Find the Fallacy

Cidu Bill on Jul 19th 2008

Filed in Bill Bickel, civil liberties, libraries | 24 responses so far

24 Responses to “Find the Fallacy”

  1. Steven Hunter Jul 19th 2008 at 06:12 pm 1

    I don’t know what logical fallacy might be in play here, but I do know one thing. In something like 90% of all child abduction cases, the abductor is a relative or friend of the family. And while the article didn’t mention it, it seems like the “Sex Offender” Uncle should have been suspect “numero-uno” from the first minute.

    Plus given that the police *were* able to obtain a warrant, they should have just done that in the first place. I guess they were working on the “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” assumption.

  2. Norm Jul 19th 2008 at 06:41 pm 2

    concur with Mr. Hunter

  3. Sari Everna Jul 19th 2008 at 07:02 pm 3

    The flaw I see in all this is that there are probably easier ways of finding out what messages the kid posted to myspace. As far as I know you should be able to just do a search for her name or pseudonym, restricted to the myspace site and come up with plenty. I don’t know for sure, though, since I don’t exactly frequent the site.

    Police can go and ask to search stuff though, without a warrant. If they get permission, they can search, but if they get a no, then they have to get a warrant if they still want to take a look. So, technically, they don’t need a warrant, but only if they get permission. And the librarian was pretty clear about them not getting it.

    I’m also jumping on “sometimes used the terminals”, ’cause it seems a little off to me for some reason. If there were computers she used more often, they should have tracked down those, first. They would be more likely to be helpful.

    Last couple of things; How easy is it to change myspace postings after the fact and can you tell if they’ve been edited?(Again, I don’t know for sure, and on some sites you can’t and on others it tells you it’s been edited, which would be a major tip-off.) Also, I totally agree that sex-offender uncle should have immediately set off a hell of a lot of alarm bells.

    And now to poke around myspace to figure out stuff about their posting system and satisfy my curiosity.

  4. dd Jul 19th 2008 at 10:59 pm 4

    If they are public computers, couldn’t the police just have logged in themselves?

    Also, I guess I’ve learned something, since I assumed that “public” meant “government-funded” and thus would be pretty wide open for police search whenever they wanted.

    When I’ve used computers at public libraries (rarely), I haven’t had a unique log-in name/password, so I don’t know how much, if anything, they’d even have been able to get from searching a public computer she and dozens of other people used on a single log-in.

  5. Highjinx Jul 19th 2008 at 11:07 pm 5

    I can’t imagine that what you do on a public computer is subject to any assumption of privacy. What you do on your computer at work certainly isn’t, so public computers in a public place certainly aren’t. Heck, I’d never even assume privacy when logged into a public wifi hotspot, even when I have a user name and password.

  6. Cidu Bill Jul 19th 2008 at 11:10 pm 6

    Okay, here’s where I was going with this:

    “We had to balance out the fact that we had information that we thought was true that Brooke Bennett used those computers to communicate on her MySpace account with protecting the civil liberties of everybody else, and this was not an easy decision to make.” -Col. James Baker, director of the Vermont State Police

    This is not a decision the police have the right or the responsibility to make. Ever. Ever. If it were their job to weigh investigative needs against civil liberties, they would choose investigative needs every time — as they should, because their job is to protect life and property, not civil liberties, and they should be doing everything they think they can get away with to achieve that end.

    And it’s the job of others to put a rein on what they can get away with.

  7. Cidu Bill Jul 19th 2008 at 11:14 pm 7

    Speaking of privacy on library and other public computers, this can’t be repeated enough: When you check your e-mail — or visit any sensitive password-protected site — log out when you leave. Merely closing the Yahoo Mail window, or even shutting down the browser, won’t necessarily log you out, and if the next library patron goes to Yahoo Mail, he might end up with access to your mail.

  8. Steven Hunter Jul 19th 2008 at 11:36 pm 8

    Actually Bill I’ll go you one step further. On *any* “public” terminal, manually log out of any websites you’ve logged into, clear your browser cache and history, delete your cookies, and then reboot the computer (if possible). If you don’t know how to do those things in a given web browser, well GIYF.

