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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 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.
How would Google know what someone has been thinking about?
They're Google.
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.
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Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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...
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.
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
If you've filed bankruptcy or are considering it, I would caution against getting engaged.
Don't even get me started about my porn perferences ;)
Dude, that you perforate your porn is TMI.
You mean you've forgotten about this already???
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!
If you've filed bankruptcy or are considering it, I would caution against getting engaged.
Why not? When she leaves and takes half, she won't be getting much, now will she?
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.
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
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
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