fficers who tracked down a rapist using his Google searches were justified in doing so, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled.
The court on Tuesday refused to overturn the conviction of John Kurtz, who had Googled his target’s home address in order to abduct and rape her in 2016. Initial DNA evidence was unhelpful for the Pennsylvania State Police, which then obtained a “reverse keyword search warrant.”
It took more than a year, but Google finally found someone had conducted two searches for the victim’s address a few hours before the attack. Using that IP address, PSP found Kurtz, whose DNA was then lifted when officers observed him tossing a cigarette butt in a parking lot.
Kurtz appealed the denial of his motion to suppress the Google evidence and his minimum 59-year prison sentence.
“When the average internet user opens an unencrypted internet browser and performs a search on a website such as Google, he or she voluntarily enables the creation and collection of data, and, in such circumstances, has no societally recognized expectation of privacy,” Justice David Wecht wrote.
“For these reasons, Kurtz had no enforceable expectation of privacy in his internet searches. As such, he cannot prevail on a challenge to the validity of the search warrant executed in this case.”
The victim was ambushed after her husband went to work for a midnight shift as a corrections officer by Kurtz, who bound her hands with zip ties, gagged her and blindfolded her. He drove her to a camper where he raped her, then released her in a cornfield.
She found a nearby residence and called police. At a hospital, DNA from her attacker was collected.
Police believed that given the remote location of the victim’s home, the rapist must have targeted the address. They also felt the victim was possibly stalked.
Kurtz, as it turned out, worked with the victim’s husband. During an interrogation, Kurtz admitted to the rape and four others.
Though most of Pennsylvania’s justices found the warrant lawful, Christine Donohue did not. In a lengthy dissenting opinion, she wrote protections in the Pennsylvania Constitution give its citizens a reasonable expectation of privacy while Googling.
“Here,” she wrote, “the only links between the facts provided in the affidavit or probable cause and Google’s search engines were wholly conclusory assumptions about the ubiquity of search engines. Probable cause demands more.”
