A serial killer that terrorized Sacramento for decades has been captured by the FBI, and hopefully justice will be served.
The method used by the authorities to capture suspect Joseph James DeAngelo is remarkable: by running a WHOIS on the domain name, IAmTheGoldenStateKiller.com.
In an era that data privacy is lacking, GDPR is arriving to make police work more complicated.
Luckily, the data research on IAmTheGoldenStateKiller.com ownership was completed before May 25th, when how domain registration information is stored and shared will change.
“We caught a hot lead earlier this week when our Google search tool turned up a suspicious URL,” said Sacramento Police chief Daniel Hahn, adding that detectives knew they had stumbled across something big when the website’s homepage loaded a 7-Megabyte, color photo of suspect Joseph James DeAngelo accompanied by a caption indicating that he was indeed the “Golden State Killer.”
(c) The Onion
And now take a deep breath: all this comes from an article published by The Onion.
We aren’t sure if The Onion registered the domain IAmTheGoldenStateKiller.com, or whether it was someone who read The Onion article and decided to have some fun with it.
The domain does not resolve.
