Are Communications Records of Americans Retained Forever? (seattletimes.com)

An Illinois prosecutor announced Friday that a Seattle man was wrongly convicted in 2012 of the abduction and murder of a 7-year-old girl in 1957, reports the Seattle Times. It was believed to be the nation's oldest cold case, but reader Trachman raises an interesting concern: He finally got an an alibi, which was a telephone call which he made in 1957. While it surely is a good thing that an innocence has been proven, the case is also an evidence that American's communication records are retained infinitely.

Comments

Re:Its just the phone company billing data ...

[KGIII]

A long, long time ago (back when the Sun was new enough to still have a price-tag hanging off the side), I had a phone that had had the rotary section removed. It was meant for inbound calls only. For one reason or another, I ended up needing a phone for a short while and needed to make outbound calls. With a little practice, you could press the button to mimic pulse-dialing and actually make outbound calls on that phone. I kept it around, after no longer needing it for that purpose, just as a novelty.

This was the 1970s and the phones all came from the telephone company back then. Also, we didn't have nearly as many amusements as we have today. Being able to dial out just by pressing the receiver button repeatedly was a good party trick - it was a simpler time.

Okay, wait. Please read.

[fyngyrz]

You're looking at this wrong. The issue isn't correctly cast as "man exonerated because saving phone records is good thing" -- the nature of he problem, and what very much needs to be addressed, is "US justice system far too easily wrongfully convicts innocents."

Because if in fact the guy didn't do it, then whatever they had that resulted in a conviction was utter shite. Which is a 100% clear and unequivocal indication that the thresholds for conviction are too low by far.

And it would appear that in fact, he didn't do it. And THAT provides the critical indicator here. Just think about it: He didn't do it; but the court system managed to convict him on entirely wrongful (or lacking) evidence. Is that what you want if YOU end up in court? Speaking from deeply unfortunate personal experience, I really don't think you do.

The only way a conviction can occur of someone who is actually innocent is via lack of evidence, or fabrication of evidence, because there cannot be any evidence that actually indicates the person is guilty. A red sock is not a blue sock because it's not a yellow sock. It's a red sock if, and only if, it's a red sock.

So rather than screw us all (further) as to our privacy, we should stop screwing people in the courts. We can do that by setting the thresholds differently (and we should), or we can wait for technology to solve it by actually reading "did it" or "didn't do it" right from the accused person's mind. But if we do the latter, a whole lot of innocent people are going to to grievously suffer as a result.

Please agitate to fix what's actually broken. Don't consider a horrible mechanism "the answer" because it resulted in illumination of some other horrible mechanism.