If you've ever deleted your browser history...

[dpareja]

...you could be put away for twenty years.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/clearing-your-browser-history-can-be-deemed-obstruction-of-justice-in-the-u-s-1.3105222

Next week, a 24-year-old man who knew Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev is scheduled to appear in U.S. Federal Court for sentencing on obstruction of justice charges related to the 2013 attacks.

Khairullozhon Matanov, a former taxi driver, did not participate in or have any prior knowledge of the bombings, according to U.S. authorities.

What could land him 20 more years in prison — where he has been since his arrest — are the charges that he deleted video files from his computer and cleared his browser history in the days following the attacks.

A Grand Jury indictment issued on May 29, 2014, states that Matanov "deleted a large amount of information from his Google Chrome Internet cache" following the bombing, including "references to the video of the suspected bombers [later identified as the Tsarnaevs]," "two of the photographs of the bombers released at approximately the same time," and "a photograph of Officer Sean Collier, who had been allegedly killed by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev."

This whole thing is due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was supposed to allow charges to be brought against corporations that deleted things like incriminating e-mails or shredded incriminating documents. But now it's being used as a way to bring felony charges against people who otherwise haven't done anything to warrant them.

[Tim Cushing] continued that, under Sabanes-Oxley, "U.S. citizens are almost expected to hold onto everything, just in case... and if you've 'destroyed' any data prior to the examination of your electronic devices, you could face felony charges for performing simple computer maintenance."

Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury agreed, telling The Nation that the U.S. government wants and believes it deserves access to all online data for policing purposes.

Speaking about Kernell's case, he said that the government's "underlying theory" is this:

"Don't even think about deleting anything that may be harmful to you, because we may come after you at some point in the future for some unforeseen reason and we want to be able to have access to that data. And if we don't have access to that data, we're going to slap an obstruction charge that has as 20-year maximum on you."

EDIT: Here's the original article from The Nation:

http://m.thenation.com/article/208593-you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history

[Ultimate Paragon]

This is... disquieting.

[niam2023]

This seems totalitarian.

[Sigmaleph]

[mellenORL]

Superb cartoon, Sigmaleph. Thanks.

[Old Viking]

I'm toast.

[RavynousHunter]

Private tabs, bitches, gotta love 'em.

[rookie]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought even if you deleted stiff and cleared your history, it can all still be got. Clearing a browser history might stop Mrs. Rookie or Mama Rookie (from when I was a kid) from finding out what sick depraved pages I was looking at or who I was talking to. But aren't there people who can go back and dig that all back up? Like if there was a crime

[dpareja]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought even if you deleted stiff and cleared your history, it can all still be got. Clearing a browser history might stop Mrs. Rookie or Mama Rookie (from when I was a kid) from finding out what sick depraved pages I was looking at or who I was talking to. But aren't there people who can go back and dig that all back up? Like if there was a crime

One, people are lazy and don't want to do that, and two, it's still destruction of evidence.

[Sigmaleph]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought even if you deleted stiff and cleared your history, it can all still be got. Clearing a browser history might stop Mrs. Rookie or Mama Rookie (from when I was a kid) from finding out what sick depraved pages I was looking at or who I was talking to. But aren't there people who can go back and dig that all back up? Like if there was a crime

Sort of? Recovering deleted information is sometimes possible but sometimes not. There's software that can recover deleted files, but that only works if the information was not written over with new data. It's also supposed to be possible to recover even information that was overwritten if you have access to a scanning tunnelling microscope, but as far as I know that's theoretical.

[RavynousHunter]

It depends on the operating system.  On Windows (this goes all the way back to the DOS days, methinks), deleted files are simply marked by the operating system as free space.  Their entries in the file allocation table (or journal, if you're using NTFS) are still there and can still be read, until they're overwritten.  There's also the chance of the actual data the file held being overwritten by normal OS operation and/or defragging.  If you get to a deleted file early enough, yes, you can retrieve it in its entirety, but if its been a while, then the file is likely unrecoverable.

[rookie]

Ok. My knowledge of this comes from the cop movies where the punk ass  kids are hired by the grizzled crusty old cop. Thanks.