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This heinous crime was "the perfect example of an unsolved mystery." But Google handed over the culprit

2020-12-30T20:52:39.419Z


When a woman was kidnapped and raped, the detective tried something that hadn't been proven before. "We really want to help because what happened is the worst nightmare," Google responded.


By Jon Schuppe - NBC News

In the early morning hours of June 16, 2017, a woman arrived at a bus stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and begged a driver to lend her his cell phone so she could call 911.

She said that two men had just attacked her and left her on the side of the road: "They stole my car, beat me and raped me," said the woman, a nurse identified only as MD to protect her privacy.

It was a

difficult crime to solve.

She remembered enough details of one of the criminals to make a police sketch;

she had a general pickup of the truck that she was loaded into after threatening her with a knife and hammer, and she knew that at some point they passed near General Mitchell International Airport.

The attackers kept MD's cell phone, but it was turned off so it was not reachable.

Officers took fingerprints of the woman's car after it was abandoned by criminals, reviewed surveillance cameras, and used a forensic sexual assault kit in the hope that it would be enough to put together a DNA profile with which to find the criminals. .

"It was the

perfect example of an unsolved police mystery

," Milwaukee detective Eric Draeger told NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.

However, there was a detail that caught Draeger's attention: when MD described his attackers' truck, he mentioned that she managed to see that

one of them had Google Maps open on his cell phone.

[How Police Used Genealogy Websites To Catch The Golden State Killer]

A crucial clue

Draeger has been part of Milwaukee Police investigations that use high technology, such as using phone company data to confirm if a suspect was at the crime site based on whether his cell phone bounced off a tower.

But the process of getting that information is slow and expensive, and the results are not as useful if the phone number of the potential suspect is unknown.

Draeger thought it would be

easier, faster and more accurate to ask someone else for the data: Google.

[This is how a man became a suspect in a robbery: by riding a bicycle with his cell phone in hand]

He had never done it, nor did he know of an officer who had, but contacted Prosecutor Erin Karshen to expedite the process of getting a court application.

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And around the night of Friday, June 16, 2017, about 12 hours after MD called 911, he sent an urgent email to the tech giant, asking for any “geo-fencing” (or virtual perimeter) information on the devices they had been using. Google Maps at the time of the kidnapping and near the airport.

To Draeger's surprise, he

received a call just 20 minutes later.

On the other end of the phone was an employee of Google's legal compliance department.

Draeger remembers telling him, "I don't know if this is possible, but we really want to help because what happened is the worst nightmare of all."

To find the person in charge

Google representatives worked with Draeger as he adjusted his request so that the search could be done beyond the airport area, as hundreds of devices had been activated there at the time.

To find matches, they also searched between devices using Google Maps near the site of the kidnapping and in a Chicago bar where the card that was stolen from MD the day after the attack was used.

An image captured by a security camera near the Milwaukee International Airport shows the van in which MD was kidnapped Milwaukee police

On June 20, the managers had found

a single cell phone that was activated

in all three points.

With that it was possible to arrest José Arévalo Viera, who had been in prison in Kentucky for a decade before the attack on MD on charges of deprivation of liberty (holding someone in place).

[2020 changed our relationship with the internet and technology, possibly forever]

Police asked T-Mobile, the telephone operator for Arévalo's number, to do an emergency trace (possible but only in very rare circumstances) with which they were able to locate him in Louisville, Kentucky.

Milwaukee authorities asked his Louisville peers to help with the arrest.

When MD was shown a series of photographs that included Arévalo's,

she immediately recognized him

and pointed him out as responsible.

With that additional confirmation, they arrested him and charged him with sexual assault, kidnapping, and armed robbery.

A DNA analysis later also found a match with the genetic material they had obtained from the rape kit.

The man was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

"Without the information from Google, we would have ended up with nothing," Draeger told NBC News.

"They helped us with information that helped bring justice to a woman who needed it," he added.

Controversies and privacy concerns

Draeger's request to solve the crimes committed against MD is one of the first known examples of a court request for geofencing, which is beginning to be used by authorities to try to close unsolved cases. 

[This artist managed to fool Google Maps after walking down a street with 99 cell phones]

It has been reported that this made it possible to find a suspect in the Texas bombings, and arrest those responsible for a home search in Minnesota and a robbery in San Francisco.

But the

tool is not without controversy.

José Arévalo Viera in a Kentucky court in June 2017, Telemundo Wisconsin

Defense lawyers and privacy activists fear those requests make it easier for the government to 

track people even when they had nothing to do with a crime

.

The authorities, meanwhile, indicate that the matter is legal because Google users agree to share their location, anonymously, to use some of the applications.

"We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement," Google's director for law enforcement and computer security Richard Salgado told NBC News.

"We have developed a specific process to respond to these requests such that we comply with legal responsibility while reducing the amount of data that is shared," he added.

In 2019 in Florida, a man was found a robbery suspect only because he passed near the home robbed as part of his typical bike route;

subsequently the police stopped considering him a suspect.

[A detailed guide to learn how to delete your Google history]

In Virginia, the

geo-fencing requests were declared unconstitutional

;

New York is studying whether to ban them.

However, the technique continues to be used, and increasingly, with cases reported from North Carolina to Arizona and from Minnesota to New York.

Google indicated that between 2017 and 2018 geofencing requests increased 1,500% and that they grew 500% more towards 2019.

Although the higher volume has also meant that the process takes longer;

while in the case of MD there was an analysis ready within a week, now that can take months, so the police resort to requests as a last resort.

"They are just one of the tools we have to make sure the community is safe," said M. D, "I don't think this is a privacy breach, it is something we really need."

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2020-12-30

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