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Google Searches Used in Murder Trial?
mcrbids writes "Well, the details are a bit scant, but it seems that the content of Google searches were used to help establish intent in a murder trial. Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about? While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns? Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime, and what effect would this have on the health of society?"
that a lot of bored people in the supposed privacy of their own home will search for a lot of crazy things that in 99.99% of cases they have no intention of carrying out.
"Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches..."
Yes they should. I think that using a search engine to research methods of breaking someone's neck and water levels in nearby lakes is evidence that should be available to officers trying to find out who broke someone's neck and dumped them in a lake.
While this evidence alone is not enough to incriminate someone it does provide extra evidence to lead to their future incarcination. Lets face it, things add up and being able to find the pieces of a puzzle is an important part of researching a crime.
You can't arrest someone for looking at certain things but knowing they looked at those things is important in figuring out if they did commit a crime.
I dont see why police shouldn't be allowed to search through your google history- or anything else on your computer for that matter, just provided that they have a warrant. It's no different from searching through your house or any of your personal belongings, which is perfectly fine provided that they have a warrant or reason to do so.
What this guy did was about as dumb as buying books/magazines/journals on these subjects, and then having sticky bookmarks on all this kind of info when the police search your home. Not that different from the countless individuals who get caught with child porn because they forget, or simply don't know how, to clean our their caches and histories.
If he had been using Safari on OS X, he could have been in "Private" mode and avoided this whole mess. OS X! Great for the creative and criminally minded!
How would Google know what someone has been thinking about?
Gee, based on just the searches that I do? They could figure out that I work for a mental health agency, that I used to work for an insurance agency, that I'm considering getting engaged, that I perfer credit unions to banks, that I've filed or am considering filing bankruptcy, etc, etc, etc. Don't even get me started about my porn perferences ;)
I can't even say that they couldn't pin all that down to an actual name any more either since I'm using G-mail and it receives the same cookie that google.com does.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Obvious question on this topic and discussion thread: Does Google itself permanently keep at least some of the information associated with Google searches? And if so, what information? Do they keep, for example, the originating IP and any other identifiers?
I have not read the article (look at my UID, I've obviously spent many years being conditioned to not read articles). However, was this information gathered via google or just by searching this guy's cache? Or was it gathered by getting his login information for his google account from him (or his computer) and then doing a search of his history?
The reason I ask is that google talks about how the information they gather (including in search history, I guess?) is aggregated and in no way identifiable and linkable to an individual. So, then, how could a subpeona to google result in anything useful being returned?
However, this isn't a huge deal, really. I'm not one of those detestable "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" idiots, but the thing to learn here is that it's okay to look up "snap" and "neck" and even "how to murder someone" via google or any other engine. However, if you actually ARE going to murder someone, you probably should not look up "snap" and "neck" or "how to murder someone" via google. Or, rather, if the authorities are trying to tie a suspect to a murder, he is not going to be convicted soley on a few google searches. It will just be additional circumstancial evidence to add to the pot.
These sort of things only become a problem when they start seeking out suspects and disrupting innocent people's lives because the people made particular searches in a search engine. So rather than saying "We're pretty sure this guy killed this other person and we want to see his google history", they start going through all of google's data and investigating every person with suspiciously strange search keywords just in case whoever they are have committed whatever crime against whatever unknowned victims and are suspects soley because of the information they sought.
Who hasn't done some weird ass searches, though? Hell, I've done searches on the old "26 ways to kill a person" howto. That doesn't mean I'm going to do it. But if I've killed someone and they then use my searches as *additional* evidence in my trial, there's no problem with that. Just don't go out hunting blindly through every individual that's done that search to pin a crime on them.
Note to self: Remember to do a few leading searches on the computer of the person I am trying to frame for a crime.
emt 377 emt 4
It's not my attitude, but I can't imagine a prosecutor wouldn't run with it. "How convenient that when the warrant was served, the defendant's hard drive had been overwritten with random data. The defendant also claims he has 'forgotten' his cryptographic keys."
you don't get it. i would not say i would have 'forgotten' my passwords. i would say: 'i well remember all my passwords, but i will not tell you them.' and if something was 'convenient' or not, there is a law that forbids to use my refusal against me. this law belongs to the base of our court system and therefore is well enforced.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Well, you don't write
site:asstr.org filthy drugged school girl nipple-clamps
into the search field unless there is *something* on your mind. That said, when did we start prosecuting thought crimes?
How many people do harmless furtive stupid things with their computers? How many people would never 'fess up if they did? How many jurors would express shock and horror at things they've maybe done themselves, because they don't want to implicate themselves? I've worked on a lot of other people's computers. It's amazing what you discover without even trying. Just open a file explorer to create a folder to put some files, and you might see all kinds of things. Open the browser, and see what you discover when autocomplete starts filling in your URL's for you.
Computers and the internet make it easier than ever before to secretly screw around. You don't have to go the neighborhood drugstore where everyone knows you to buy your Hustler or whatever. If you've always been curious about how to turn fertilizer into explosives, it's not hard to find out.
