Could Cops Use Google As Pre-Cogs? 376
theodp writes "Remember the Pre-Cogs in Minority Report? Slate's Will Oremus does, and wonders if Google could similarly help the police apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge collected from searches. Oremus writes: 'At around 3:45 a.m. on March 24, someone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., used a mobile phone to Google "chemicals to passout a person." Then the person searched Ask.com for "making people faint." Then Google again, for "ways to kill people in their sleep," "how to suffocate someone," and "how to poison someone." The phone belonged to 23-year-old Nicole Okrzesik. Later that morning, police allege, she and her boyfriend strangled 19-year-old Juliana Mensch as she slept on the floor of their apartment.' In theory, Oremus muses, Google or Ask.com could have flagged Okrzesik's search queries as suspicious and dispatched cops to the scene before Mensch's assailants had the chance to do her in." I bet you're already thinking of just a few reasons why this might not such a good idea.
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
No. [wikipedia.org]
Cops could (in theory, with the right legal framework in place, and the right IT support, and funding, etc.) use Google's data and analysis as strong indicators of suspicion. That could be useful, but it's not nearly enough to warrant an in-person police response.
An analogy would be for me to run up to a random cop on the street and ask him how long it'd take to get reinforcements to the area. It's not the kind of activity that normally happens, so I've probably earned a bit of surveillance and a few funny looks, but it's no reason to be arrested on the spot.
NO (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Our constitution doesn't allow you to be arrested for thinking about committing a crime, only for committing one.
How about we go back to swift and sure punishment that's so severe that most sane people wont do the crime? Instead, we have too many in jail for minor offenses, while the well connected can steal billions or kill people and not even get indited or get off on technicalities.
Let's fix the criminal justice system we have, not create one in which we make up more crimes that haven't happened.
Re:The summury sums up why its a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
This is as about related as killing someone by gas/chemicals as killing someone by strangulation is.
What if your partner wanted to try choking as a sex act? What if you Googled it to find out how dangerous and/or if there are implications to it. What if you typed "choking someone death" in Google to try to find out more about choking deaths? What if they did pass while in the act and it was truly an accident or there was something you didn't know about them (there could be countless things that could go wrong. Maybe you missed one.
Maybe you are housecleaning and you want to find out if some chemicals interact and may cause death.