How I almost got a Criminal Record

My very first thought was do NOT go to the police station without a lawyer. Nothing good can come out of talking to the police (or anyone else) without legal counsel when you are the accused.<p>This video lecture by officer George Bruch really opened my eyes:<p><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6014022229458915912#" rel="nofollow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6014022229458915912#</a>

Same thing happend to a german professor in 2008, where they also accidentialy swapped IP numbers. The accusation was child pornography, the news got hold of it and, of course, his reputation was deeply damaged.<p>Original german article: <a href="http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Unschuldig-unter-Verdacht-291506.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Unschuldig-unter-Verdacht-291...</a><p>and translation: <a href="http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&#38;prev=_t&#38;hl=de&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;layout=2&#38;eotf=1&#38;sl=de&#38;tl=en&#38;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FUnschuldig-unter-Verdacht-291506.html" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&#38;prev=_t&#38;hl...</a>

Anyone else impressed that the police are actually taking this kind of thing seriously? How many stories do you read about "xx got laptop stolen and police won't do anything" - here it's hacking, and police got involved.

Ouch. That'd be a very Kafkaesque situation to be in. You know you didn't do anything, but they claim to have your IP in the offending logs. Luckily, it sorted itself out.<p>This is really scary. With the little the police knows about IT, there's no way you could prove yourself innocent... even in the case of an accident like this.<p>I don't even want to think about cases where hackers would plant an IP address in the logs on purpose to get someone into jail.

There are places where it's a criminal offense to go deface some person's facebook?<p>First reaction: AWESOME. I won't see any spam about that in the feed (which I rarely view anyway).<p>Second thought: This cannot end well. It's so easy to spoof stuff that a lot of innocent people will have to deal with similar situations before the law gets repealed (if it gets repealed, most likely it'd just stop being enforced).<p>Unfortunately, most people would never think about how bad it could end, just about how people won't be annoying them on facebook.

When I began reading the story, I was worried it would be about a NAT problem (since it involved his phone).<p>While I'm glad this guy got his situation cleared so easily, I wonder how you would defend yourself in this situation. Police ask telecom, "who has this address?" Telecom says: "this person has that address" (while failing to mention who else has that address). How would you refute such charges, since it would be true that you did have that ip address in this hypothetical situation?

How did they get the police to actually act over a facebook account hack? Someone deleted a good 30,000 entries on my mySQL DB - I'd like to press charges for that.

&#62; So, should you ever get into a situation where you are wrongfully suspected, make sure to let people know that there is a possibility of an error, even if they tell you otherwise.<p>Isn't this sort of obvious? If I'm charged with a crime I know I didn't commit, of course I'm going to tell them there's been a mistake.