'Search Everyone First?' Lawyers Challenge Use of Warrants to Find Google Searchers (yahoo.com) 125
Bloomberg reports:
After five people were killed in a 2020 arson in Colorado, law enforcement officials failed to turn up any leads through their initial investigative techniques. So they served a warrant to Google for anyone who had searched for the address of the fire, according to a court motion.
Google eventually complied with the data request, helping law enforcement find suspects. Three teenagers who had searched the address were charged with murder. But the technique also drew a challenge from defense lawyers, who are calling reverse keyword search warrants "a digital dragnet of immense proportions." It's the first case to challenge the constitutionality of the method, the attorneys say.
Defense lawyers filed a motion Wednesday to challenge the judge's decision to use evidence from the warrant to charge their client, Gavin Seymour. They're asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the matter, after the judge earlier denied their motion to suppress the evidence. The keyword search warrant "is profoundly different from traditional search warrants seeking data belonging to a suspect," the defense argued in the court filing. "Instead, the process operates in reverse — search everyone first, and identify suspects later."
One defendant's lawyer points out Google must review the activities of billions of innocent searchers to respond to keyword search warrants, arguing this has "tremendous implications...for everyone in the country who uses Google to run searches."
Google eventually complied with the data request, helping law enforcement find suspects. Three teenagers who had searched the address were charged with murder. But the technique also drew a challenge from defense lawyers, who are calling reverse keyword search warrants "a digital dragnet of immense proportions." It's the first case to challenge the constitutionality of the method, the attorneys say.
Defense lawyers filed a motion Wednesday to challenge the judge's decision to use evidence from the warrant to charge their client, Gavin Seymour. They're asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the matter, after the judge earlier denied their motion to suppress the evidence. The keyword search warrant "is profoundly different from traditional search warrants seeking data belonging to a suspect," the defense argued in the court filing. "Instead, the process operates in reverse — search everyone first, and identify suspects later."
One defendant's lawyer points out Google must review the activities of billions of innocent searchers to respond to keyword search warrants, arguing this has "tremendous implications...for everyone in the country who uses Google to run searches."
Maybe don't (Score:5, Interesting)
use a search engine where you are logged in? duckduckgo and brave will get you results without worry of being caught up in a dragnet.
Imagine a scenario where you are trying to remember the name of a street, so you google for the donut shop that you know is on that street, and then the next day there's a robbery at the shop, and suddenly you're being hauled in for questioning. This wouldn't have happened if you had used a different search engine.
Re:Maybe don't (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Maybe don't (Score:5, Funny)
use a search engine where you are logged in? duckduckgo and brave will get you results without worry of being caught up in a dragnet.
Exactly! I only use duckduckgo for all my arson location searches. ;)
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In that case you should be safe, since nobody uses bing [bleepingcomputer.com].
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Well, most criminals in this level are stupid. The smarter ones become politicians or bankers.
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They aren't smart enough to fool people who are paying attention, so they have to fool Republicans, who can be counted on to look the other way so long as they make the right angry noises.
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When I look at the current crop of republicans, I really wonder...
I don't think you have to be "smarter" to end up as a republican politician, just born to middle/upper-class parents.
If they'd been born lower down the ladder they'd be ordinary drug dealers or used-car salesmen.
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You have a point.
Re:Maybe don't (Score:5, Informative)
In this case [kdvr.com], the police did a lot more research before they hauled anyone in for questioning. They knew (from video of the scene) that they were looking for three suspects, Google's search data identified five potential candidates, and the police used other evidence to narrow it to the three suspects who were prosecuted. The main suspect (Bui) confessed to the arson and named his associates. The two other people who came up in the first set of results probably never knew the police were interested.
Re:Maybe don't (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, having the search history "used as evidence to charge" seems quite unreasonable. There should be sufficient *other* evidence that the parties are guilty and that's what should be evaluated at trial.
If the difference between being able to win a conviction or not is the ability to show that they Googled the address, it seems that there are plenty of problems with the case and that maybe they aren't guilty.
Am I missing something?
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The problem is that the odds of googling an address that's about to get robbed are astronomically low just like winning the lottery, and you only have to convince a jury of that. (Preferably one made up of people who have never won the lottery or got struck by lightning.)
And you might also get a visit by the police at your place of employment asking you to come to the station and answer a few questions. That could easily get you fired, and your only recourse is to try to sue the city who is someone with muc
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The problem is that the odds of googling an address that's about to get robbed are astronomically low just like winning the lottery, and you only have to convince a jury of that.
