Yes, Probable Cause For Georgia Shooter

WASHINGTON - Sept. 5, 2024 - PRLog -- The suspect in the Georgia school shooting was questioned by police earlier about threats  to shoot up schools, but no action was taken because the 13-year-old denied that he had posted any threats.  Thus the police reportedly concluded that they did not have probable cause to take any further action.

But the mere fact that the young boy denied the claim, despite strong evidence that the threat came from a computer at his home, doesn't mean that the police are helpless because there's no probable cause.

If that was the law, every person found to have child porn on his computer, but denies knowing how it got there, would be free to leave, and not subject to any further investigation, notes public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

The threats in question were posted in an account reportedly associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, but the police appeared stumped because records indicated that the account had been accessed from various locations.

But this sounds like a favorite hacker technique called IP address spoofing or IP address hoping which is used to obscure the user's true location.  It involves sending network traffic that appears to originate from a different IP address than from the hacker's actual location, and sometimes involves transmitting (bouncing) from state to state, or even from country to country.

But skilled investigators should be able to uncover the user's real location through methods like network traffic analysis and digital forensics, says Banzhaf, who says he may be one of the oldest living hackers.

He was also one of the first academics to warn about the danger of Russians hacking our presidential elections, writing as early as August of 2016 that "This Presidential Election Could Be Hacked, Perhaps by a Foreign Power" and "Hacker with Off-the-Shelf Malware Can Steal More Votes Than Any Corrupt Politician." Russian Hackers Used GWU Events, Professors To Influence Election (https://www.valuewalk.com/russian-hackers-influence-elect...)

In addition, he says, the police could have seized any computers in the home, and had experts conduct a digital forensic analysis (using computer forensics) to see if the threats were typed on and sent from it.

Police could also utilize forensic language analysis -  which compares different samples of writing to see if the use similar words, syntax, sentence structure, etc. - to determine if the postings matched documents known to have been created by Gray.

In any event, it seems clear that the Jackson County police should have done more using computer forensics, language analysis, and/or even a more thorough interrogation of the boy, when the threats were first posted; it could have saved four lives, argues Banzhaf.

http://banzhaf.net/   jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com   @profbanzhaf