Could Cops Use Google As Pre-Cogs?

theodp writes "Remember the Pre-Cogs in Minority Report? Slate's Will Oremus does, and wonders if Google could similarly help the police apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge collected from searches. Oremus writes: 'At around 3:45 a.m. on March 24, someone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., used a mobile phone to Google "chemicals to passout a person." Then the person searched Ask.com for "making people faint." Then Google again, for "ways to kill people in their sleep," "how to suffocate someone," and "how to poison someone." The phone belonged to 23-year-old Nicole Okrzesik. Later that morning, police allege, she and her boyfriend strangled 19-year-old Juliana Mensch as she slept on the floor of their apartment.' In theory, Oremus muses, Google or Ask.com could have flagged Okrzesik's search queries as suspicious and dispatched cops to the scene before Mensch's assailants had the chance to do her in." I bet you're already thinking of just a few reasons why this might not such a good idea.

Comments

bad idea

[beh]

Hmm - what reasons could there be to legitimately do these kinds of searches?

  - checking whether something seen on some crime drama actually makes sense
  - checking whether a stupid newspaper story makes sense
  - checking whether an outrageous story from a neighbour makes any sense
  - looking for ideas to write a crime novel
  - learning about the effects of certain things, say, for medical interests (medical students)

Either way - what people do should be what people do on their own; locking people up because
they MIGHT do something is a very bad precedent. And where will you stop?

Will you allow someone to a gas station and fill up their car after they had a bad fight with their
partner, whom they know will have to cross a road somewhere in the next hour? Or should you lock
them up after the fight? (independently of whether you or your partner started the fight)?

How about filling your car, and going for drinks later - having a car with a full tank of gas at
your disposal afterwards? Time to lock you up?

Sure, at a guess, looking up 'ways to kill people in their sleep' I would also think makes you
more likely a potential murderer than filling up your car. But, where do you draw the line on
what's legitimate and what isn't?

Also, maybe after you read how painful or possibly difficult your goal is - who's to say that
reading about it might not actually lead you to give up the thought? And then you still get
locked up because of something you looked up, where the result of the search itself already
deterred you (though, obviously, that can't be seen in any google search strings - you just
stop searching)...

Also, the only goal you'd reach is that now a potential murderer has to break in somewhere
only to look up how to murder someone - and then the wrong person would get arrested...
(...which might give the best possible version - look it up on the victim's computer - get them arrested!)

There are so many ways to screw this up - as bad as it is, until someone _actually_ tries
to go through with it, don't interfere...

The pre-cog route will just make things a LOT worse for civil liberties / personal freedom.

Re:bad idea

[idontgno]

Actually, you're both right, in the sense that (A) there are many "legitimate", non-suspicious reasons to search for "controversial" subjects, and (B) more importantly, no search has to justify its own "legitimacy" (which is your point) because of fundamental rights of privacy, particularly investigation without due process and probable cause.

GPP was suggesting perfectly good answers to a question. You're pointing out that the question shouldn't have to be answered at all without some other evidence-based reasonable suspicion.

Re:bad idea

[AngryDeuce]

A million times this. I'm a Wikipedia junky (obligatory xkcd) that searches things out of raw curiosity with no applicable reason whatsoever. I've also done my share of looking at gore photos, crime scene photographs, things of that nature. I'm totally non-violent and would never hurt a fly, but if the police were to start looking at my search history and profiling me based on that alone, they'd probably want to keep a closer eye on me anyway "just in case".

Just because a particular subject interests me, that doesn't mean I'm going to emulate it. Morbid fascination does not equal intent, whether now or in the future.

It amazes me how many supposedly educated people would support things like this. This is basically just another step down the road to thought police and telescreens. Doubleplusungood.

What happens if

[Compaqt]

you google "people who google 'chemicals to passout a person'"?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[Fishbulb]

Who decides what is 'suspicious'?

The really insidious part is this:

[...] help the police apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge [...]

If they haven't committed a crime yet, they're not yet a criminal. Period.

Re:Unreasonable to expect privacy

[TubeSteak]

To put things in perspective, the law mandates that video rental records be private.

That's because someone walked into a record store and pulled up the rental history of a sitting Supreme Court Justice.
Many legislators have zero problem with privacy invading laws because they always assume it won't be used on them.
The second that changed, they shit their pants and passed a law that protected everyone within the year.

If you want real reform, we need the cops to start treating judges and legislators like they treat young black men in NY City.

Re:Unreasonable to expect privacy

[zill]

That's because someone walked into a record store and pulled up the rental history of a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

In case anyone else haven't heard the story before:

During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper.[22] Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.

mostly bad idea

[tverbeek]

There are all sorts of problems with this idea, of course. Oodles of them. But it isn't entirely without merit. The authorities cannot (at least under current legal doctrine) charge you with a crime you might commit in the future, and I don't think they ever should. But if you're figuring out how to kill someone, and the cops show up at your door saying "we think you're planning to kill someone and you'll be the first person we talk to if someone is killed", that's going to be a rather strong deterrent, and probably prevent that crime. The question is whether it can be done without irreparable harm to personal liberties... and I doubt that.

Re:No.

[Sarten-X]

A friend of mine (whom we shall call "Art", for he is now an art teacher) was once involved in a city-wide scavenger hunt, where one item to find was "a police officer's badge number". Art and his team found a patrol car stopped in front of them at an intersection. Doing what all (un)reasonable young adults do in their young adult years, they chose the most straightforward method to get the officer's attention: they rammed his car.

More or less... They pulled up behind the car, then inched forward while the cop gave them quizzical looks in his mirror. Moving as slowly as he could manage, Art bumped the officer's vehicle. The officer got out, asked what was going on, understood the situation, laughed about it, gave them his business card (in lieu of his badge number, which is apparently against city policy to give out), and let them off with a warning to avoid hitting patrol cars in the future.

Despite Slashdot's popular opinion, most police officers are decent people. Treat them as such, with respect for the fact that they're trying to do their job, and they'll usually treat you decently as well.