Murder accused DIDN'T ask Siri 'how to hide my roommate' Florida newspaper The Gainsville Sun reports that the accused in a murder case is alleged to have used his iPhone to search for ways to dispose of a body. Yet all is not what it seems. The Alachua County Criminal Justice Center is currently hearing a case involving the death of Christian Aguilar in September 2012. In testimony …
> Evidence was also tendered to the effect that the answers to Bravo's query included suggestions about swamps and reservoirs being fine places to hide a roommate.
Sounds as if Siri (or its human keepers) should also be arrested for aiding and abetting in this crime.
Given recent precedence one might have expected Siri to tip off the authorities in cases like this. (Maybe it did?)
Sounds like a remake of that movie with Louis de Funès The Gazebo where he tries to get rid of a very hard-to-get-rid-of body.
As a point of fact, that would better tell you how NOT to hide a body, because, as I recall, the miscrants end up propperly cuffed in Fargo(1996).
"So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it."
(I think I love every line Frances McDormand has in that movie)
"Logs also showed an app that switched on the phone's flash to use as a torch ran at the time it is alleged Bravo hid Aguilar's body."
Whoa thats some time log peoples mobiles are keeping and just how do you dig a hole whilst holding a phone Siri?
If the phone hadn't been switched off (and maybe if it has?), there seems to be something akin to dmsg that records all sorts of events and their status. I would imagine "flashlight app started" followed by something about "hardware led active" would be among the entries.
I read somewhere that Microsoft, on Windows Phone 8, ranks the popularity of apps in the store not only by downloads but also by how often they're executed and whether or not they're pinned onto the start screen.
I'm sure that if Microsoft has the tech to do that, so do the others.
By the fact that the phone logged the light was turned on and off and for investigators went into the phone and found that information. If there is a moral here (other than don't kill people), it's probably to be to turn the ring volume down low on your phone and leave it at home when you're out disposing of the corpse. The low volume is just in case you have to explain why you didn't answer an incoming call.
By the fact that the phone logged the light was turned on and off and for investigators went into the phone and found that information.
I wonder why on earth would the phone log things like that? Just because it can? Some developer has not thought through all the consequences.
The low volume is just in case you have to explain why you didn't answer an incoming call.
My explanation for not answering is usually that the battery was flat and I left the phone hooked to the charger.... but I suspect that this event too would be logged in iPhone (I have a Lumia instead - I wonder how many details that one logs).
Re comment. " My explanation for not answering is usually that the battery was flat and I left the phone hooked to the charger.... but I suspect that this event too would be logged in iPhone"
There was a high profile murder case in Oz recently where a vital piece of evidence was that a smart phone ( can't be arsed looking up what sort) was hooked up to a charger in the wee hours of the morning. So it seems it is logged.
"I wonder why on earth would the phone log things like that? Just because it can? Some developer has not thought through all the consequences."
I just updated some apps on my Galaxy S2. It failed. Not enough storage. Loads of "SD" space and and an installed SD card, but almost no main storage. After deleting lots of smallish non-essential files and generally wandering all over the file system I came across 1.3GB of log files, mainly dmesg files archived by date. 1.3GB?!?!?! WTF?!?!?!
And yes, there is all sorts of crap being logged.
> turn the ring volume down low on your phone and leave it at home
In order of preference:
1. If you have a conspirator who is clean, give it to him and have him do your normal daily routine with it (go shopping, to the gym, whatever).
2. What you suggest, unless it would be very uncharacteristic of you to leave it home like that.
3. Pull out the battery (if it's not removable you're fucked) so that it "loses coverage" without performing a proper sign-off.
3. Pull out the battery (if it's not removable you're fucked) so that it "loses coverage" without performing a proper sign-off.
If the battery is not removable, place the phone inside a microwave oven (switched off), or other faraday cage, to force loss of connection to the network. If microwaves at 850W can't get out, the couple of watts your phone puts out won't either.
> place the phone inside a microwave oven (switched off), or other faraday cage, to force loss of connection to the network.
Well of course if you switch it off it's going to disconnect, no need for a microwave oven there!