    @DD The fact that the computer is “public” or provided by government money doesn’t in any way give the government a right to violate your rights. People in government housing have the same 4th amendment rights as people in private housing.

  9. Arthur Jul 19th 2008 at 11:40 pm 9

    Cidu Bill said, “When you check your e-mail […] log out when you leave. […] the next library patron […] might end up with access to your mail.”

    My usual, when I find I’m logged in to someone else’s e-mail, is to send them a message from their own ID telling them about their mistake. Of course, I have no idea whether it does any good.

  10. Cidu Bill Jul 19th 2008 at 11:50 pm 10

    I’ve done that too, Arthur. Presumably receiving an e-mail from your own account will put the fear of God into you.

    (reminds me of those horror movies: “The phone call is coming from your own house!”)

  11. PeterW Jul 20th 2008 at 12:35 am 11

    I ought to do that next time it happens. And to make them sweat some more, I might allude to sending inappropriate emails from their account to people in their address book.

  12. Arthur Jul 20th 2008 at 01:17 am 12

    Re your perceived fallacy:

    I think Col. Baker’s statement and your statement may be just a difference in phrasing rather than a real difference in meaning. At a patrolman’s level, “what we can get away with” is based on what he’s been told about probable cause, etc. At a colonel’s level, he’s the one who needs to formulate what to tell the patrolmen about probable cause vs. laws, precedents, and court rulings. Politically he can’t say that they’ll do everything they can get away with, though it’s probably true. Instead, he expands on what they can’t get away with to the reasons they can’t get away with them, i.e. civil rights.

    Without more knowledge, I can’t tell if he did the right thing: Send people to ask for the data (and if they got it willingly they’re ahead of the game), while at the same time start progress on getting a search warrant (in case the data is not given willingly).

  13. Kit Jul 20th 2008 at 01:45 am 13

    Something I think everyone is missing: What would be on the computer she used to access MySpace anyway? Just like oil, the computer used to access a social network is “fungible.” That’s kind of the point of being able to access from anywhere. It doesn’t make any difference!

  14. Cidu Bill Jul 20th 2008 at 02:14 am 14

    The article was very unclear on what the police thought they’d be able to find, so I just ignored that aspect and focused on what interested me about the story.

  15. Tom T. Jul 20th 2008 at 09:38 am 15

    But the whole point is what the police thought they might find. Presumably they’re looking for information in the browser cache that may have indicated where the girl was intending to go (fragments of email or IM, Mapquest searches, websites of local businesses). It’s easy in hindsight to say that the police should have targeted the uncle, but they didn’t necessarily know where the uncle was at the time either.

    Let’s be clear: There’s no library privacy issue here. The police were not seeking borrower records of any sort. There is no expectation of privacy in internet use on a public terminal because the user is sitting in a public place at the time. Librarians can and do look over patrons’ shoulders to see what they’re doing. I suspect that if a patron in the Randolph library had been accessing porn or white-supremacy websites, this librarian would not have hesitated to violate his privacy and shut him down.

    So if there are no actual interests being protected, the librarian is just a self-righteous twit who thinks that sticking it to the Man relieves her of any obligation to use good judgment. She better hope that there wasn’t any information on that computer that would have allowed the police to head off a meeting between the girl and her uncle during the eight-hour wait. If there was, then she doomed that girl to die.

  16. Powers Jul 20th 2008 at 09:57 am 16

    Tom, the article states there was an agreement of privacy, so saying “There’s no expectation of privacy” is wrong. The library, based on my reading, guaranteed the privacy of the computer records &c. in the absence of a legal document. The librarian was following the agreement the library had made with its patrons.

    Besides, if the information was *that* vital, why’d it take eight hours to get a warrant?

  17. Lola Jul 20th 2008 at 10:11 am 17

    So here’s question. Why did they want to sieze all of the computers? Surely the girl wasn’t going from computer to computer in one session. And another. Why not just behave like patrons and access the computers and do their search? They are public access and there is nothing to prevent anybody, police included, from going on and looking at the history. Kind of like trash at the curb and probably just as legal as an exigent no warrant enter and search anyway. It wasn’t clear in the article, was the girl already deceased at the time? If not, were I the librarian, though I’d know I’d done the right thing, it would give me nightmares for as long as I still had dreams.

