Here's What Facebook Sends the Cops In Response To a Subpoena 153
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook already shares its Law Enforcement Guidelines publicly, but we've never actually seen the data Menlo Park sends over to the cops when it gets a formal subpoena for your profile information. Now we know. This appears to be the first time we get to see what a Facebook account report looks like. The document was released by the The Boston Phoenix as part of a lengthy feature titled 'Hunting the Craigslist Killer,' which describes how an online investigation helped officials track down Philip Markoff. The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn't care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third."
Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/fb-subpoena-db/index.html
Re:account (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the Boston Phoenix article, it was actually the IP address he used to sign up for his throwaway hotmail account, followed by the street address associated with that from Comcast that identified him. Then they did further field work to establish that it was him, and not a neighbour or passer-by who had hacked into his wifi network. The Facebook profile in this case didn't produce any useful information.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:4, Informative)
Very true. I wish people would stop believing that a court's decision is always correct. People escape conviction all the time.
And vice versa unfortunately.
The poor are more likely to get convicted and serve jail time as they can't afford the expensive 'good' lawyers and must rely on the overworked, under-budgeted public defenders.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:5, Informative)
In normal circumstances, it is wise to proceed with caution before accusing somebody and generally the evidence isn't presented to be viewed by the general public.
However in this case i am confident that the identification by one of the women robbed, the dead girls blood on his clothing the shell casings left at the murder scene that matched the gun found in his apartment along with the disposable phones he used for contacting the women ...
The evidence is solid enough to be sure that he did in fact commit the crimes he was accused of. Plus there is no chance of being sued for deformation what with the guy having committed suicide while awaiting trial.
There were a few interesting points made, while he used disposable phones to contact the women he also had his regular phone with him which tied him to the same cells used by the disposable phones at the same times which was useful in identifying him as a suspect. He also made the email account he used to contact the girl he murdered from his home ip address.
The police nearly made a mess of things when they brought him in as after interviewing him there wasn't enough evidence to charge him, but luckily while he was in custody being questioned one of the women who was robbed identified him with absolute certainty which enabled the police to search his apartment and find the physical evidence. Without her identification of him they almost certainly would have had to let him go and give him the opportunity of disposing of the physical evidence.
The facebook stuff is interesting in that it shows what information facebook holds about someone even after that information has been "deleted". However in this case nothing facebook released gave any evidence towards the criminal case.
The guy was a medical student so it is reasonable to assume he was highly intelligent, he also seems to have had a gambling problem.
His choice of who to rob was probably made on the basis he thought that the services these women offered was likely to mean they would have money from earlier clients and less likely to report a robbery. The article also mentioned he had a collection of women's underwear under his mattress so maybe it was more than just getting money to pay his debts.
Did he rob other women who didn't report the crime?