I have a picture of a local restaurant I posted on Google Reviews that Google tells me has been viewed over 500,000 times. Granted that is over several years now, but it seems this rather popular restaurant gets searched for a lot. Thankfully they don't get robbed a lot, or I presume the cops would have quite a large number of innocent suspects.
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That's because you presume the police are as dumb as you.
In the real world, police aren't going to treat everyone who searched for a business address as a suspect. This was a residence, so the number of people who searched for the address was vastly smaller. They also limited their search to people in the state, and likely to a rather small time frame. They only went to Google at all after they knew the arsonists wore masks during the crime, and so probably planned it. And they investigated a bunch of o
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Was that some kind of a joke or are you just trolling?
And the reason the police couldn't do the same for a business is because...?
Honestly, the police-worship here on Slashdot is completely insane.
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I think the police won't treat everyone who searches for a business address as a suspect in some random crime at the business because, like I said in my first comment, that will make a lot more work for them (they have to figure out which of those people are worth referring for prosecution) and expose them to problems in court. It's not what happened here, and nobody has pointed to any case where police actually did what you suggest.
Honestly, the number of shit-for-brains anarchists here on Slashdot is com
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So again, the reason why the police couldn't narrow their search to a limited area and time frame is because...?
It's funny how you call others "shit-for-brains" and yet you're the one who can't seem to answer a simple question.
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The police DID narrow this Google search to a particular place (Colorado) and time (the month before the arson), shit-for-brains, and I already pointed to news stories discussing that. And the police narrowed their other electronic searches (such as cell site location records) even more.
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Here are some more articles about it:
https://kdvr.com/news/local/de... [kdvr.com]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... [forbes.com]
Note in the second one that, out of the five accounts identified by Google in response to the (second Google-directed) search warrant in this case, "All three [suspects] had searched for the address prior to the arson." Police already knew they were looking for three suspects from video of the arson. The search warrant in this case was almost surgical in its precision, even before police used other infor
Re:Maybe don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? You really don't see how these sorts of fishing expeditions are ripe for abuse? Here's an easy way:
One day I decide I want to visit a friend in the next town over. Being a polite guest, I decide I'm going to bring a pizza from this great place near his house. But I remember its name and not the address. So I check its website, find the address, and search for it in google maps to get my route. I visit my friend, pick up the pizza, we eat, I go home, all good. But later in the night, the pizza parlor is robbed or burnt down or whatever. And the police decide that instead of bothering to do their jobs and conduct an actual investigation that leads to the real culprit, they'll just go on this same sort of google fishing expedition.
So, because the police decided to follow the philosophy of "close enough for government work" instead of seeking the real culprit; they show up at MY doorstep instead. They harass and attack ME. They accuse ME. Maybe they even go so far as to arrest me; all for a crime I did not commit. They may even decide to throw public humiliation into their and do all that at my place of work so they can have themselves a "perp walk." And no matter how far they do or do not decide to take their unjustified witch hunt; I have no recourse and will get no redress. Because of the bullshit that is qualified immunity, it would be all but impossible to see them punished for their false and slanderous accusation and whatever harassment they brought with it. Do you think that's a fair and just outcome? 'Cuz I don't.
It's already far too easy for the police to harass and abuse the public. We need to be rolling that back, putting in checks and balances, and punishing them... a whole hell of a lot more than we ever seem to manage to do so now... when they do choose to step out of line, abuse the power with which they've been entrusted, and in doing so break their trust with the public. We should bloody well NOT be opening additional and new avenues for their abuse.
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meanwhile someone is posting "only criminals get in trouble, you just need to be like me and never break the law, then you have nothing to fear" to the internet somewhere and actually believes it
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Define "fishing expedition", because the police here had to get a warrant for anonymized search logs, a second warrant to de-anonymize a subset of the accounts, and a third warrant to get other online information about the three suspects in the murder case.
The kind of thing you imagine didn't happen in this case. You haven't given any evidence to suggest it happens any more often than mistaken identification for any other reason -- and in fact there are a lot of reasons to think other mechanisms (like conf
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No. My point is that the police should actually do what you said: investigate. (You know... fingerprints, ballistics, chemical analysis, DNA matches, etc.). But my idea of what constitutes proper investigation does not include a dragnet approach that is susceptible to false positives that would lead the police to arrest, accuse, or in any other way harass, anyone who did not, in fact, commit the crime. And "Don't bother gathering and analyzing evidence. Just go after people who googled the address." is,
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Well this is certainly not the time to look up "pistol braces" without using duckduckgo or brave then.