  18. arvy Jul 20th 2008 at 10:55 am 18

    Tom T: If a patron is viewing porn, a librarian would be within his/her rights to ask the patron to stop, since the computer screen could be viewed by others. But this is far different from reporting that information to government authorities. You have no evidence to support the notion that they would ask a patron to cease visiting white supremecist pages (you’ve added another logical fallacy to the discussion by essentially calling them hypocrites for potential contradictory actions that you invented).

    For those who suggested that the cops should have used the machines as patrons, there are numerous potential problems with this. First, Library conputers generally have very high security levels; one patron cannot generally view the browsing history of another (if the references to coming across another user’s already logged in e-mail are related to library computers then I guess this isn’t universal, but I’m guessing such lapses are the exception) Second, all the libraries around here have limits of one hour and restrictions about use by people without library cards. This would make it very difficult for police to find anything useful, especially if other patrons were waiting.

    I think readers should hold off on their knee-jerk reactions and recognize that a)this case is a little more complex than some responders are acknowledging, and b) in the heat of the moment people often respond emotionally rather than logically thinking through all the possible long-term implications of their immediate actions.

  19. Trish Jul 20th 2008 at 01:02 pm 19

    There is actually an easy solution for the library to use in the future to prevent this situation. The college I went to had a special drive armor on every computer. When the computer was rebooted, the hard drive erased and reset to a new install. We never had any problems with viruses or patron installing programs they should not or downloaded games or anything. If a patron wanted to save a file, they had to use FTP or a disk or a USB stick or something. NOTHING was saved on the local drive or the network drive.

    This way, we were never plagued with viruses or problems, and no warrant would ever matter. All a patron had to do was reboot before they walked away. If somebody showed up with a warrant (and they did at least once when I was there) all they would get are the sign in logs of who used the lab. There wasn’t even a log as to who used which computer.

  20. Powers Jul 21st 2008 at 07:06 am 20

    Lola: They needed to seize the physical computers. First, they don’t know which computer(s) the girl used. Even if there was a log handy, there’s always the possibility that she signed one log but ended up switching to a different computer. Best to cover all the bases. Second, it’s not just a matter of doing a file search on each computer; technicians have specialized tools to search through all the data on a hard drive, even files that may have been deleted. They need the computers in a lab to do a thorough search.

  21. Ray Brady Jul 21st 2008 at 12:54 pm 21

    They most certainly did not need to seize the computers. Any data available on those machines, whether on the active registry or deleted, could be preserved simply by replicating the hard drive. Any competent technician could do this armed with nothing but a $100 USB drive. The police overreacted because they didn’t know what they were doing, and so their instinct was just to grab everything and sort it out later. How many months would it have been, I wonder, before the library got their computers back?

  22. DPWally Jul 21st 2008 at 02:37 pm 22

    Since there was some confusion on this point…

    They already knew about the changes to her Myspace profile. They believed she made the changes from a computer in the library. So they were looking for evidence she was in the library, what time she was there, plus anything else she did while on the computer. Anything else that would give clues to where she went and why. Browser caches keep all kinds of stuff, and computer forensics can find lots of info that has been erased and overwritten.

    I assume it didn’t take long to get a warrant for that.

  23. DPWally Jul 21st 2008 at 02:43 pm 23

    Apparently I didn’t read the last 5 entries before writing mine.

    A computer in normal use deletes and overwrites files, especially temporary files like browser caches, so you don’t investigate by logging in and reading files. You can copy non-deleted files to a USB drive, but that doesn’t help much either. It’s the deleted stuff they want.

    The best method is to shut it down immediately, before the OS or another user can make any more changes, then remove the disk and do forensic analysis.

  24. Count Shrimpula Jul 21st 2008 at 03:23 pm 24

    More than that, DPWally, they actually make a full imaged backup of everything that’s on the drive, seal that one up, and then do the forensics on the copied drive. That way if something gets screwed up, or if the defense tries to say they planted the info on the drive, they still have the pristine original there to prove they didn’t.

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