Hint: If You Commit A Crime, Do Not Google Every Aspect Of It Afterwards

from the isn't-this-obvious? dept

Thu, Oct 20th 2011 1:33pm — Glyn Moody

Techdirt has reported on a number people accused of murder googling for things like "neck snap break" or "how to commit murder" beforehand, and leaving these suggestive details on their computers. Those were some years back, and since then there has been plenty of attention given to the idea that your search histories provide a great deal of information about what you were thinking - and possibly even what you were thinking about doing.

So you would expect people by now would have learned to be a little more cautious � for example, by carrying out searches anonymously at different Internet cafes. But the story of Vincent Tabak, whose case is currently going through UK courts, suggests that message still hasn't got across. The court has been hearing about his intensive use of the Internet to research a range of topics after killing a woman called Joanna Yeates (he admits manslaughter, but denies murder):

The 33-year-old defendant ... looked up satellite imagery of the site where he dumped Yeates's body. He researched the Wikipedia page for murder and maximum sentence for manslaughter, web records from work and personal laptops showed.

While regularly checking the Avon and Somerset police website and local news site www.thisisbristol.co.uk, the Dutch engineer was also checking decomposition rates.

Days after killing Yeates at her Clifton flat on 17 December, Tabak was watching a timelapse video of a body decomposing, Bristol crown court heard.

That's a reminder of just how much detailed information about past Internet activity can be gleaned from computers, and how incriminating that might be in certain circumstances. On the other hand, perhaps we should be grateful that people committing crimes are still making it so easy to convict them on the basis of their tell-tale online activity.

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Filed Under: crime, evidence, searches

30 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 1:47pm

Somewhere someone is getting the idea that we should flag everyone that looks at a timelapse video of a body decomposing to investigate them for murder...
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The eejit (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:02pm

Re:
Not quite. In this case, it was actually evidence. Moreover, it just highlights how little actual anonymity is available online, if you know where to look.
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PlagueSD (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:03pm

Sounds like a story for "World's Dumbest Criminals" TV show.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:08pm

Re: Re:
" if you know where to look."

yeah like in the history tab of your browser on your physical computer....
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:08pm

Re:
dumb, but well (google) educated
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Ron Rezendes (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:26pm

WTF!?
I have CCLeaner on my computer and run it several times a day!

Hopefully, I will never be hiding these kinds of searches!
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Jake, 20 Oct 2011 @ 2:28pm

I'd be interested to learn whether these searches took place before or after he was first interviewed by the police, because by themselves they're not terribly incriminating; if I was a vaguely plausible suspect in a murder inquiry, I'd want to have some idea what kind of evidence might be used against me if the police decided to prosecute.
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Ikarushka (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 3:26pm

He should've used Siri, not Google.
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harbingerofdoom (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 3:38pm

Re: WTF!?
its a nice tuneup type tool, but it does not remove the tracks. higher end recovery tools will easily be able to reconstruct the data.
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Njdobber (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 3:56pm

Re:
"siri how do i kill a person and then get away with it?" "check google"
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el_segfaulto (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 4:07pm

Re: WTF!?
It's a good start, but it's hardly a speed bump for most forensics tools. If you want to really be safe, use a service like scroogle who supposedly keep no records and require all searches to be conducted via SSL. On your PC consider using a RAM drive (which creates a virtual hard drive on your RAM) for temporary internet files, I'd recommend 4GB or higher. You'll also see a marked increase in performance since the difference in bus and access speed between RAM and SCSI is night and day. Really, things like this are only for the uber-paranoid.

My personal record is recovering 250GB of data on a formatted drive in under 20 hours using nothing but consumer devices. When I was doing contract work and had access to much higher-end equipment that time would have been substantially lower.
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el_segfaulto (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 4:08pm

Re:
Your Honor. Siri told me to do it!
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Cody Jackson (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 4:36pm

LiveCDs
For the truly paranoid (or just serious privacy-minded), simply use a LiveCD version of an OS and boot from that. Everything is kept in RAM so once you exit the computer, nothing is left behind. As long as you aren't logging into search engines, you are just another person on the 'net. If you really want to be safe, use TOR and encryption during your surfing.

I remember reading a book in the Shadowrun RPG that was a neat suggestion, for rich people. Have your computer memory (RAM, ROM, etc.) put on EPROM chips and do your work in a dark room. Replace the lights with UV lights. When someone busts down your door and turns on the lights, the UV rays automatically erase the chips and there goes any evidence of wrong-doing. :) (Impractical, but an interesting thought.)
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 6:43pm

satellite imagery eh?
$5 says he was checking to see if the dead body showed up on the images...

I can't tell you how many people I've see who think that Google Maps is realtime
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 7:13pm

I hope this is not the only evidence he was sentenced for, it doesn't seem that strong.

If you heard of a murder what would you do?
Would you look up the location of that murder on Google maps?
I know I did it a couple of times.

If you were accused of anything would you not look up what could happen to you?
I saw a lot of people googling about copyright infringement and what it means.

This is not to say the guy is not guilty at this point I really don't know and it may be fun to accuse him of wrong doing, but one hopes that the evidence against him is a lot more stronger than just internet searches.