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You don't have to be logged in to be identified or identifiable based on your web browsing activity. Even if you use Duck Duck Go, your IP address is shared with every single web site you visit. And even if you never log in while searching with criminal intent, you might also search for "innocent" purposes while logged in. Those searches can easily be correlated with your "logged out" searches using the IP address they have in common. Or you might log in to Amazon or some other web site, and again your IP a
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I don't think I really risk giving criminals much help on this website for old fossils, so I'll just point out that criminals should really use Apple private relay, the only VPN which breaks IP linking too.
Not that I think it benefits society in the first world to remove this investigation option from police, but it is what it is.
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So, as long as you use only Safari on an Apple product, and no other apps that directly connect to the internet, you're good (to search for criminal purposes). Few criminals are that smart, that's why they think crime pays. And even if they do get away with it for a while, eventually they will slip up and get caught.
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It's too bad their search results suck compared to Google's. :(
How is this different from search phone records? (Score:2)
I do not see the difference to looking up phone records, which has been a common standard for a long long time.
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What phone records do you mean exactly? If you are talking about getting the phone records for a specific phone number it's quite different as you are looking up data for a specific person. If you are talking about thing like 'get all identities of people that connected to telephone poles X, Y and Z between time 1 and time 2, then yes there are similarities and there is definitely discussion about that too.
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No different from checking the records of the donut shop to see who called in the previous weeks threatening to rob the shop and then checking out those numbers.
So every time I lookup when some local supermarket closes - I'm actually threatening to rob the place and the police should do something about it?
Same for everyone else looking up hours, store location or parking available.
Which is the issue here.
EVERYONE who simple looked up some location in the past, for whatever reason, is now automagically a suspect in any future crime happening at that location.
Further, existence of a crime automagically means anyone related to the location of the crime, in any way, ca
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Not a 'suspect' but a list of people they can't exclude from having committed the crime. Then they'll look at each person and see if they may have done it. A suspect is someone who they think *did* do the crime. If police have a long list, they know not everyone did it.
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If police have a long list, they know not everyone did it.
Limited only by how many confessions that can coerce.
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EVERYONE who simple looked up some location in the past, for whatever reason, is now automagically a suspect in any future crime happening at that location.
Calm down and take a breath. The police generally aren't that dumb -- being that dumb makes more work for them (because they have to filter out a lot of chaff) and makes it easier to throw out their work in court. In this case, they looked very closely at log results, and found only a few suspicious accounts. At that point, they only had anonymized identified for those accounts, so no human was a suspect. The police used a lot of other evidence -- cell phone location data, CCTV from a store where the th
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Calm down and take a breath. The police generally aren't that dumb
OK, you know that episode of the Simpsons when the police are chasing Homer around the tree and they tell the Chief they need backup because they are all running in the same direction? I've seen that situation play out in real life. It wasn't a tree, but there were 3 police and they all went in the same direction together. They didn't call for backup and the person they were chasing got away.
So you say police aren't that dumb but I've seen e
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It's more like going into a store and asking "have you had anyone trying to buy large amounts of ammonia recently?" Google's isn't "review[ing] the activities of billions of innocent searchers" it's running a DB query. The negatives never show up.
I can see the argument on both sides, to be honest, but if the search is specific enough to a certain crime - like, the address, for example - I don't have a problem with this.
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Is it specific enough? That's the key point and the difference here:
Unlike buying ammonia, there are more legitimate reasons to search for a street address than illegitimate use cases. Buying large amounts of fertilizer is a red flag (if you're not a farmer)
But viewing a place in Google Map? Even with a specific query, most of your results will be negatives.
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It's a balancing act. There's 5 dead people here; that justifies a wider net than someone throwing a brick through a window, for instance.
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I agree. But "widening the net" to something that includes some everyday action, you just add more false leads without a guarantee that the right lead is included at all. You're adding just more hay to the haystack you want to find the needle in. This is only a good idea if otherwise you would have no haystack to search in at all.
Or to get back from the figure of speech: This works only if you search for behavior that is suspicious also under normal circumstances.
For address searches this may largely depend
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Will a majority be false results? In this case, Google found five accounts in Colorado who searched for this house address (presumably in some time frame around the arson), and there were three arsonists. If all three of the arsonists we're in those results, that would make a majority of the results positives.
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Which makes it an effective and not overly broad mean in this case. But would absolutely not work if e.g. the arson would have been in a mall.
