Commit a crime? Your Fitbit, key fob or pacemaker could snitch on you
Commit a crime? Your Fitbit, key fob or pacemaker could
snitch on you
By Justin Jouvenal Washington Post October 9, 2017 7:46
PM
The firefighter found Richard Dabate on the floor of his
kitchen, where he had made a desperate 911 call minutes earlier, court records
show. Bleeding and lashed to a chair with zip ties, the man moaned a chilling
warning: "They're still in the house."
Smoke hung in the air, and a trail of blood led to a
darkened basement, as Connecticut State Police swarmed the large home in the
Hartford suburbs two days before Christmas in 2015.
Richard, 41, told authorities a masked intruder with a
"Vin Diesel" voice killed his wife, Connie, in front of him and
tortured him. Police combed the home and town of Ellington but found no
suspect.
With no witnesses other than Richard Dabate, detectives
turned to the vast array of data and sensors that increasingly surround us. An
important bit of evidence came from an unlikely source: the Fitbit tracking
Connie's movements.
Others from the home's smart alarm systems, Facebook,
cellphones, email and a key fob allowed police to re-create a nearly
minute-by-minute account of the morning that they said revealed Richard's story
was an elaborately staged fiction.
Undone by his data, Richard was charged with his wife's
murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
The case, which is in pretrial motions, is perhaps the
best example to date of how Internet-connected, data-collecting smart devices
such as fitness trackers, digital home assistants, thermostats, TVs and even
pill bottles are beginning to transform criminal justice.
The ubiquitous devices can serve as a legion of
witnesses, capturing our every move, biometrics and what we have ingested. They
sometimes listen in or watch us in the privacy of our homes. And police are
increasingly looking to the devices for clues.
The prospect has alarmed privacy advocates, who say too
many consumers are unaware of the revealing information these devices are
harvesting. They also point out there are few laws specifically crafted to
guide how law enforcement officials collect smart-device data.
Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District of Columbia
law professor, says we are entering an era of "sensorveillance" when
we can expect one device or another to be monitoring us much of the time. The
title of a law paper on the topic put the prospect this way: "Technology
is Killing Our Opportunity to Lie."
The business research company Gartner estimates 8.4
billion devices were connected to the internet in 2017, a 31 percent increase
over the previous year. By 2020, the company estimates there will be roughly
three smart devices for every person on the planet.
"Americans are just waking up to the fact that their
smart devices are going to snitch on them," Ferguson said. "And that
they are going to reveal intimate details about their lives they did not intend
law enforcement to have."
- - -
The Dabates' yellow Colonial was festively decorated with
wreaths on the windows the morning of Dec. 23, 2015. Richard, Connie and their
two boys, ages 6 and 9, bustled around getting ready for the day.
To many of their acquaintances, the family appeared to be
an ordinary one in a quiet bedroom community. Richard was a network
administrator, and Connie worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative.
Joann Knapp, a former neighbor of the Dabates, fondly
recalls Connie popping over to her house to ask her out for walks while Knapp
was having a difficult pregnancy. Knapp said Connie and Richard appeared to
have a happy - even passionate - marriage.
"They couldn't keep their eyes off each other,"
Knapp said. "It was a look that you would want."
But behind that public face, Connie's killing would
reveal a darkly tangled relationship and a major secret.
Richard and his attorney did not respond to requests for
comment. Richard gave a detailed — but shifting — account of Connie's killing
to detectives over six hours on the day of the slaying. It is contained in his
arrest warrant.
On the drive to work that morning, Richard said, he got
an alert on his phone that the home's alarm had been triggered. He said he shot
an email to his boss and returned home, arriving there between 8:45 a.m. and 9
a.m.
Richard told police he heard a noise on the second floor
and found a hulking intruder wearing camouflage and a mask inside the walk-in
closet of the master bedroom. The intruder demanded his wallet at knifepoint.
Soon after, Connie returned home from an exercise class;
Richard told investigators he yelled at her to run. Connie fled into the
basement, and the intruder followed.
When Richard arrived on the lower level, he made his way
through darkness, finding the man pointing a gun at Connie's head. Richard said
that the gun was his own and that Connie must have removed it from a safe to
defend herself.
Richard said he charged but heard a deafening blast and
fell. When he got up, Connie was slumped on the ground. Police would later
determine the gunshot hit her in the back of her head.
The intruder disabled Richard and then zip-tied one of
Richard's arms and one of his legs to a folding chair, according to the
account.
The intruder jabbed Richard with a box cutter. The man
also started a fire in a cardboard box using a blow torch, which he then turned
on Richard's ankle.
Richard told investigators he saw an opening: He jammed
the blow torch in the man's face and singed it. The intruder ran out.
