5 ms·

> arresting a person that set fire to a car in order to intimidate a witness in a sexual abuse case is a good thing The little problem is all the people who mi

> arresting a person that set fire to a car in order to intimidate a witness in a sexual abuse case is a good thing The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. Even the basics of conditional probability are not well understood by many judges and jurors - heck, they're not even understood by many people on HN. Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit. We know of many cases where people have been exonerated after years in jail. We don't even know how many people haven't been exonerated and are continuing to rot in jail for crimes they didn't commit.

graeme 6y ago
Presumably they’ll seek other evidence and not convict based on google searches alone. At least in this case, as it is high profile. Certainly I could see this being abused as other types of evidence are today
- hammock 6y ago
  The US Constitution doesn't just protect against being wrongly convicted. It protects against unreasonable search & seizure - this protection applies to everyone, and is wholly separate from any protections attached to criminal investigations.
  - graeme 6y ago
    This sort of US is much wider than the US. Any government can request this information with a warrant. Restricting it to US ideas narrows the conversation.
treis 6y ago
>The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. That's not what they did. The got a warrant for those that searched the specific address around the specific time the crime occured. Then tracked the phone to the crime scene. After that level of identification then they subpoenaed the searches for that person.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Precisely. This is similar to the case of the catching of the Golden State Killer, where they used DNA correlation to find a possible suspect but that narrowed the focus of investigation; it wasn't the evidence brought to convict. I think it's probably acceptable for society to grant large leeway for information that focuses an investigation, while keeping the set of acceptable evidence for conviction narrow.
sixothree 6y ago
I'm sure lots of people were curious as to the methods used by protesters who burned things recently. They could have been swept up in this as well. edit: and to be clear, this sort of thing makes hesitant to even voice an example of that query here. This is chilling.

graeme 6y ago

Presumably they’ll seek other evidence and not convict based on google searches alone. At least in this case, as it is high profile. Certainly I could see this being abused as other types of evidence are today

hammock 6y ago
The US Constitution doesn't just protect against being wrongly convicted. It protects against unreasonable search & seizure - this protection applies to everyone, and is wholly separate from any protections attached to criminal investigations.
- graeme 6y ago
  This sort of US is much wider than the US. Any government can request this information with a warrant. Restricting it to US ideas narrows the conversation.

treis 6y ago

>The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. That's not what they did. The got a warrant for those that searched the specific address around the specific time the crime occured. Then tracked the phone to the crime scene. After that level of identification then they subpoenaed the searches for that person.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Precisely. This is similar to the case of the catching of the Golden State Killer, where they used DNA correlation to find a possible suspect but that narrowed the focus of investigation; it wasn't the evidence brought to convict. I think it's probably acceptable for society to grant large leeway for information that focuses an investigation, while keeping the set of acceptable evidence for conviction narrow.

sixothree 6y ago

I'm sure lots of people were curious as to the methods used by protesters who burned things recently. They could have been swept up in this as well. edit: and to be clear, this sort of thing makes hesitant to even voice an example of that query here. This is chilling.