I'm not saying that searching Google searches should not be allowed, but like any search warrant it needs to have safeguards against to broad overuse. You need to give the judge a good description of what you expect to find and not just hope that something will show up if you just tear down the house long enough.
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It's sheer, and stupid, speculation on your part that the police would make Google tell them who searched for a mall before an arson. The police would probably start with CCTV footage and cell site location records, but they would also have to filter those down before those are helpful.
I'm not saying your concern is entirely unhinged, but so far it's long on speculation and short on real-world overbreadth.
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I wouldn't exactly call thinking through possible consequences "speculation". And of course I hope that we will not see them in the real world.
Not sarcastic for once (Score:2)
That's what defence lawyers do (Score:3)
It's their job to find any possible straw. Because the law is so absurdly complex, it becomes incumbent on the state to provide defence lawyers to those who they accuse. There isn't a good alternative - though British law is less picky about evidence derived from dubious sources.
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It's their job to find any possible straw. Because the law is so absurdly complex, it becomes incumbent on the state to provide defence lawyers to those who they accuse. There isn't a good alternative - though British law is less picky about evidence derived from dubious sources.
When you’re quite wealthy in America, owning a straw company not only is great for your taxes, but you literally cannot be criminally convicted of anything and everything else is just a 1% of the profits fine. Well, except perhaps stealing from other billionaires. That one thing remains punishable by law.
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Unless you upset the wrong people. It's interesting to wonder who Trump upset to get the IRS looking at Trump hotels...
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That raises a more interesting question: are these records simply non admissible, or h
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There's a big 4th amendment problem here. Searches have to be reasonable -- and it's widely settled law that 'general searches' are unreasonable. Warrants have to be specific for this reason.
As far as inadmissibility/illegality: I don't think the law draws a clear distinction. If it's inadmissible for violating the 4th amendment, then it's also illegally obtained evidence and the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' doctrine from evidence law applies.
I almost think of this article as a non-issue. The Colorado
Get a VPN already (Score:2)
So that this crap stops.
Criminals are stupid (Score:2)
That's why they get caught.
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If you're trying to get away with arson (or other lawbreaking), you'd better:
- Not use the internet
- Not use a cell phone
- Not use a car
- Not walk anywhere there are cameras
Good luck to you.
In our efforts to fight crime, it's important to draw boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not. The goal is to prevent abuse and avoid putting innocent people in jail. That certainly did not happen here, so it's hard to make this an argument for police "abuse."
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so it's hard to make this an argument for police "abuse."
My argument would not be that there was abuse, but if allowing it would set a precedent that would allow abuse in the future.
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Our constitution is based on the premise that governments can and naturally will try to abuse their power. There is no avoiding that. It didn't address this risk be taking away all of its power, but rather, by drawing boundaries around what is and is not acceptable, and implementing a system of checks and balances. Specifically, the police are subject to rulings of the judiciary, which in turn must follow the laws passed by the legislature.
The same thing applies in this situation. Did police obtain the prop
Why does Google retain this data? (Score:2)
Serious question: why does Google retain this data? Keeping search queries and such - sure - that makes sense, so that they can optimize their search. I'll even grant their ability (in the US, anyway, where there is no privacy) to process this data for marketing purposes.
However, there is zero need for them to retain the source data: "this person entered query X, on day Y, from IP-address Z". Given the number of queries they process, that's a huge amount of overhead. Unless...they are being paid by the go
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They keep the data specifically so that they can give it to police.
Google is part of PRISM, so I'm not even exaggerating. We literally know they are part of unconstitutional citizen spying programs.
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Yup. Google is shockingly full of 'neurodivergent' types who think they're changing the world. They don't even come close to understanding why 'the ends justify the means' is a problematic argument.
They make the argument that optimizing auto-complete and search bar suggestions create such a public good that it outweighs the harm of breaching all users' privacy with all the fervor of Greta Thunberg.
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The internet is full of malign interests.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html [apache.org]
It has been standard practice since the beginning to log everything and retain as much as storage will allow. Primarily to protect oneself from the multitude of malign interests through knowledge gained by careful log analysis.
In general, data, once created, should not be destroyed unless necessary.
The situations that require disabling logging for performance are rare at this point, given the hardware and software solution
Re: Why does Google retain this data? (Score:3)
Retaining any and all data they can get their hands on and then selling profiles is their core business model. That's how they make money.
A search engine, mail hosting, online storage, that mobile OS, those are all means to an end: to collect user data. All these services costs money.