Richard said he crawled upstairs with the chair still
attached, activated the panic alarm, called 911 and collapsed. The firefighter
found him soon after.
- - -
The chaotic scene inside the Dabate home had all the
hallmarks of a home invasion, but a few details would prompt investigators to
take a closer look.
Dogs brought in to track the suspect could find no scent
trails leaving the property and circled back to Richard, according to arrest
records. Richard also aroused suspicion when detectives asked whether their
probe would reveal any problems between him and Connie.
He took a deep breath and offered: "Yes and
no."
Richard told a bizarre story. He said that he had gotten
a high school friend pregnant and that it was Connie's idea. He said the three
planned to co-parent the child, since his wife wanted another baby but could
not have one for health reasons.
Later, Richard changed his story, saying that the
pregnancy was unplanned and that he had a romantic relationship with the
friend. Detectives found no evidence Connie knew of the pregnancy.
"This situation popped up like a frickin' soap
opera," Richard told detectives.
The admission pointed toward a possible motive for
Connie's killing, but it would be the data detectives uncovered that would give
them evidence to conclude his story was a lie.
Detectives had noticed Connie was wearing a Fitbit when
they found her body.
They requested the device's data, which showed she had
walked 1,217 feet after returning home from the exercise class, far more than
the 125 feet it would take her to go from the car in the garage to the basement
in Richard's telling of what happened.
The Fitbit also registered Connie moving roughly an hour
after Richard said she was killed before 9:10 a.m. Facebook records also cast
doubt on Richard's timeline, showing Connie had posted as late as 9:46 a.m.
Detectives would also come to doubt that Richard left
home that morning, after examining data from his home alarm system and his
email account.
Records indicate he used a key fob to activate his home
alarm from his basement at 8:50 a.m. and then disabled it at 8:59 a.m. from the
same location.
Richard also told investigators he emailed his boss from
the road after getting the alert about the alarm. But records from his
Microsoft Outlook account showed he sent the email from the IP address
associated with his home.
Combined, the data punched major holes in Richard's
story. Police obtained an arrest warrant for him in April.
The high school friend of Richard's told authorities he
had said he planned to serve divorce papers on Connie the week she was killed.
Richard had texted her the night before Connie's death: "I'll see you
tomorrow my little love nugget."
- - -
The Dabate case is just one of a handful in which law
enforcement officials have resorted to smart-device sleuthing.
In September 2016, an Ohio man told authorities he awoke
to find his home ablaze, but police quickly suspected he set the fire himself.
They filed a search warrant to get data from his pacemaker.
Authorities said his heart rate and cardiac rhythms
indicated the man was awake at the time he claimed he was sleeping. He was charged
with arson and insurance fraud.
Prosecutors in a 2015 Arkansas murder case sought
recordings from the suspect's Amazon Echo when a 47-year-old man was found
floating in the suspect's hot tub after a night of partying. Authorities
thought the voice-activated assistant may have recorded valuable evidence of
the crime.
Amazon.com challenged the search warrant in court, saying
that the request was overly broad and that government seizure of such data
would chill customers' First Amendment rights to free speech. But the challenge
was eventually dropped because the suspect agreed to allow Amazon to turn over
the information.
Virginia State Police Special Agent Robert Brown III of
the High Technology Division said the current trickle of such smart-device
cases will probably soon become a flood.
"It will definitely be something in five or 10
years, in every case, we will look to see if this information is
available," Brown said.
Amazon and Fitbit said in statements that they won't
release customers' data to authorities without a valid legal demand, but they
declined to say how many such requests they have received from law enforcement.
"Respect for the privacy of our users drives our
approach," Fitbit said in its statement.
Ferguson, the law professor, said a case before the
Supreme Court could be key in determining how exposed smart-device data is to
searches by law enforcement.
In 2011, investigators in Detroit obtained months of
cellphone location data on a suspect in a robbery investigation without a
search warrant. Timothy Carpenter was later convicted, in part on this
information gleaned from cellphone companies.
Carpenter is arguing in his appeal that such cellphone
location data is so powerful it should be covered by the protections of the
Fourth Amendment and that police should be required to get a search warrant to
obtain it.
Courts have long held that people who voluntarily
disclose information to a bank, cellphone company or other third party have no
reasonable expectation of privacy. Ferguson said that since many smart devices
transfer data to company servers, this third-party doctrine could apply to
them, as well.
Ferguson said a ruling against Carpenter might clear the
way for authorities to seek smart-device data stored on those servers without a
warrant.
"In a world of truly ubiquitous connectivity where
we are recording our heartbeat, our steps, our location if all of that data is
now available to law enforcement without a warrant, that is a big change,"
he said. "And that's a big invasion of what most of us think our privacy
should include."
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