Ars Technica reports that Rodney Bradford, a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident, was arrested for robbing a man at gunpoint, despite his insistence that he was at his father’s Harlem apartment at the time. His defense lawyer discovered that an update was made to Bradford’s Facebook profile at the time of the robbery. When the district attorney verified the claims with Bradford’s father and stepmother and the IP information with Facebook, the charges against Bradford were dropped.
However, the Facebook posting could have been made by someone else, and there would be no way to truly verify who was sitting in front of the computer at the time. Bradford’s attorney brushes this technicality off as a “level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this.”
Actually, as Ars Tecnhica’s Jacqui Cheng points out, “it doesn’t take much of a genius to leave yourself logged in on someone else’s machine (in fact, quite the opposite). A report circulated in September about a robber who decided to log into his own Facebook account at the victim’s house during the robbing and forgot to log out—given that level of stupidity, it’s not hard to imagine leaving yourself logged in at your own father’s apartment.”
Criminal Justice law instructor Joseph Pollini says, “Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.”
Law enforcement is facing this issue much more frequently these days. It’s not just about blaming your cat for downloading child porn anymore—anyone who wants to do so can easily create alibis online with the help of friends or family, and it doesn’t take an experienced hacker to figure out how to use internet speed to their advantage.
Tags: Internet Speed
Nice. You have a couple of good points. When it’s all said and done the police do a good job. The problem with law is that it doesn’t always work effectively. It is a failed system and needs to be fixed.