A little known law could land you up to 20 years behind bars for deleting your browser history or other potentially incriminating evidence should you ever be involved in a federal investigation.
Friend of the Boston bombers, 24-year-old former cab driver Khairullozhon Matanov, had dinner with the Tsarnaev brothers the night of the Boston bombings in 2013. A few days later, Matanov recognized pictures of his friends on the news as suspects from the bombing. Matanov went to the local police and told them he knew who the suspects were and that he had had dinner with them that week.
What Matanov didn’t tell the police was exactly when he’d first seen the pictures of his friends labeled as suspects, details about Tamerlan Tsarnaev that he knew, including that they had prayed together, and whose idea it was for the three of them to have dinner the night of the bombings.
It is unclear why he lied about the little details of his relationship with the brothers that could so easily have been proven wrong. It is possible that it was an effort to distance himself from his friends who were under heavy investigation, or that he may have had more insidious motivations.
Regardless – the nail in Matanov’s proverbial coffin was sealed when he later went home and deleted his internet browser history.
One year later, Matanov was arrested and indicted on four counts of obstruction of justice. Three counts had to do with his lies and the fourth was for destroying evidence with intent to obstruct a federal investigation – a.k.a when he deleted his internet history and videos on his computer. Prosecutors took this as an implication that he had sympathies towards the Tsarnaevs’ terrorist motives.
According to The Nation, Matanov, though he was not accused of having known about the bombings or having anything to do with them, faced up to 20 years maximum for the last count alone, which dealt with the destruction of records, under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Martanov plead guilty in March 2015. Though he maintains the innocence behind his actions, he told the judge he feared the potential prison sentence and settled for a 30-month sentence instead.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted under Congress following the Enron scandal in 2002 to deter corporations from destroying documents that may incriminate them in a federal investigation.
Though the law mainly mentions public corporations in its verbiage, out of the eleven sections there are also provisions covering private companies. By some definitions, that can mean private citizens, as well.
The troubling part about this law — and the one that prosecutors used to indict Matanov with — is that federal prosecutors do not have to prove that the person knew an investigation was underway or that what they deleted or removed would be evidence in said investigation.
The broad usage of this law leaves many gray areas and sets a concerning precedent in a world that is becoming increasingly digital by the day. The privacy of people and corporations’ digital data is what is being contested and – as it would seem from the implications of this law and Matanov’s case – is not fully protected.
Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Nation that the underlying message of the government’s enforcement of this law and others that impeded on private citizen’s digital data is:
If the part of Fakhoury’s statement about surveillance and access for an “unforeseen reason” sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
All of the recent debate surrounding the Patriot Act is similar in that the two main players are the government and the people and the concern is what is often considered private digital data.
It seems that the things we do online – the way we communicate through technology and store private information – are in largely uncharted waters legally. As the realities of laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and the Patriot Act begin to play out in real life cases, people are questioning how far is too far when it comes to digital surveillance and privacy. Laws may have to be re-examined to strike a balance between a Big Brother government and dutiful security measures.
