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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?"
The stated use (subpeonaing google for information on a person who has been arrested and they are building a case against) is perfectly reasonable, assuming they have reason to believe google would have useful evidence. That's what happens when you get arrested, they try to collect evidence to use against you from any source the can.
And of course, the slippery slope case presented in the intro copy would NOT be reasonable. If i am arrested for valid suspicion i would expect them to try to build a case against me. But, in a free society, it is not acceptable to have everything i do fed into a system which is flagging people as POTENTIAL criminals.
so: yes. and no.
lysergically yours
This isn't new. Last year, I was a juror on a trial for various sex/computer crimes, and part of the evidence admitted were the search strings from Google in the IE history/cache. In the interest of keeping my lunch down, I'm not going to reprint some of the searches here. We'll just say that they're bad.
It can be used as evidence against you. For example if a murderer smokes a cigarrette and discards the butt in the trash and a police officer sees him do it. There is no need for probable cause or any of the other legal fancy-shit, since the article was discarded, and was in plain site.
The same should apply to the internet. What you leave here is not private. By definition if it is on the internet it should be considered *public*. Far too often I've run into people who don't want you to look at their "private" webpages even though they are not protected and indeed are searchable on the net! People like this need to take a clue from this trial. If it is on the internet it is public... PERIOD.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Well you bring up a good point. I mean, how do they know that the search wasn't circumstancial? Just because he was looking up lake depths, doesn't necessarily mean that he was using that information to hide his tracks. He might have thought about going fishing after killing his wife. Stranger things have happened. It may be unlikely that he was going fishing after he killed his wife, but the fact is, they can't prove what was going through is mind when he was doing the search. They have strong reason to believe that he was using the information to commit the crime. But it is still possible though not likely that it was a coincidence.
...in my personal opinion the biggest thing Google could do would be to have a personal preferences section and a "wipe my history" button. When clicked, this action would wipe out all of the data collected on me to date (by my cookie data, gmail data, etc).
That would probably be the single biggest proof that Google truly does stand apart from other all other companies.
does anybody else think that this would be a great way to frame somebody?
shanegrant.com
I often search the web for material for my games, using words like names of different weapons, ritual magic, sacrifice, summoning demons, explosives and such - Would this put me under the magnifying glass?
The article isn't very technical, but it suggests that the evidence was obtained from the suspect's computer, not from Google itself. In other words, they looked at his browser cache. I doubt Google keeps logs of every search -- at least, not for very long.
Unless you have a computer that is physically off-limits to anyone else in the world, I don't see how this can easily be proven. Even if I logged into to some account, that doesn't prove I was there doing it. For example, my browser remembers my name and password for several accounts. Anyone else could sit down and my computer and log into those accounts.
So, whose to say someone isn't trying to frame me by entering my home and using my computer to make 'questionable' searches? For that matter, who's to say someone couldn't have remoted in to my computer and performed those searches.
When I was in high school a friend and I used to mix our own black power and explode pipe bombs in his father's field (it was a farming area) during the winter when there were no crops to damage. Can you imagine what would happen if any children tried that today?
.22 rifles, 12 gauge shotguns, pistols, or whatever we owned and favored (my cousin had a lever action 30-30 rifle just like "The "Rifleman" did on the television program of that name), and head out in the farming fields hunting Jack Rabbits - which were pests to the farmers.
Even stranger to today's society, our parents knew and approved of our activities. FWIW, we both had First Class Radio Amateur Licenses and were in all the math/science/electronics classes together, so we weren't totally clueless about what we were doing. This was back in a time (~1955) when a group of us kids would think nothing of grabbing our
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