If you just look how it has long surpassed oil and weapons trade, for example, obviously the business of collecting data to sell it is most profitable.
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Data never goes away. Pretty much everybody keeps everything forever. Even companies that have specific retention policies, still find it hard to delete *everything* spelled out in their policies. This is because so much data that is retained, has multiple purposes, and destroying data can have unintended consequences.
Note to self (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure Bing will gladly share your browsing history with Law Enforcement as well.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
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A lot of people use Bing, who have no idea they are using Bing. Apparently, they've been asked often enough that they have a handy form for Law Enforcement to fill out!
Is that how it works? (Score:2)
only lawyers.. (Score:2)
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While I agree that Law Enforcement used acceptable tactics here, your larger statement is counter to the US constitution and principles of justice.
We DO believe that, if you are caught through illegal means, you should go free. This is why courts regularly review the admissibility of evidence, to make sure that police don't abuse their authority, and so create a tyrannical state. Liberty must be enforceable if it is to mean anything at all.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/we... [cornell.edu]
So the problem with this (Score:4, Informative)
Being a cop is a job and jobs have stats you're expected to make. Cops on focused on catching criminals their focused on arrests and convictions. If the two happened to line up that's great but if they don't that's okay by them.
So the lesson is... (Score:2)
When planning a crime, use Duck Duck Go or Startpage along with a VPN for your search needs. If you need the Street View or Satellite functions of Google Maps, it might be wise to seek an address nearby, or even on an adjacent street, rather than the actual location. Perhaps that way the PoPo would be less likely to catch you in the net when they ask Google for search data about a specific location.
Just a John Doe Warrant (Score:3)
Upheld by most courts. Often, police pursue suspects when their names are unknown to them. Based solely on a description of that suspect. This is no different than that.
Other cases involve such things as fingerprints or familial DNA matches. All tested in court.
Proof of use? (Score:2)
How exactly can they prove that it was these kids who did the searches. Even if they have IPs from their phones, unless they have actual video of them doing these searches, how can the prosecution prove it was them doing the search?
Principles of Anglo-American Jurisprudence (Score:5, Insightful)
A very basic legal principle is that the Police are not allowed to do 'generalized searches.'
A warrant requires specificity. You cannot get a warrant to search every house on the block, for instance, unless you meet the high bar of showing probable cause to search each house.
In another context, we've all seen DUI checkpoints. Long ago, some cops got the bright idea to have 'general checkpoints.' The idea was that they would stop every car that passed and examine them for drunk drivers, weapons, drugs, and any and all criminal behavior. This was vigorously struck down by the courts as violating the 'reasonableness' portion of the 4th amendment. The average citizen is entitled to the presumption that they've done nothing wrong, and is entitled to go about their life without being harassed ('unreasonably searched') by cops. Even DUI checkpoints are a little bit of a gray area... they are legal according to Federal Law, but actually deemed illegal (at least at one point in time) according to Michigan state law (for instance).
It is very clear that the only reason this warrant was served on Google was because technology puts this data in their control. It very much IS a general warrant, in violation of the 4th amendment. Google itself is not being accused of arson. At best, the knowledge is imputed... Google is a potential 'witness.' You cannot serve a search warrant on a witness to, eg go through his personal effects, even if you're reasonably certain those personal effects have data about a crime. That is just not how legal procedure works. Once a trial proceeding exists, only THEN may witnesses be subpoena'd.
So everything about this situation is backwards. The very real problem is eviscerating the 4th amendment... and I'm pretty sure this will get overturned on appeal.
Re:Fair game (Score:5, Insightful)
Google doesn't sell the data. They sell advertisement placements.
Whether or not the data is sold commercially (it isn't) is irrelevant to whether law enforcement should have access to it.
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If something is available commercially, law enforcement can purchase it like anyone else, unless statutorily prohibited from doing so.
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Not quite. Law enforcement can specifically be prohibited from using this data. Of course that will just cause more "testilying" by people that are in theory tasked with upholding the law, not breaking it. But at least they will have some risk when doing so.
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Not quite. Law enforcement can specifically be prohibited from using this data.
Aye, I said that ;)
Such rules would be municipal and State-wide, though, not national.
Stuff that the police can purchase on the open market, or otherwise get their hands on without using State power is not constitutionally restricted, and Federal power over State and municipal policing is *very* limited.
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As someone else already pointed out, Google doesn't sell that data itself. It sells a service based on that data and would be pretty stupid to sell the data so that their service would no longer be needed.
