Sunday, June 06, 1999
Cyber cops on e-mail trail
BY CALVIN WOODWARD
The Associated Press
LEESBURG, Va. — An old black ledger with gold trim, its tidy columns written in ink, sits in Loudoun County's 19th century brick courthouse, looking like some journal on criminal justice past. But its contents are hardly old fashioned.
Containing a list of search warrants being sought by police around the nation, it is a catalog of sorts, pointing to pedophiles, harassers, stalkers, terrorists, murderers — and the high-tech means being used to catch them.
Armed with those warrants, police visit the nearby headquarters of America Online and retrieve information that people on the Internet never dreamed would end up in the hands of the law.
Private e-mail between lovers. The threatening missives of haters. The true identities of people hiding behind screen names in a medium they thought was the essence of secrecy.
“I know who you are and where you live,” an anonymous hatemonger e-mailed a 12-year-old girl in Lancaster, Pa. By peeking into the accounts of Internet providers, police can often say the same thing: They will know who the threatening people are and where they live.
“Ultimately, if you break the law, it can be traced,” says Ron Horack, point man for AOL-related investigations at the county sheriff's department.
Late last month, federal authorities said they had charged a northern Virginia pediatrician with possessing child pornography after investigating his AOL account and finding explicit images sent to him by e-mail over the course of almost six months. They said they then found more child pornography on his computer.
The pediatrician had been posing as a 16-year-old girl in e-mail correspondence with a man who had been sending him the images, police said. Possessing child pornography is a federal crime when it has been distributed across state lines.
Go for a walk, drive a car or spin circles in the moonlight and chances are, no one notices. Take a journey on the Internet, and a trail is left. Police are on that trail in a growing number of criminal investigations.
With an approved warrant, they can look at the electronic mail and other online communications of people suspected of a range of crimes, getting information not just from a home computer but often the company that provides the Internet, e-mail or chat service.
They can do the same with victims, in the process seeing mail from people who had nothing to do with a crime. Everything from humdrum to-do lists to love letters from illicit digital dalliances becomes potential evidence and eventually a matter of public record.
“It is a growing risk to privacy,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who says police should stick to traditional methods such as stings, informants and forensic evidence, which don't invade people's communications.
Says Mr. Horack: “If they're going to use the Internet for their crime, we're going to use the Internet to catch them.”
Decatur, Ala., police have been tightlipped about their investigation of the March 12 killing of Karen Croft Tipton, 39, wife of a prominent local psychiatrist. She was stabbed to death in her home.
But in their affidavit at the Virginia courthouse, they disclose she was using her computer about the time of her attack and was still signed on to AOL when her body was discovered. Their warrant sought access to her e-mail, the content of her “buddy list” — a more immediate way for people on AOL to communicate — and other information related to her screen names and those of her husband.
Information was retrieved, put on a computer disk and sent with some documents to Decatur police. So far, no arrest has been made.
Authorities turned to AOL to see some of the online activities of the two high school students who killed 13 other people and themselves in Littleton, Colo. They've used it to try to track down some of the copycat threats that have closed many schools since.
They took the same route, with so far inconclusive results, after a woman in Pennsylvania was told in a chat room, “I guarantee you I will hurt you if you don't listen to me.” And they checked the Internet when a man in New York was charged with attempted murder of his wife, who, police say, was having a passionate online encounter her husband happened to see.
“AOL is extremely law-enforcement-friendly,” Mr. Horack says. “They don't hold anything back.”
America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider, or ISP, tells its almost 18 million customers that it won't read or disclose private communication or personal identifying information except under a “valid legal process.”
Other major service providers, as well as separate online e-mail services and Internet hubs such as Hotmail and Yahoo, say much the same, although the disclaimers might be hard to find in screens of small print.
“We have a long-standing policy of cooperation with law enforcement,” AOL spokesman Rich D'Amato said.
Communications such as e-mail are disclosed only in criminal investigations and with a warrant, he says. In response to orders in civil cases, AOL may give out information allowing someone's real name to be matched to a screen name.
So if a spouse is found to be having an online affair with someone known only as Heart4U, the identity of that cyberlover might eventually be uncovered in a divorce proceeding.
Raytheon Inc. obtained subpoenas to identify 21 people, most of them employees, said to have been spreading corporate secrets and gripes in an anonymous online chat room.
It then dropped a lawsuit it had brought against the 21, each identified as “John Doe,” indicating to privacy experts that the company had gone to court in the first place only to learn the identities of the chatters. Four employees quit; others entered corporate “counseling.”
Privacy advocates worry that authorities could go on increasingly invasive fishing expeditions.
“There are simply many more events that are recorded (online) that would not be recorded in the physical world,” Mr. Rotenberg says. “I think it is going to become an enormous problem as people become more and more dependent on ISPs.”
Meanwhile, tools continue to be developed to protect anonymity — a site called anonymizer.com, for one, will relay e-mail, stripping out the sender's identifying information.
A review of more than 100 AOL warrants filed in Leesburg this year shows that most involve alleged pedophiles, stalkers and harassers who have used the Internet to find prey and left evidence of their intentions with victims or undercover police.
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