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Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

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Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#2
Reminds me of the Maury Travis case. Documented in the Forensic Files episode "X Marks the Spot". "Shear Luck" is another memorable episode about a suspect who cut up a floppy disk containing evidence.

Edit: Just remembered the episodes "Ticker Tape" and "Hack Attack", which are of a similar theme.

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#5
I am trying to understand how it is possible to filter all IP activity for such a (broad) search term. As opposed to say superbowl livestream.

They only looked at requests sent to YouTube? Doesn't YouTube use https by default?

Did they do a simple YouTube search for 'Tom and Jerry' note down the full URLs for first two pages of search results... and look for those in the ISP logs?

DNS lookups only show "www.youtube.com" but not the VideoID or full URL I presume. So ISPs must be logging all URLs being visited by all their users?

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#6

What surprised me the most was 26,000 people watched Tom and Jerry between 7:30pm and 6:30am on some website. That’s a lot more than I would have expected.

I am guessing there must be some multiplier .. like hits to a CDN in parallel / pre-fetch a few seconds of video for each of the 10-20 videos on a search page.

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#7

I just assume stories like this are parallel construction. edit: Indeed, they even admit this is not what they used to track them down.

Indeed, if I was in LE I would not give away my signature tells.

The argument is our course: is public safety more important than data privacy?

Nobody AFAICT is honestly running those numbers. Probably because it would require cross-agency number gathering and the end result is potentially that agencies lose some magic powers.

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#8
post #5

I am trying to understand how it is possible to filter all IP activity for such a (broad) search term. As opposed to say superbowl livestream. They only looked at requests sent to YouTube? Doesn't YouTube use https by default? Did they do a simple YouTube search for 'Tom and Jerry' note down the full URLs for first two pages of search results... and look for those in the ISP logs? DNS lookups only show "www.youtube.c…

They said they were able to identify the specific video that the child watched.

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#9
post #5

I am trying to understand how it is possible to filter all IP activity for such a (broad) search term. As opposed to say superbowl livestream. They only looked at requests sent to YouTube? Doesn't YouTube use https by default? Did they do a simple YouTube search for 'Tom and Jerry' note down the full URLs for first two pages of search results... and look for those in the ISP logs? DNS lookups only show "www.youtube.c…

India's encryption laws require service providers to allow law enforcement to intercept, monitor and trace encrypted traffic. Encryption within India is limited by law to weak forms.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/indias-draconian-rules...

Re: Child abduction case: Tom and Jerry cartoons helped police identify suspects

#10

What surprised me the most was 26,000 people watched Tom and Jerry between 7:30pm and 6:30am on some website. That’s a lot more than I would have expected.

It's been a couple of decades but when I spent time in India as a kid, Tom and Jerry was a popular cartoon on TV.
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