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Cell phone and social media forensics cracked the Steubenville rape case
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: October 23, 2015
Old-fashioned police work merged with the most modern computer forensics to solve one of the most infamous crimes in southern Ohio history.
Two primary investigators in the case, Jean-Phillip Rigaud, currently a special agent in the Ohio Attorney General’s office, but at the time a detective for the Steubenville Police Department and JoAnn Gibb, a computer forensic specialist for the OAG’s office who works closely with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), and who cracked the cell phone data, recently presented their inside view of the nationally notorious case at a Community Legal Aid conference held recently in Kent.
Entitled Utilizing Technology to Improve Assistance to Victims, the conference was evenly divided among attorneys and social workers and other professionals in the field, and attracted participants from across the state of Ohio.
After the main presentation by Rigaud and Gibb, the participants also had the opportunity to attend two breakout sessions—one for attorneys led by Jennifer Dave of the Stark County prosecutor’s office and one for people working in victims’ assistance led by Jennifer van Dulmen, managing attorney of Community Legal Aid.
On Aug. 12, 2012, in the early morning hours, a very intoxicated 16-year-old girl from across the Ohio River in Weirton, West Virginia was raped in Steubenville, Ohio, by two 16-year-old students of Steubenville High School.
The case gained national notoriety when the socio-political underpinnings of the case dragged numerous commentators and other parties, including the hacktivist groups Anonymous and Knightsec, into a protracted national discussion.
Rigaud and Gibb’s presentation, called “Sexting and Texting: The Manual From Lessons Learned,” however, concentrated on how the crime was actually solved, an effort that combined thousands of hours of “gumshoe” police investigation and victim assistance with extensive forensics of every media in which high school students communicate—including texting, emails, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, voicemail and more.
“More and more through the years, “Rigaud said during the opening of his presentation, “cases are evolving into the uses of technology.”
Rigaud was the detective who took the initial intake information from the victim and her family. That information, he said, included cell phone data (although the victim’s phone had disappeared), texts, tweets, screen shots, Instagram posts, and “a couple of photographs,” which he displayed.
After a brief beginning look into the events, Rigaud said, the victim’s family asked the police department to stop the investigation. Rigaud demurred, saying that, “by that point, we just had too much information to let the case go.”
The information he was talking about was much more than just witness statements. It included video postings on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that were making their way around the world, while the police in Ohio could only look on in amazement as the case took on an online life of its own.
Rigaud showed the first few minutes of the most infamous (and disturbing) YouTube video, shot in a basement, not of the rape itself, but of several high schoolers discussing it after the fact.
In addition to social media (which Rigaud called “a frenemy”), the police confiscated a total of 17 smartphones. “Cell phones,” she said, “are treasure troves of information.”
What information can be obtained from a cell phone? According to Gibb, it can be massive, including call history, chats and IM’s, texts (SMS and MMS), geo coding (of photos and videos) contacts, videos, GPS locations, attachments, pictures, internet browser history, voice recordings and call history.
The phones were sent to BCI, and subsequently to Gibb, who said that she was “overwhelmed” by them. Search warrants were also served on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to varying degrees of success. The victim, said Rigaud, “had to remove herself from all social media” because of the publicity.
Gibb’s specialty within BCI has become cell phone forensics she said and has even gone as far as taking FBI training in the field.
During her presentation, Gibb gave a short lesson on how cell phones can be cracked. “Encryption is a big problem,” she said.
Getting data from a smartphone is easy with permission but without it iPhones are encrypted to an extent that they cannot be cracked under any circumstances—including by Apple. Androids are easy, she said.
Each phone took “two to three days to open up and go through all the data,” she said.
Her forensics led to data amounting to 362,000 texts, 14,000 pieces of multimedia and “thousands of pictures, videos and phone calls,” said Gibb. She read texts for four hours straight on the witness stand.
Other social media data was subpoenaed and made its way into trial, including one Facebook report that stretched to 39,000 PDF pages, said Gibb.
In all, she said over 1 terabyte of data was used to solve and prove the case.
Riguad said one upsetting aspect of the investigation was the intrusion of the hacktivist groups, who hacked the Steubenville football team website and told the police about data that the groups had that could contribute to the case.
“We didn’t need their help,” said Rigaud. “We already had everything they said that they had.” When asked after the presentation what it was like dealing with Anonymous, Rigaud said that it was “scary. You have no idea who those people are or what they can do.”
Riguad said the 24-hour media attention on the investigation was also difficult that “we didn’t handle the media very well.” Nobody in a small town like Steubenville is trained to deal with that level of media attention, he said.
The two boys were eventually convicted of the rape in juvenile court. Riguad said they are now out of jail but much of the public data, especially on YouTube and other social media, is still out there.
Jennifer Dave’s workshop for attorneys concentrated primarily on recent developments in Rules of Evidence 104 (A) and (B) and 401 and 402, which concern relevancy of evidence.
“E-evidence is our future,” she said in opening the workshop.
From the prosecutor’s perspective, she said, social media has been a resource since “around 2004. People are pretty vain, and will put a lot of personal information, including criminal behavior, into their social media.”
However, she also said that Facebook itself was “not very cooperative” when asked for data on their users.
The primary leading case on social media relevancy in all courts, she said, is Lorraine v. Markel American Insurance Co., 241 F.R.D. 534 (D. Md. 2007), which divides questions of relevancy into issues of “high standards” and authenticity.
“Courts are often intimidated by this evidence,” Dave said. “But this is going to be the future.”