News.com reports that a wireless hacker was sentenced to 15 months in prison due to the help of some Google searches.
The wireless hacker conducted searches for keyword phrases on “how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ,” “interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz,” “wireless networks 2.4 interference,” and “make device interfere wireless network.”
The court documents do not disclose how this information was retrieved, i.e. via Google subpoena, looking at his browser history on his PC, or tracking his internet usage during the investigation.
Related Topics: Google: Legal | Legal: Privacy | Search & Society: General
I cannot comment on this specific case, but other court cases I have read about were supplied with information retrieved from the violators’ own computers.
Simply clearing your cache, cookies, and history doesn’t completely eliminate the trail of places you have been to. I haven’t looked at the way FireFox works, but I know that Internet Explorer (up through IE 6.0 — have not looked at 7.0) maintains a secondary layer of browser cache files that, in some cases, are virtually impossible to remove without a disk wipe.
That may simply be an unintended feature or perhaps there was some issue with the disk I examined and the files were corrupted.