None of these things imply that you have a criminal mind, but pretending such behavior is abnormal during a trial plays into arguments about state of mind, etc. Arguments which, were the truth about our collective online behavior known, might not hold much water. "He has a huge lesbian and anal sex porn collection. He has some pirated MP3's. He has a couple shots of bourbon and trolls usenet, picking fights just to amuse himself. He torments people on slashdot with inane poorly written rambling diatribes because, in his words, 'he was bored.' He appears to have an addiction to gory 'first person shooters', and used the online pseudonym 'diefuckers'. This man is clearly deranged, a menace to civilized society."
Except that this man is everyman.
Sort of funny story. I was playing unreal tournament after work one day. Somehow the chat turned to how old everyone was. I had thought I was probably the old guy there (pushing 40), and that I was playing games with a bunch of kids. Turns out at least half the players were around my age.
I think it would be beneficial to society if we could somehow shed our cloak of hypocrisy, and be little more honest about the type of people we really are. Umm, well, yeah right. Hahahahaha. I have to go teach Sunday school now. See ya.
However, if you actually ARE going to murder someone, you probably should not look up "snap" and "neck" or "how to murder someone" via google.
Usually those who get caught are not "profr. Moriarty" cold-blooded murderers who calculate all their movements and erase all possible evidence. But rather emotionally unstable people who, in a desperate situation, opt to kill the one causing them trouble
And when you're in a desperate situation, you usually don't think "Ah... will the police use the google caché to judge me?"
To quote CSI:
-The murderer made his second mistake.
-Second? What was the first?
-Murder.
Actually, it's the perfect time for it... you don't drag your spouses credit rating down with yours, and you don't fold your debts in to theirs either
Libraries never have kept information of what you had checked out once it is returned (unlike Amazon that has a record of all your purchases). I've been working with library circulation systems for thirty years, and ALWAYS there is an RFP requirement that "the system shall not keep a record after the item is returned. The link between patron and item must be broken..."
(Full disclosure statement: Patron history is allowed and kept for so-called "Outreach patrons" who enjoy a personalized level of library service because they are homebound. They tend to be elderly and forgetful, and they tend to read genres like romances or westerns. They also are voracious readers who can easily 'read out' a collection. This "patron history" allows their caregiver to avoid giving them the same book on the very next visit. They just wait a couople and then maybe they won't remember anyway.)
During the last fit of hysteria over the Patriot Act our Board of Trustees even wanted to know the precise backup policy and suggested we keep FEWER BACKUPS! Yes, it is possible to restore the system state to four months ago and read what people had checked out then, but only if you disrupted a 24/7 system for a couple of days to do it. Beyond that it is pretty much impossible because the tapes get written over (Our variation on father/grandfather is Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri-1, Fri-2, Fri-3, Fri-4, Fri-5 to accommodate five-Friday months. The most you can stretch is about 4 months with this scheme. The dailies are written over in 7 days. The Fri-1-Fri-4 are written over the next month, and the Fri-5 is written over the next month that has five Fridays). Fortunately reason prevailed and they didn't mess with my backups.
The tapes themselves are not going to help the cops. It's not as if the information is linear on the tapes. Library databases are incredibly complex with multiple tables, layers, and pointers. The information on the tapes is useless unless it is run through the programs themselves in exactly the right manner on a machine configured EXACTLY like the one it came off of (in terms of rev levels of the programs, config options, etc.)
I'd be perfectly happy giving the FBI or the NSA or whomever a full backup copy from my database. It would cost them about a million dollars and several months just to get to the point of making sense out of it, assuming they hired the right people to put it all back together.
The only practical way for an 'authority' to go back in time on check outs is to subpoena the library and force them to do it, in which case it would be national news in 24 hours. It would be easy to check on what you have checked out right now, and for that all you need is a subpoena.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Evidence like this is usually used in conjunction with other evidence. Like if they think you set off a pipe bomb they could use reciepts of you buying PVC pipe, duct tape, and a bunch of nails, a pound of C4 found in your apartment, along with a search on "how to build a pipe bomb" to get a conviction.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
He could have browsed from a live CD and not left a trail. I wonder how many crimes are being solved because criminals don't know how to take a few simple security steps?
That won't help if law enforcement subpoenas Google, or any other website for that matter (yeah, I know that in this case Google wasn't involved, but I could easily imagine it happening). Probably the best thing to do is use someone else's open access point, with your live CD on your laptop.
yeah exactly, this is a very stupid summary just trying to troll for some reactionary privacy outcries. Guess what? if you get arrested for a crime you're privacy is going to be invaded a whole lot more than just "what you searched for at google". Your phone records get inspected, your computer gets inspected, heck, you're house gets searched. Somehow we are supposed to be concerned that your internet searches can be accessed when the police have already arrested you after getting an arrest warrent and invaded your home after getting a search warrent? Since when is your behavoir on the internet more private than what you have in your own closet?
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR