Can messages in messaging application be used as evidence to accuse someone? For domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking, abusive partners can misuse messaging to harass, intimidate, and threaten. How significant is evidence of messages in a messaging application (like WhatsApp) considered in this case, assuming there is little to no other circumstantial evidence? I am a computer science researcher and studying the deniability property of messaging applications. The deniability property of messaging ensures that if Alice and Bob communicate over messaging applications, neither of them can prove cryptographically to a third-party who sent which message. Both parties can forge each other's messages without leaving any trace. For my research, I am trying to understand if the messaging applications are being used as evidence and to what extent. Could it be possible to put a false accusation on someone just based on the messaging application? And how do cyber law specific to this differ from state to state? Any pointers to other resources would be helpful too.
united-states Messaging (and other online communication) are fixed media. A face-to-face conversation, or a telephone call, does not exist at all - except in the mental recollections of the participants. And those are always very problematic as evidence, because people's recall is inaccurate. Whereas communication in a fixed medium is durable: a newspaper, a sound recording, security camera footage. It stands on its own and can be examined by experts. What catches a lot of people off guard about the Internet is they are mostly fixed media. Prior to the Internet, investigation of harassment almost entirely depended on anecdotal evidence. It was difficult to prosecute cases which were entirely based on the victim's word. The closest any of this came to objective evidence was a polygraph, and that wasn't reliable. Of course we want bona-fide victims protected, but what keeps a malicious actor from putting someone else in jail with words alone? Now with the Internet, much of the evidence is rendered in fixed media. This is a &quot;breath of fresh air&quot; for such prosecutions! However, just like any other physical evidence, it must be brought into evidence by the testimony of persons, and that testimony gets to be cross-examined. And this is where your concerns about provenance get addressed. A party will assert that the messages are forged, and that will be examined. The validity of evidence is itself on trial. There are two evaluations: first whether the evidence is even valid enough to present to a jury, and evidence that makes the cut is then examined and cross-examined in front of the jury. Keep in mind that contrary to TV drama, there's no &quot;surprise evidence&quot;. Almost any evidence - and certainly ALL evidence in a fixed medium - must be shared with the other party long before trial. Pre-trial, it will be challenged, the phone/device subpoenaed and turned over to experts for analysis. If it is evident that the party &quot;has conveniently deleted or lost&quot; the material, the evidence will be thrown out. And if the party is proven to have falsified the data, they're in much worse shape. A lot of chat services keep chat logs on the server/cloud, in the clear. Getting those is as easy as subpoenaing them, and that will be a canonical answer because the ISP would have no reason to lie. For a service where chat logs are kept in the clear only by individuals who choose to keep them, then &quot;reading those logs into evidence&quot; will involve a cross-examination of the parties involved as to their honesty and motivations. I don't know what and how WhatsApp stores when they log chats, so I don't know if there's any cryptographic information there that could be authenticated. But certainly if &quot;he&quot; presents one chat log, and &quot;she&quot; presents a different chat log, then we're clear around to &quot;he said, she said&quot;. But all of it together can be examined. For instance, linguists can look at other chats, discern the writing styles of each party, and then look at the disputed lines and examine who is more likely to have written those. And they give testimony on that. So it is evidence, but it gets two rounds of possible challenge: First as to whether the evidence is reliable enough to even present to the jury, and then experts testifying in front of the jury their opinion of its reliability.
Surely such a well meaning albeit naive driver wouldn't stand a chance in court if they said that it's because they've a section 230-like protection. Because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act explicitly protects computer service providers from such charges. A driver is not a computer service provider, and the US legislature has never voted to offer similar protection to drivers picking up hitchhikers. You say that an email can easily be classified as fraudulent, but that's not true. Spam detection has gotten pretty sophisticated, but they still get plenty of false positives. They were a lot less sophisticated back in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act was passed.
Police continue to investigate Following an acquittal, there are two possible positions for the police: they are certain the acquitted person performed the act but they were not guilty (for all sorts of reasons). The investigation is closed because although the police know who did it, there was no criminality due to the not guilty verdict. The evidence in the court shows that the accused did not commit the act. Ergo, someone else did. The police will keep looking for that someone else. Note that the proposed scenario is highly dangerous for you. First, the exculpatory evidence may be inadmissible, particularly if it is an alibi (see Can I surprise the prosecution with an alibi defense at trial?). To rely on an an alibi defence, it must be raised with the prosecution before the trial. You would have to have said that you were where the phone footage was shot before the trial starts and the police may have therefore discounted you as a suspect from the get go. Second, you are now committing a crime, usually called an attempt to pervert the course of justice and this action may also make you an accomplice to the murder after the fact. You beat the rap on the murder and then spend a lot of time in prison for those two.
Recording other people without consent is a crime (§ 201 StGB). But so is threatening other people with violence (§ 241 StGB). Secret recordings and other acts can still be legitimate if they are necessary and appropriate to deflect harm (§ 34 StGB), similar to how hurting someone can be legitimate if you're acting in self-defense. If you're prosecuted for this, it will be up to the court to determine if your act was necessary and proportionate. But regardless of what you did, your recording can be used as evidence against the ex-roommate. German criminal law does not generally exclude illegally acquired evidence. The main risk of disclosing this recording is that you are also providing evidence against yourself for possible wiretapping charges (which may or may not be punishable as discussed above).
It depends on what is of evidence for. Normally, any newspaper, be it &quot;tabloid&quot; or &quot;respected&quot; or even the jurisdiction's &quot;paper of record&quot; would be considered hearsay; instead the source of the newspaper story should be called to testify instead. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this, beyond normal hearsay exceptions, which basically boil down to when a certain thing being published is, in fact, the information being entered into evidence. For example, in certain circumstances, the courts may accept &quot;service by publication&quot; for certain notices. An instance of this publication would be evidence that service by publication was carried out. Another example, your link is to a lawsuit concerning defamation; defamation requires proving that the damaging falsehood was transmitted to a third party. So entering into evidence a tabloid that publishes such a damaging falsehood is evidence that it was transmitted to a third party (namely, the public).
If you wrote for example "I had thoughts about taking the axe from my garage and decapitating my neighbour", and your neighbour read that, he would reasonably be worried and contact the police. I would take that as a death threat, and the death threat is by itself illegal. There would be some range where I could claim that you were making a death threat and making excuses to avoid legal responsibility. You can have all the thoughs you like, you can write them into your private diary where nobody can read them, but as soon as you publish it, it becomes "speech" and some speech is illegal.
Child Sexual abuse - can you jail person just based on what child said? Under U.S. law, yes. There is no proof whatsoever about this, no facts, or witnesses Testimony of a witness is evidence. There is a witness, the child, and another witness, the psychologist, who heard the child and testified. Those are facts and witnesses. Assuming that an exception to the hearsay rule and confrontation clause can be secured (which it certainly can for purposes of a probable cause determination to make an arrest and sometimes can and sometimes can't for purposes of a conviction), what the child said can be presented through the psychologist, which is admissible evidence. The fact that something was said by a child does not make it not evidence, nor does it make it inadmissible. The rules governing when hearsay is admissible as evidence are arcane at best and very circumstance dependent. A jury can choose to believe that any particular item of evidence is sufficiently credible to constitute proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Credibility and weight are for a jury, not for the judge and not for an appellate court.
The Radiocommunications Agency (now OFCOM) issued some guidance about this in 2001. The specific offence is defined by s5 Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949: Any person who ... uses any wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message (whether sent by means of wireless telegraphy or not) of which neither the person using the apparatus nor a person on whose behalf he is acting is an intended recipient ... shall be guilty of an offence under this Act. It's also an offence under s5(1)(b)(ii) to disclose the contents of any such message, so the reception and disclosure of radio messages not sent by or addressed to you are both offences. I don't know if there have been any successful prosecutions specifically for monitoring aircraft communications. I doubt whether a hobbyist listening for his own enjoyment would attract the attention of the authorities, but if he started to publish recordings of the traffic then that might well do it.