Police Get Personal in Online Crime

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer - Friday, May 28, 1999

LEESBURG, Va. -- Go for a walk, drive a car or dance in the moonlight and chances are, no one notices. Journey on the Internet and a trail is left.

And police are hot on that trail in a growing number of criminal investigations.

Armed with search warrants, police are looking into the online activities of suspects, and sometimes victims, by seizing evidence from Internet service providers and finding material that people online 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.

"Ultimately, if you break the law, it can be traced," said investigator Ron Horack of the Loudoun County, Va., sheriff's department. Horack helps police around the country apply for search warrants to get material from the county-based America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider with 18 million customers.

"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 know who the threatening people are and where they live.

This week federal authorities said they had charged a northern Virginia pediatrician with possessing child pornography after investigating his AOL account and finding at least 22 explicit images sent to him via e-mail over the course of nearly six months. They said they then found more child pornography on his computer. The doctor could not immediately be reached for comment.

With a warrant, law enforcement authorities can look at the electronic mail and other online communications of people suspected of a range of serious 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 corresponded with them but 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," said 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.

Said Horack: "If they're going to use the Internet for their crime, we're going to use the Internet to catch them."

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., last month. 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, thus far with 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 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," Horack said. "They don't hold anything back."

America Online tells its nearly 18 million customers it won't read or disclose private communication or personal identifying information except under a "valid legal process."

Other major Internet service providers, or ISPs, as well as separate online e-mail services and Internet hubs like Hotmail and Yahoo, say much the same, although the disclaimers may be hard to find in screens of small print.

"We have a long-standing policy of cooperation with law enforcement," said AOL spokesman Rich D'Amato.

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," said Rotenberg. "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.

So far, at least, few warrants going to AOL look like goose chases, an impression formed after a review of the more than 100 that have been filed in Leesburg this year.

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.

Horack prepares warrant applications for police from other parts of the country, some so new to digital detective work they need their children's help to get online. Once they are approved by a magistrate, he takes them to AOL and retrieves the information. It's almost a full-time job, offered by the sheriff because the company gives such a big boost to the county.

The warrants are especially effective against child pornographers, Horack says. "Pedophiles are pack rats. They don't throw away anything." Even when they do delete material from their computer, it might be found at the service provider.

In the case of the 12 -year-old Pennsylvania girl, nothing turned up in the AOL search. Most of the time, something does.

For example, police in Hendersonville, Tenn., turned to AOL to see the Internet activity of Dennis Wayne Cope, 47, shot and found dead in a crawl space of his home in February.

In an affidavit seeking access to Cope's e-mail, "buddy list content" and other online activities, police said he had been corresponding online with the estranged wife of suspect Robert Lee Pattee. They also say Pattee's hand print was found at the scene.

Pattee has been charged with first-degree murder.

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