Palisades Fire Suspect's Chatgpt History to Be Used as Evidence

If you want real and total anonymous search, use a public computer.

As I understand it, some people treat chatgpt like a close personal friend and therapist. Confiding their deepest secrets and things like that.

There is text input and text output it's really not that complicated

If used in court the jury would be given access to the full conversation just like if it was an email thread

I'm sure that there are many people who thoughtlessly type very personal things into chatgpt including things that might not look so good for them if they came out at trial.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20251008204636/https://www.rolli...

We’ve long ago entered a reality where almost everyone has a device on them that can track their exact location all the time and keeps a log of all their connections, interests and experiences. If a crime occurs at a location police can now theoretically see everyone who was in the vicinity, or who researched methods of committing a crime, etc. It’s hard to balance personal freedoms with justice, especially when those who execute on that balance have a monopoly on violence and can at times operate without public review. I think it’s the power differential that makes the debate and advocacy for clearer privacy protection more practical.

As a naturally curious person, who reads a lot and looks up a lot of things, I've learned to be cautious when talking to regular people.

While considering buying a house I did extensive research about fires. To do my job, I often read about computer security, data exfiltration, hackers and ransomware.

If I watch a WWI documentary, I'll end up reading about mustard gas and trench foot and how to aim artillery afterwards. If I read a sci-fi novel about a lab leak virus, I'll end up researching how real virus safety works and about bioterrorism. If I listen to a podcast about psychedelic-assisted therapy, I'll end up researching how drugs work and how they were discovered.

If I'm ever accused of a crime, of almost any variety or circumstance, I'm sure that prosecutors would be able to find suspicious searches related to it in my history. And then leaked out to the press or mentioned to the jury as just a vague "suspect had searches related to..."

The average juror, or the average person who's just scrolling past a headline, could pretty trivially be convinced that my search history is nefarious for almost any accusation.

1. How wide is the search net dragged?

2. Who can ask for access?

The first shows up in court cases about things like "which phones were near the crime" or "who in the area was talking about forest fires to ChatGPT?" If you sweep the net far enough, everyone can be put under suspicion for something.

A fun example of the second from a few years ago in the New York area was toll records being accessed to prove affairs. While most of us are OK with detectives investigating murders getting access to private information, having to turn it over to our exes is more questionable. (And the more personal the information, the less we are OK with it.)

The modern abuse of the third-party doctrine is a different topic. Modern usage of the third-party doctrine claims (for instance) that emails sent and received via Gmail are actually Google's property and thus they can serve Google a warrant in order to access anyone's emails. The old-timey equivalent would be that the police could subpoena the post office to get the contents of my (past) letters -- this is something that would've been considered inconceivably illegal a few decades ago, but because of technical details of the design of the internet, we have ended up in this situation. Of course, the fact there are these choke points you can subpoena is very useful to the mass surveillance crowd (which is why these topics get linked -- people forget that many of these mass surveillance programs do have rubber-stamped court orders to claim that there is some legal basis for wiretapping hundreds of millions of people without probable cause).

In addition (in the US) the 5th amendment allows you the right to not be witness against yourself, and this has been found to apply to certain kinds of requests for documents. However, because of the third-party doctrine you cannot exercise those rights because you are not being asked to produce those documents.

In the past, if you put evidence in a safe and refused to open it, the police could crack it, drill it, cut it open, etc. if all else failed.

Modern technology allows wide access to the equivalent of a perfectly impregnable safe. If the police get a warrant for your files, but your files fundamentally cannot be read without your cooperation, what then?

It comes down to three options: accept this possibility and do without the evidence; make it legally required to unlock the files, with a punishment at least as severe as you're facing for the actual crime; or outlaw impregnable safes.

There doesn't seem to be any consensus yet about which approach is correct. We see all three in action in various places.

Talking to an LLM like a human is like talking to a mirror. You're just shaping their responses based on what you say. Quite sad to see stuff like the "myboyfriendisai" reddit

That seems clear cut first degree murder to me, as I understand it (I'm not sure if it requires a specific person to be murdered but a pre-meditated act that kills people seems like it'd qualify to me).

Liability would still be on him.

You may find the "Thin skull rule" interesting for criminal liability

1. I engaged with Gemini.

2. I found the results wanting, and pasted them into comment threads elsewhere on the internet, observing that they tended to support the common criticism of LLMs as being "meaning-blind".

3. Later, I went back and viewed the "history" of my "saved" session.

4. My prompts were not changed, but the responses from Gemini were different. Because of the comment threads, it was easy for me to verify that I was remembering the original exchange correctly and Google was indulging in some revision of history.

This is all pet theories and silliness for purposes of discussion. I freely admit that I haven't built a case here that's strong enough to withstand even a gentle poking by an opponent.

I don't know as much about arson but I did go through the same serial killer phase as every morose teen and one of the things that stuck with me is the way that some offenders escalate from simple peeping and stalking all the way up to murder. Another thing that stuck with me is how in some cases when there is an intended victim, esp for revenge, an obsessed mind will often hone in on a single characteristic of the intended victim then transfer victimhood to strangers based on that characteristic. The woman who "wronged" you is a skinny blonde who smokes cigarettes so you go out looking for skinny blondes who smoke cigarettes to victimize in her stead because in your unconscious brain that matches the pattern of behavior that would soothe the wounded entitlement of the offender. Given these facts about the nature of obsessive, vengeance-oriented crime and the fact that the serial killer/arsonist crossover is so common that arson is one of the mcdonald triad of behaviors common to serial killers there's a non-zero possibility that we're seeing a revenge fantasy transferred to another victim. There's also the fact that obsessed criminals tend to want to roleplay or practice and a lot of times their first "serious" crime is one of these roleplay/practice sessions getting out of control. This feels like that to me though I can't prove it. It's like he wanted to see what starting a fire would be like, assumed that the local VFD would get it under control and in doing so would also give him an idea of what the response looked like so he could optimize for escape, then either it got out of control or he tried to inject himself into the emergency response (another common thing among obsessed criminals, many like to relive the crime by being part of the investigation, like to tease investigators by being right under their nose or believe that by injecting themselves into the investigation they can steer it away from them).

Again, does any of this hold up in a court of law? Of course not. Does it hold up in a court of a thread on a post on HN? Maybe, we're here to talk and I'm of a mind that we didn't do anything to fix w/e it was that made people serial killers but there aren't really any serial killers anymore so something must have happened to that behavior. Perhaps stranger arson is a way that the same drivers that led to serial murder before the ~~panopticon~~internet are driving new behaviors now. Intuitively I'm highly confident that the stranger spree killings we see now are driven by those same pressures in a lot of perpetrators and the change in MO is about taking advantage of lag time in law enforcement's ability to correlate facts. Before the internet you could drive a few hours' down the road and start using a new name and unless your old name was already in the system there was basically no way for anyone to know. Obsessed criminals could offend, disappear and wait it out. Nowadays we're really good at ID'ing an offender so obsessive murders have to be one and done, but another strategy could be crimes that are small enough that they don't trigger the kind of dragnet response that involves things like checking all the CCTV cameras in a ten mile circle around the crime and things like that.

edit: everyone seems focused on the "serial killer phase" line that was really intended to be a throwaway. I just mean that I read a lot about them and thought it was shocking and cool to have a "favorite". Gross shit, but I assure you no one was ever in any amount of physical or psychic danger beyond declaring me a pizza cutter (all edge and no real point).