Casey Anthony’s Google Searches – Computer Forensics

Casey Anthony’s Google searches. Gone already and we hardly knew ye….

I vividly remember watching some of the Casey Anthony trial live as it was televised. This was one of the most talked about cases in recent history. Since the trial was such a ratings bonanza for the media, it was nearly laid out like an itinerary. We knew when Roy Krunk was going to testify, we eagerly waited for George & Cindy Anthony, and we all waited anxiously to see if Casey herself would testify.

Even the attorneys themselves had become household names to a certain extent and lightning rods for controversy as they so often are. Had anyone ever heard of Jose Baez, Mason Cheney or Geoff Ashton prior to the trial?

With the advent and increase in social media use, this modern day televised ‘soap opera’, was basically a made for media drama in the form of a true story. People were tweeting during the trial, and it seemed that most everyone had an opinion on whether she innocent or guilty. The hatred for Casey Anthony was palpable. It seemed to be the only thing that anyone was talking about during the summer of 2011.

I know it’s a ‘sin to comment on the obvious’, but if this were a fictional novel, the innocent verdict certainly would have been the ‘shocker’ in the last chapter. I know…still hard to comprehend. As hard as it may be to believe, I will repeat it. She was found innocent by a jury of her ‘peers’.

The point of this blog post is not to rehash the trial (or ‘mis-trial’) so to speak, as there are plenty of sources for every angle possible.

The point is…. The Orange Co. Sheriffs dept. committed a blunder of epic proportions. Orlando television station WKMG first reported that the sheriffs’ office computer investigators missed a Google Search for “fool proof” suffocation methods. Whoever conducted the Google search looked for the term “fool-proof suffication,” (sic) misspelling “suffocation”. Google in all its wisdom, for the most part, knows what you meant to search for and will suggest the correction. It’s as if Google is anticipating misspellings and has taken that into consideration. Very much unlike the the forensic ‘investigation’ that was performed on Casey Anthony’s hard drive.

Did that resonate with you like it did me?
They missed an entry for “FOOL-PROOF SUFFOCATION!!

Casey Anthony Google Searches

 

 

Most browsers will also ‘auto-fill’ the address bar in a browser.

Internet web browsers will start to autofill the URL once you start to type.

My mother, God bless her, is no computer expert and had to be coerced into getting a computer and getting online. Now she plays basic web based games, enjoys Facebook and surfs the internet.
Yet even she knows that she has two browsers available to her, and that some of her web based video games work better with Firefox.

Popular Browser Icons

In my opinion, equally as mind boggling is the fact that the computer investigators only looked at Internet Explorer Files. I just looked at the analytics for ECO Data Recovery. It appears that Mozilla Firefox is actually more popular than Internet Explorer amongst our visitors on computers running Windows.
(A snapshot of our website traffic reveals that Mozilla Firefox accounts for 26% while Internet Explorer accounts for 22%. It’s not a huge difference, but consider the fact that with our visitors, Mozilla Firefox is till a more popular browser. )

How on earth could the investigators have overlooked this? Since I have serious doubts of how thorough the hard drive investigation was, I can tell you that a quick look through temporary internet files would have revealed some very, very possibly damning evidence.

Now I know hindsight is 20/20. Investigative reports showed 17 vague entries from the computer’s Internet Explorer browser. However this hindsight reveals more than 1200 entries from the  Mozilla Firefox browser!! (Including the suffocation search.) From some of the news reports that I have read, the Orange Co. PD did not consult with the F.BI. nor the F.D.L.E. (Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement.)

With this particular case, data recovery software would not have even been necessary to possibly alter the outcome of this trial. A simple, basic search of the temporary internet files without even using data recovery software would have revealed the searches that could have had dramatic results. I’m sure that there would have been fireworks in the courtroom when this evidence would have been presented.

Of course it’s easy to comment on all of this information one year later, while I blog about it from the standpoint of  a data recovery service.

The fact of the matter is that: A competent computer technician would have been able to pull the temporary internet files, and with certainty would have known to check for multiple browsers.

ECO Data Recovery provides forensic computer investigations and digital forensics for cases of corporate espionage, employee sabotage, and even marital cases where infidelity is a factor. There was a time in the not so distant past that we performed computer forensics for numerous Law Enforcement agencies. As you might imagine with the rise of the technological revolution, there has also been a rise in computer related crimes. Now, it’s not uncommon at all for a Law Enforcement Agency to have their own in house digital crimes unit.

We recently had a local agency bring us a hard drive that had been held for possible evidence against a perpetrator. Once the hard drive did become a focal point of the investigation, the detectives learned that the hard disk drive was not suffering from a physical failure, also commonly known as a head crash. We rebuilt the drive to a functioning state, and provided back to the agency so that they may perform their own computer forensics on the hard drive.

Who’s to say if this evidence would have changed the outcome of trial? To me, as a layperson the evidence that was submitted seemed more than sufficient for a conviction. Since our court systems has a procedural defense known as Double Jeopardy.

This means that a person who has been acquitted of a crime, cannot be charged with the same crime twice.

Casey Anthony could confess, write a book, and even upload a “How To” video to Youtube , yet she will never be able to be charged with the death of her daughter.

ECO Data Recovery
800-339-3412
1391 N. Military Trail
West Palm Beach, FL ~ 33409
http://www.ecodatarecovery.com