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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.
You really have to ask?
My understanding from reading several articles on this case is that the phone call alibi was investigated at the time and those records were part of the original case file. The change is in the testimony and credibility of witnesses who had previously undermined that alibi. They did not just now uncover records of a phone call from 1957. This does not answer the question of what records are retained by who and for how long.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
It was a collect call.
Businesses that don't record what monies are owed by a client don't last too long.
Can us little people see please? I'm be pretty interested in the stacks of transcribed phone-calls between my grandfather and his mistress.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I'm more surprised by the fact that they were doing it 60 years ago. Even before touch-tone phones.
Its just the phone company billing data, which phone companies have been collecting for about as long as they have been sending bills to people. All that has happened is that someone dug up the phone company billing data from 1957. Want to know what phone call "metadata" is? Look at your phone bill.
As for touch-tone dialing, dialing information was detected mechanically long before that with rotary phones. It was just a matter of counting "clicks" rather than recognizing the frequency of tones.
What's really bothersome is not that they were collecting the data but that he had to prove his innocence instead of the State having to prove his guilt. It's a disturbing trend where we're proving innocence as opposed to relying on the State to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. (Or more likely than not, in the case of civil matters.)
As a defendant, you should never have to prove your innocence. The verbiage might seem trivial but it's the underlying concept, and how important it is, that makes me alarmed. Not that long ago, I had a conversation on /. where the person thought it was outdated and "stupid" that it was better for ten guilty people to go free than one innocent person be jailed.
Sadly, I'm not even remotely kidding about that conversation. I'm not exaggerating and it is not hyperbole. They not only stated that but they made comments that supported that sentiment - before and since. They're not alone, they had people who openly agreed with them. I should not have to prove that I'm innocent. Not at all. Needing to find an alibi, from that many years ago, is crazy. Given the time that has passed, the case should have not been prosecuted unless it was so air-tight that an alibi would not have made a difference. That's awfully close to, if not being past, the line where one is proving innocence.
The fact that the records are kept is secondary to that - and kind of disturbing but there's not much we can do about it unless we wish to enact legislation to prohibit or require data retention. Right now, they're free to retain those records. It'd also be a bit difficult to ensure records are not kept.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You're spouting nonsense... They did have ample evidence indicating his guilt. It has always fallen to the defendant to provide a defense, and counter / refute the state's (otherwise-compelling) incriminating evidence.
You don't seem to know what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means... It has never meant "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". It's a very high standard of evidence, but never has anyone pretended innocent men never look guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... Hence the critical NEED for defense lawyers for the accused, from the very start of legal systems.
It's ridiculous to put such an impossibly high burden on the prosecution in any circumstances. A huge number of guilty criminals would never be punished, because they were minimally able to hide their crimes behind a tiny sliver of possible doubt.
In addition, I don't believe ANY case can EVER be so airtight that an iron-clad alibi would still result in a conviction. Eyewitnesses can easily make mistakes.... plenty of people LOOK quite similar, so even video evidence could be faulty. Similarly, NO form of forensic evidence is free of "collisions", where two people, out of a pool of millions, have practically identical features (e.g. fingerprints, DNA, etc.).
Just ask the National Academies: "no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features."
http://www8.nationalacademies....
Or ask Brandon Mayfield how he feels about the accuracy of fingerprint evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontl...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
One of my business locations is fed by an optical data line, which aside from the (awesome) network connection, also provides the only standard telco POTS line brought into the business, sourced directly from the box where the optical connection comes in from outside. Switchhook dialing absolutely does not work. DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency), or you get nothing.
I asked about it when we got the optical interface; they told me straight up, "no."
Being a suspicious type, I connected a Hayes modem which hangs off my classic 6809 system, told it "ATDP xxxyyyy", watched as it agreeably pulsed away... and nothing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They did have ample evidence indicating his guilt. It has always fallen to the defendant to provide a defense, and counter / refute the state's (otherwise-compelling) incriminating evidence.
Apparently it wasn't enough since we know he is not guilty. In fact, the standard IS that a defendant should be able to sit silently and find himself acquitted is he didn't do it. The defendant DOES have the right to speak in his defense, of course.
This being a really ancient crime, the prosecutor really did owe a very high duty to be sure since after 50 years the those witnesses who aren't deceased probably only remember the events in caricature.
In this case, In a sane world, there would be a good case for prosecutorial misconduct. Starting with the prosecutor charging him with being a fugitive from justice planning to drop that charge at trial with the explicit purpose of making sure the bail was beyond the defendant's means. That is, he knowingly charged a defendant with a crime he knew him to be innocent of.
Of course, that is easily topped by the prosecutor's office having sufficient exculpatory evidence on hand that they should never have charged him. That evidence is what was re-examined as part of a review process (not an appeal) that has overturned his conviction.