Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History?

bornkillerbornkiller AdministratorIn your girlfriends snatch
The 11th commandment shall be; Do not DELETEth your browser cache so we may gaze upon it" sayeth the US government!

You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’ photos on the Internet, lied about whether Tamerlan lived with his wife and daughter, and lied about when he and Tamerlan had last prayed together. Matanov likely lied to distance himself from the brothers or to cover up his own jihadist sympathies—or maybe he was just confused.

Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history.

Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. During this time the FBI tracked him with a drone-like surveillance plane that made loops around Quincy, disturbing residents. The feds finally arrested and indicted him in May 2014. They never alleged that Matanov was involved in the bombings or that he knew about them beforehand, but they charged him with four counts of obstruction of justice. There were three counts for making false statements based on the aforementioned lies and—remarkably—one count for destroying “any record, document or tangible object” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation. This last charge was for deleting videos on his computer that may have demonstrated his own terrorist sympathies and for clearing his browser history.

Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone.

Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities. A police officer in Colorado who falsified a report to cover up a brutality case was convicted under the act, as was a woman in Illinois who destroyed her boyfriend’s child pornography.

Now how fucked up is that???

More: http://www.thenation.com/article/208593/you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history

Comments

  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    Kafkaesque really. I doubt the charge of 'record destruction' will stick though....
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    You'd think it wouldn't stick huh, considering how stupid it actually is. Even without the knowledge your under suspicion and committing this so called criminal act is really a travesty of justice.

    If it he does get charged for it you know what comes next. It'd be illegal to delete caches overall and the use of any software that shrouds our identity will be a crime. Wearing a V for vendetta mask, changing the name of our pets, changing addresses and even changing underpants, yep! You guessed it, all a crime . It's coming, heed my words.

    "One of the stipulations of Sarbanes-Oxley is the preservation of evidence. Failing to do so, or purposefully destroying records, can result in felony criminal charges. This, unfortunately, doesn't even have to be willful destruction. The law forbids the destruction of evidence, regardless of personal knowledge of ongoing investigations, or even if no investigation has even commenced."
    Source: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=khairullozhon+matanov

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