I have searched for decomposing bodies, murders and stories about murders, graphic photographs and more, I hope that can't be used alone to convict me of anything.

Using real crime stories as templates for other stories also are not a bad idea.

You get a name.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/index.html

Then find the database where you can probably find more info about that case.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fbi/is/ncic.htm (FBI crime database)

And read about it. Great source for inspiration, I once found the story of a guy who build a house that was full of secret rooms and he brought in a lot of people over the years people only discovered that he was killing people after he died and they found hundreds of remains inside the house walls. I like horror stories and I could picture a creature killing people in their houses coming out at night from the walls after reading that piece of history.

I also searched for a lot of weird things like medical images about diseases because I wanted to make 3D models of them and see how they looked like, could anyone say that I am fascinated with death? probably, but does it mean I would kill anybody? I want to believe it is outside of that possibility personally I go to extremes to evade a confrontation, but others can't see that or feel and so what they see is strange and could be viewed as dangerous but is it?

On the funny side this is what happens when people get overboard with laws.
Crazy mayor(Vilnius - Lithuania) uses APC to crush illegal parked cars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ-8xj8CUZw

http://www.dumbcriminals.com/

Again, I don't know if the guy is guilty or not, just that all that alleged evidence can have more simple explanations and that alone should not be viewed as prove of any wrong doing alone, it needs more than just that.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Oct 2011 @ 7:55pm

Re: Re:
Evidence of what? Poor taste? How does watching a video of a different corpse connect you to this corpse? Correlation and causation come in here someplace.
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Jesse (profile), 20 Oct 2011 @ 8:15pm

Or you know...
"So you would expect people by now would have learned to be a little more cautious � for example, by carrying out searches anonymously at different Internet cafes."

Or you know, not commit murder.
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Butcherer79 (profile), 21 Oct 2011 @ 2:43am

Re:
"This is not to say the guy is not guilty at this point I really don't know and it may be fun to accuse him of wrong doing, but one hopes that the evidence against him is a lot more stronger than just internet searches."

He's admitted to killing her, just not murdering her, this evidence is being used as firstly a sign of mental awareness (so he cannot try the diminished responsibility on mental health grounds), it also is being used to show how calculating and calm he was after killing the woman in researching different ways to dispose of/decompose the body, to either speed up or slow down decomposition to a degree that the foresic teams cannot accurately pinpoint a time/date of death.
Also, these searches were made after the killing, but it had only been released to the press as missing person.

The fact that he's admitted to killing her has thrown more weight behind this evidence, it's circumstantial, sure, and not enough to convict alone, but it's another nail in the defenses case.

Incidently, he has said he killed her by placing his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming at his 'misinterpretation' of inviting her neighbour for a cup of coffee, he tried to kiss her and she screamed, he shut her up. Plausable but sadly for him, the cause of death was strangulation, not just suffocation. Another nail.
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Butcherer79 (profile), 21 Oct 2011 @ 2:48am

Re:
"Again, I don't know if the guy is guilty or not, just that all that alleged evidence can have more simple explanations and that alone should not be viewed as prove of any wrong doing alone, it needs more than just that."

The DNA evidence probably helps, it's what forced his hand in admitting to manslaughter.
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The eejit (profile), 21 Oct 2011 @ 4:42am

Re: Re: Re:
Look at the researched range of topics: murder, decomposition, torture. If you actually commit a crime, then this list of searches is evidence of premeditation, a prerequisite for a murder charge. So, in doing that, Tabak caused his defence team problems.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2011 @ 3:17pm

La, la, la
Whatever
La, la, la
Use a proxy
La, la, la
Cleaning programs
La, la, la
Gonna do it tonight? Tonight? Store nothing, no, nothing on your hard drive. Tonight, tonight, use removable media and have a place to hide it.
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2011 @ 3:34am

n00b lol
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Thomas Norris, 2 Nov 2011 @ 1:13pm

Amazing how the guy who thinks he is smarter than everyone else is usually the dumbest!
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Butcherer79 (profile), 2 Nov 2011 @ 3:05pm

Re:
who are you talking about here, I presume it's Vincent himself?
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vancedecker (profile), 21 Dec 2011 @ 4:32pm

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says...
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
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Invisible_Jester89, 2 Jan 2012 @ 10:11pm

Police must just wish that EVERY murderer was this easy to catch.

And yet two more cases for the "Dumb Criminals" file...
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mhab, 29 Nov 2012 @ 1:54pm

Re: Re:
lmao!
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whyd i leave a name, 29 Dec 2013 @ 12:03am

Omg that's nasty the guy looked at the pics
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Sven, 13 Jan 2014 @ 6:39am

anonymous -- really?
Regarding so-called anonymous browsing services, I may be overly suspicious, but I would assume these sites are not anonymous and in fact draw lots of attention from govt. snoops. I think the only way to browse anonymously is to use a disguise and a fake id to buy some time at an internet cafe, and even then I would be extremely careful about detection.
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Anon, 13 Feb 2016 @ 2:26pm

Re: WTF!?
Just removing your web browser history wouldn't work if your Internet Service Provider or employer tracks what you do online.
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