"What would it tell me about you if we could look up your Google searches over the past year?" asked Ovie Carroll, director of the Cybercrime Lab at the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Being able to look up someone's Google searches is like sliding open the door into their most private thoughts.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Every time we check our phones, log into our email, swipe a loyalty or credit card, or use a wireless fitness tracker, we produce a bit of data. And all that data, combined with all the other morsels of information we leave around our homes, offices, or along our daily commutes, generates a veritable - and trackable - trail of information that most people don't even realize they're producing.
But someone who knows how to unearth that data, and has the ability to connect the dots, or even access what we've "secretly" stored in the cloud, can discover more details about our behavior and private lives than we can imagine.
That's what makes Ovie Carroll's job as director of the Cybercrime Lab at the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, both easier than ever and nearly impossible.
Easier because people are producing more digital fingerprints than ever before. And harder because the sheer volume of what's being generated, multiplied times the number of people producing it, is almost unfathomable.
During a presentation for federal judges, attorneys, and others about the future of digital evidence at the recent Federal Bar Association's convention in Cleveland, Carroll shared how much the internet and interconnectivity have changed criminal investigations.
"We are living in a digital world," Carroll told the audience, and the ability to identify, preserve and analyze data has never been more critical.
Consider the fact that 8 zettabytes of data were created or replicated worldwide in 2015. If a gigabyte is like the information on a stack of paper 1,000 feet tall, and a terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes, a zettabyte is like a stack of papers 1.66 trillion miles high, or 226 round trips from the Sun to Pluto.
Three billion computers and 6 billion phones in the world have changed everything about the way we the way we communicate, as well as how we live and socialize, he said.
A whopping 1.65 billion people are now using Facebook; and spending about 19.7 hours a month updating their Facebook statuses. On Twitter, people are sending 500 million twitter messages a day, all of which are still being catalogued by the Library of Congress.
"There's something about the Internet that gives us a sense of anonymity, because we say and do things we would not ever do in public," Carroll said.
For example, people launched 15 million Google searches a month in 1999. But last month alone, the number of Google searches ballooned to 106,127,500,000.
"What would it tell me about you if we could look up your Google searches over the past year?" he asked. Being able to look up someone's Google searches is like sliding open the door into their most private thoughts.
In some cases, investigators have found, aspiring criminals actually research what they're about to do before they do it. After they've done it, they keep searching Google for it, to see if the police know what they did or if the media have found out about it. Sometimes, they try to become their own attorneys and type in "What crime did I commit when I..."
One of the greatest collectors of data is our smart phones. Carroll pulled out his iPhone and showed how under Settings, Privacy, and Frequent Locations, his phone had been keeping track of all the places he frequents, recent trips he had made, even the hotels he had stayed at, and the restaurants he had eaten in.
When someone in the audience called out, "But what about 'Clear history'?" Carroll replied that even deleting something never makes it entirely disappear. "It just makes you feel better," he said, as the audience members laughed.
"How long dies it keep that info? Forever. The never-ending goal of every aspect of the internet is to collect, analyze, manipulate, and monetize our behavior," he said. He showed an advertisement for new Under Armor running shoe that has location devices embedded inside the soles. "This is awesome," he told his bosses at the Department of Justice's Computer Crime Lab. "We should get this shoe!"
"Everybody who's making anything is strapping sensors to it," he said. He's even seen sports bras that monitor the wearer's temperature, heart rate, and intensity of workouts.
Someone -- Carroll is convinced it was a lawyer -- discovered that the user agreement that came with his Samsung smart TV mentions that its smart TVs record your living room chatter. The more people use web-based email accounts, and the more they synchronize their electronic devices, the more digital evidence they leave behind for investigators.
He says his Amazon Echo, a voice-activated all-in-one controller that lets him check the weather and traffic, turn off the lights, or turn up the thermostat, "remembers every command I ever gave it."
A new wrinkle in cybercrime investigation is online file storage, which gives users the ability to store data beyond the memory on their phones. Investigators once asked Yahoo to freeze the contents of an email account until they could get a search warrant. Within three days of their request, someone from an IP address from China had asked the server to delete 986 emails from that very account.
The average computer has 6 gigabytes of short-term memory, roughly equal to a stack of paper 6,000 feet high. That memory not only captures evidence, but user attribution, he said.
"How many people have heard about Google analytics?" he asked. "Google analytics is running on 50 percent of the websites in the world." That means that every time you log onto a device, it takes a digital snapshot of website you looked at, what browser you used to get there, the first time you logged on to that site, the second-from-the-last time you logged on, and your most recent visit.
All of which provides "significantly more digital evidence about our activity," he said. Combine those details with the size of hard drives in modern computers, and that's even more data that anyone imagined, available to anyone conducting a full, forensic analysis of that computer.
He compared it to the leaving his fingerprints on the podium in the banquet hall, arriving with pet hairs on his suit, or going home with carpet fibers in his shoe. The more we inadvertently tell our devices, the more evidence we leave behind about when and where we've been, he said.