But second and probably more important: even the worst form of targeted advertising does not put you at risk of you, your family including your dog or even your neighbors being killed by an overzealous SWAT team.
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Google's response to a search warrant doesn't put anyone at that risk, either. There were no SWAT raids in this case, and the police deciding to conduct a raid is a superseding cause [nolo.com] in any damages causes by that raid.
Beyond that, the defense's argument here is frivolous. If Google has an index on the search term in their logs, no other search logs are searched at all. If they don't have such an index, the only thing computers do when checking other logs is check whether one string is the thing they are
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Google's response to a search warrant doesn't put anyone at that risk, either. There were no SWAT raids in this case, and the police deciding to conduct a raid is a superseding cause [nolo.com] in any damages causes by that raid.
In this case, yes.
But Google has no control what will happen with the results that they hand over.
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Does any respondent to a warrant?
Re:Fair game (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Thats why it is not up to Google to decide if this is legal. But those people who decide that have to keep in mind what the impact on constitutionally guaranteed rights is in the worst case is.
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That doesn't distinguish this from a majority of other requests by law enforcement.
If you're going to assert things here, you might want to post the full argument that you think you are making, from premises through deductions to conclusion.
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Sure it does. It helps the police formulate the flimsiest of excuses for highly invasive and sometimes life threatening further actions to find some donkey to pin the tail on.
The news if full of good examples of why merely being suspected is sufficiently harmful to be considered a punishment in and of itself.
Have you ever searched something on google and within a couple weeks something criminal happened involving something you happened to search? Anything at all? Congratulations! You're a suspect!
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The thing you speculate didn't happen in this case, and the behavior all around was based on mechanisms built into the system to protect against abusive or arbitrary identification of people as possible suspects. The idea that somebody becomes a suspect just by searching on Google before a crime is committed is such irresponsible and already-refuted speculation that the only reasonable conclusion is that you are a lying troll. Why are you in such a fervor to normalize murder by arson?
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Actually, there have already been other stories on /. where that DID happen, so the potential problems are not speculative. I'll agree that this case isn't a great test case for it.
Very few people actually support murder and arson. It's just that if we tell the police "anything goes", we end up with the police doing more harm to people than the bad guys do.
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"Other stories", like this one [slashdot.org] ... about the same suspect in the same case? You really need some citations for your wild-ass claims.
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No, of course not. It's not exactly secret knowledge. If I claim the moon is NOT made of green cheese, will you demand a citation?
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Right now, it looks like you are claiming the moon IS made of green cheese, because everybody knows the nursery rhymes.
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Want to be angry about police? Try this [www.cbc.ca]: legalized murder, perversion of justice (police moving a camera to hide what they were about to do), and apparently no consequences for lying about it.
Later on, Mr. Hutley began sobbing and admitted he had not been truthful in the report, saying "I'm sorry. I would have never said the things I said in there if I knew there was a video."
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The people who were prosecuted were guilty, right? Whose rights were infringed?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The people who were prosecuted were guilty, right?
How the fuck could we answer that for you? You think there are witnesses hanging around Slashdot waiting to give you their testimony? Maybe you could wait for the legal process to be completed and that might provide something to go on.
Re: (Score:2)
The people who were prosecuted were guilty, right?
Of course. They always are.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
To clarify: What I meant was that there was no miscarriage of justice, right?
How would I know? It often takes decades to answer that question.
Re:Fair game (Score:4, Insightful)
If the law allows advertisers to track this info, law enforcement should also be allowed to access it.
Yep. This isn't any different than asking cellphone operators what 'phones were in an area or asking local residents if they have any CCTV footage.
If the law allows the data to exist, law enforcement should have access via court orders.
nb. If it were the government compiling this info it would be a different story, bit it isn't...
Re:Fair game (Score:4, Interesting)
I often hear the argument, I believe it's backed up by thick stacks of case law, that if you (for example) leave your curtains open and the policeman can see the dead body on the floor, that evidence doesn't require a search warrant to use in court.
I feel like using a smartphone, or anything Google/FB/Apple/etc, is the modern equivalent of leaving your curtains open. Don't do it if you have bodies laying there. Hell, don't do it at all. I leave my curtains closed, and I leave my smartphone off, and I don't have any bodies.
As a society, we have already made the decision that all this surveillance is OK. I don't quite agree and I'd rather see the data hoarders regulated out of that business entirely. But since that is where we are, we might as well use that data to good ends, instead of just the everyday mind-rotting BS.
Re:Fair game (Score:4, Insightful)