Ok, joking aside, I've tried this, and it still gets a signal just fine (GSM and Wifi).
@Loyal Commenter
I'd say fridge works better than a microwave: Tho most of the body of a microwave is metallic, the glass-window is not, it only has a metallic mesh in it, and if I remember correctly the mesh is only supposed to hold back electromagnetic waves that are specific to that microwave, not cell phones.
Alternatively you could probably put it in a microwave and put the microwave into a fridge... ;)
This post has been deleted by its author
If your TV is one of the new really smart ones with a camera (as Intel is proposing) leaving it on may not be such a good idea.
Face it - we are approaching the total surveilance sosciety, next thing we will be sending the marks back in time where a young looper will be waiting for the candidate dead body with a blunderbuss.
How about "I didn't answer because I was in bed"? I'm assuming that body hiding is something best done at an hour when the largest percentage of people will be in bed, like say 3-4am. If someone calls me then, I'm not even looking at my phone to see who it is, I'll reach over and silence the ring, and go back to sleep. If someone died, they'll still be dead in the morning.
...should of phrased it...my room mate is missing and I think "Dave" may of killed them, where is the most likely place he would of dumped the body to avoid it being found.
At least Siri would probably provide an answer rather than getting bogged down with grandma criticism.
"Verizon, Bravo's carrier at the time of the Aguilar's death, has provided information about his phone's whereabouts that the accused him at the location the deceased's body was found. But Bravo's lawyers have asked that evidence not be shown to the jury, arguing that Verizon hasn't properly explained how it obtained and prepared the data."
It's a great system at work that allows valid evidence to be ignored.
Phone Location tracking has reportedly been used in other cases to prove that individuals were at certain areas (either agreeing or disagreeing a claim). Asking for evidence to be omitted because of a lack of technical detail casts a really bad shadow over your defence. I could see it being a valid argument in the case of brand new technology that hasn't been verified as accurate but this sort of thing has been around for a while now.
Indeed, but it provides evidence of increased likelyhood that the owner (who hasn't reported it stolen) is likely to have been there along with the phone. If the owner wasn't with the phone then they'd be expected to give evidence in their testimony of why the phone wasn't in their possession and apparently wondering round the city - if it was with a friend who, if it was stolen then how did they then get it back again.
@Roger
Correct, it couldn't be considered solid evidence in a stand alone manner, but neither does a phone's Flashlight being turned on at a specific time. Try and convict someone on those two facts alone and you'll be laughed out of court.
It does, however, indicate that the phone was present at the burial site at a specific time. As the phone was later found to be in his possession (otherwise they could not have looked through the phone logs to discover Flashlight timestamps) then it would appear that the phone was not stolen.
If he's claiming that he did not visit that area then either: a) he's lying; b) someone else took his phone and went there themselves before returning the phone; c) the phone moved there of its own accord.
@A Non e-mouse
Fair point, it's not been proven to be correct. However, Verizon will have been tracking phones for a number of years. I don't know if they have ever been called to submit their data in court before but other companies have been. While copyright undoubtedly prevents their methods being identical it is doubtful that their whole tracking system is wrong.
asking Siri outrageous questions:
* what is the nearest bank that I can rob ?
* where is my nearest drug dealer ?
* how can I transfer money to ISIS ?
Points awarded on how funny the replies are; a bonus if the cops want to know why you are asking the questions.
"At least he apparently didn't use Apple's Maps. Otherwise the swamp might well have turned out to look like a desert...."
Sigh.
1 the Apple Maps joke is getting old. And Apple Maps _can_ find the way to Raiford quite well. i suspect that m'man is going to be spending a lot of time in a fine state-run establishment there.
2 He's in _Florida_. Only an idiot needs a map to find a swamp or a canal or some other location where it would be easy to get rid of a body. All he'd need to do would be to move in a straight line for a bit, he'd find one. There's a north-south, and fairly small, canal about three-quarters of a mile from me. That one dead-ends into a east-west, and much bigger, canal about a mile south. And _that_ one empties into the Intercoastal Waterway a few miles east. The Intercoastal is deep and wide and suitably weighted bodies won't be easily found. But there's no need to go that far, they just recently found a car in a canal, after nine years... <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2599207/Missing-mans-car-NINE-YEARS-later-canal-near-Florida-home-skeletal-remains-inside.html> It's hard to find stuff in canals around here...
