Police Tracking Criminals in Cyperspace

An old black ledger with gold trim, its tidy columns written in ink, sits in Loudoun County’s 19th century brick courthouse by a street corner that people tend to cross only when the light tells them to go.

The book looks like some journal on criminal justice past. But it speaks to the future.

Containing a list of search warrants being sought by police across 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 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.

“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,” said Ron Horack, point man for AOL-related investigations at the county Sheriff’s Department.

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 hot 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 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 added that 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.”

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Decatur, Ala., police have been tight-lipped about their investigation of the March 12 killing of Karen Croft Tipton, 39, wife of a prominent local psychiatrist, who was stabbed to death in her home.

But in their affidavit at the Virginia courthouse, they disclosed that she was using her computer when attacked 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.

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Authorities turned to AOL to see some of the online activities of the two high school students who killed 13 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 when a man in New York was charged with attempted murder of his wife, who, police say, was having a passionate online encounter that her husband happened to see.

“AOL is extremely law-enforcement friendly,” Horack said. “They don’t hold anything back.”

America Online, the world’s largest Internet service provider, or ISP, tells its nearly 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 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 said. 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 appear to be wild-goose chases, an impression formed after a review of the more than 100 that were 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 that 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 is 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 said. “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.

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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 handprint was found at the scene.

Pattee has been charged with first-degree murder.

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AOL Guidelines

Some of America Online’s conditions for releasing information on members to investigators:

* No disclosure except under “valid legal process” such as search warrant, subpoena or other court order.

* Under a search warrant, AOL may turn over any relevant e-mail, similar content and personal identifying information. AOL says it generally keeps unread e-mail in its own system for 28 days; e-mail that has been read for two days. Members have the option of storing it longer on the server, as well as keeping it in their own computers.

* In civil cases, AOL won’t release e-mail but may give out personal identifying information in response to a subpoena or other court order. The member whose information is to be disclosed is given two weeks’ notice in case he or she wishes to contest the order.

* Public chat rooms are monitored for inappropriate content and AOL has a detailed process for handling complaints and terminating service to members who violate rules.

* AOL does not keep records of member passwords.

Associated Press

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Online Whodunits

Some recent cases in which police sought access to the online activities of suspects or victims:

* A Mishawaka, Ind., woman, posing as a man, who formed a relationship with a 15-year-old Iowa girl.

* A man charged with aggravated murder in the shooting death of Penny Chang, 15, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who had been sent 60 pages of threatening e-mail and harassed on the phone.

* The custodian of an Alexandria, La., cathedral charged in a church arson. Police were testing his alibi that he was online when the fire started.

* A San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department dispatcher who police say was in collusion with a suspect.

* A youth in Sterling, Va., who received threatening e-mails, including one saying: “I’m going to [expletive] kill you if you don’t call me. . . . You see, my friend, I like to call this a little game. A game of cat and mouse. I have been watching you for some time now.”

* A masseur found dead with his computer missing in his Las Vegas apartment. Police believe he met clients in chat rooms.

* A Hamden, Conn., woman who received a string of threatening and obscene e-mails, one saying: “Everyone has to die someday. unfortunately your time is near.” Police say the sender at one point “said he was a 12-year-old boy from California and was sorry.”

* A Eugene, Ore., man suspected of inciting a “riot” at a Nike store.

Associated Press