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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?"
> Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what
> you've been thinking about?
How would Google know what someone has been thinking about?
Will police subpoena google? No, because in this case, the
search history was recovered from the local hard drive.
Note to self: Remeber to clear browser cache before killing someone.
Thanks for the reminder slashdot!
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
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
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.
The information on the searches came from his browser history, not from Google.
*launches google*
*types "how to bomb white house"...*
**KNOCK KNOCK**
"Who's th....
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.
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.
Need information to help with killing your wife? Choose Altavista, the Cops would never think to ask us!
Visit altavista.com and search "Snap Neck"
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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!
From the article:
In other words, they looked at the files on his computer as evidence. That's been done for
Might they subpoena google in the future? Maybe, but that hasn't happened yet...
The article says "investigators continue to find new evidence on computers seized from Robert Petrick's home", suggesting that this information came from the familiar browser history feature rather than from Google's databases.
Since the defendant was already a suspect, reviewing his browser history is no different than searching his personal papers or anything else in his home.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
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?
Last week, a forensic investigator discovered that Petrick allegedly researched lake levels, water currents, boat ramps and access about Falls Lake just four days before he reported Sutphen missing on Jan. 22, 2003.
~http://www.wral.com/news/5287261/detail.html
Yes, the info was found on his hard drive, not acquired from Google or his ISP or anywhere else.
He was arrested based on evidence such as a neuse being found at his home, he has contridicted himself in his testimony, other searches revealed on his computer were for boat ramp and current info for the lake where the body was found and cadaver dogs picked up on scents at his house. He has already been found guilty of fraud for using his wife's name to obtain a loan after her dissappearance. Those are just the things to come out in the first week of testimony
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.
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
100 million pages removed from his computers is simply inexcusable.
...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.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system
Are you sure about that?
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
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?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You mean you've forgotten about this already???
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.
Google Sets will need a little more work before it knows what people are thinking. It's OK for things like "Beatles songs" or "Cambridge colleges", obvious stuff like that, but when I entered the names of half the girlfriends I've had it didn't come out with the other half of the list.
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.
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.
"dynomite", "hole", "blast", "ass", "trick", "slashdot", "pleasure", "bigger", "troll"
Table-ized A.I.
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.
It takes less than a minute to mug someone and get away with a wallet full of cash
It takes longer than that to come up with the plan, obtain the tools necessary, find the right place, sufficiently mask your identity, wait for a good target to come by, flee the scene, get rid of any evidence and then have a convincing alibi when all is said and done.
Not following all of those procedures (and probably more) will significantly increase your risk of getting caught. And all this for... what's the average amount of cash that people carry on them. Maybe $50? Sure, you can wait for victims which have a higher likelyhood of carrying more money, but then that simply takes more time, preperation and might put you in a more risky location (risky to the criminal, not necesarilly the victim.)
It is possible that you would get away with it at least once, probably even likely. But mugging people enough times to actually make a living off of it will draw a lot of suspicion and greatly increase your likelyhood of getting caught. Or finding that your mark is packing heat and pissed off.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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.
I vow to no longer use Google anymore, now that I know they capture everything I do.
Uh... wait a minute... the internet - without Google... hmm.
Um. Forget it.