3 He's in _FLORIDA_. If there's a body of water or a swamp in the vicinity, there's a gator, or two, or more, in the vicinity. (As long as it's not salt water, of course. Gators don't like salt water, and while crocs do, there aren't many crocs north of St Lucie County. Mostly American crocs live in Dade, in fact.) Every ever so often there are 'news' stories about people who've forgotten this, and walk their dogs too close to the canal and... oops. Buh-bye, Fluffy. Or who go diving in golf course water traps looking for golf balls and finding Something Else. <http://www.witn.com/home/headlines/Alligator-Eats-Dog-In-Jacksonville-216753881.html> <http://on.aol.com/video/golf-course-staffer-bitten-by-alligator-518340462> And then there are the snapping turtles and the alligator gars and whatnot. They'll usually get rid of the evidence fairly quickly. Getting rid of a body in Florida is... trivial. It ain't like England, where the worst danger is the odd rabid Tory.
However, it seems that this lad really _is_ an idiot. He took his cell phone with him when getting rid of a body. He actually used the cell phone while doing this. And he's hired the most inept lawyers in Florida to defend him. Perhaps he's going to try a 'diminished capacity' defence...
".....there's a gator, or two, or more, in the vicinity....." Apparently, there are even giant constrictors to get rid of the 'gators after they get rid of the body for you (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1006_051006_pythoneatsgator.html). Florida would seem to be a murderer's dream disposal location!
'Evidence was also tendered to the effect that the answers to Bravo's query included suggestions about swamps and reservoirs being fine places to hide a roommate.'
Investigators say that it is unfortunately highly unlikely they will find the body, as attempting to find the location of the swamps and reservoirs on Apple maps has so far proved impossible,
Except it is VERY hard in the modern world to cut up a body without leaving tell-tale residues around the site of the dismembering.
I have done quite some pcr in my time and it is VERY sensitive. There was so much bluescript cloning vector in use in one lab I was in you could PCR it up by simply adding demonised water as a substrate. We had to limit the number of amplification cycles when testing which mice were transgenic and have more than sort of negative control or else all the lanes had bands in them and you were reduced to judging intensity . . .
If you are going to kill someone do it non messily where they live and transport the body to a convenient sinkhole in a vehicle you both have used before. You might, get away with it. Unless someone you didn't see, or a camera saw you, or in your panicked state of mind you too your switched on smartphone with you.
There are so many things to think about when you have killed someone and just one of them is needed to slip your mind and you are banged to right. So best not to go to the killing stage in the first place.
Hmm, must have been some sort of Freudian typo. M is on the same hand but a different finger to I. Might have been some sort of autocorrect I suppose. Deionised is not exactly as common as a word as demonised. My spellchecker suggested demonised instead just then so that is explanation I'm going to go for. Dystonia or other nastier mental degenerations I could name and in some cases describe the genetic or physiological basis for notwithstanding.
Should of paid more attention in chemistry class. See Emilio Koyama in the Breaking Bad pilot. Walter, Jesse and Mike Ehrmantraut, just a bunch of fun loving criminals ..
just switch off your phone and leave it at home when doing something like this - the reason for phone being off is that you ae not welded to the thing and only have it on when you need it..
As for disposal, wrap the bare object in chicken wire, weight it down and dump in a slow river away form paths - with luck it wont come up for a good while, oh and burn the "coverings"
young fellas have no idea these days
PS a very good friend is not somebody who helps you dispose of the body but one that has no idea you might do such a thing and will say so.
One of the DYAC sites has a screenshot of Siri having been asked where to hide a body and the suggestions it comes up with and this is the link to the shot:
http://whysiriwhy.com/post/18951548831/this-could-come-in-handy
So it is entirely possible a friend sent him a link on Facebook to view. It may even be the same link he viewed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
