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Comment by JoeSmithson | Hacker News Reader

So essentially they asked for anonymised lists of phones (i.e. not even the actual numbers) that had been in the locations where the suspects had been, then cross-referenced these to find potential suspects, presumably finding some phones that exactly matched the reported movements of the suspects which they then made a second application to de-anonymise.

Do people honestly think this is disproportionate for investigating a home invasion? It seems like they have been quite privacy conscious in my opinion.

What would have been a better way to investigate this crime?

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  Do people honestly think this is disproportionate
  for investigating a home invasion?

I think the concern is not Google sharing this data once they have it. The concern is Google having it, in the first place (in personally identifiable form).

There's a lot of unclarity about which free and paid Google services and products are and aren't tracked. Who knows if their DNS resolver or their wifi-visibility-to-phone-location service or google-maps-used-without-logging-in would have come up in such a search warrant?

We know, because its outlined in their privacy policy that they store dns logs for 24 hours, and store the location data of devices which allow the location history feature, and provide data to governments who send a proper search warrant with reasonable cause.

My problem isn’t so much that Google is storing location data if people have agreed to allow it. The semantics of agreeing to enable location history are arguable, but by default Google’s location history feature is opt-out. I’d prefer it be not be that way, but that’s a debate for another time.

What I do have a problem with is what this line from the article suggests:

>An Associated Press investigation last year revealed that even with these settings disabled, Google continued to collect and store users' location data.

Maybe I’m missing something from the TOS, but it seems to me that the opt-out process doesn’t do what it describes; so what is it for?

> The concern is Google having it, in the first place

This. I think it's the only responsible thing for the police to do. Since they know the data probably exists they have to look, but does this data need to exist?

What we need is some limitations on what is collected and how long it is stored.

Hold on, this is great justification for Google having this data (in addition to the real reason, which is to provide better location-based services). Due to the anonymization process, no one's privacy is unduly infringed upon, and investigators have a tool for catching criminals. Do you not see that last bit as a societal win?

>Do people honestly think this is disproportionate for investigating a home invasion?

The scale of the search[0] is grossly disproportionate, to be sure. The population of the city in question was 60,797+[1] almost ten years ago.

So, we have a wide-net around the house, a period of about six hours requested, and if that main road is a major artery for driving, then we can safely assume (if it's day-time time-frame) that at least a small-to-medium-size portion of the population would've been simply driving by.

Now, for the St. Paul Food Market, they wanted 33 hours' worth of data and that is off of two main drags (it looks like). Given Google's overestimation of its ability to place a device at a location (noted in the article) and the potential of the predominance of the population to have driven in that area (let's say business day versus weekend); then, yeah, that does seem grossly disproportionate for investigating a robbery of a home invasion, and/or markets; especially considering that the markets weren't hit multiple times over that time-frame - they just wanted to see patterns of travel for everyone in the area over that period of time.

>What would have been a better way to investigate this crime?

The original police-work methods they were using, which they admitted in their court-filings as having actually led to the suspects? The confidential informant being chief amond those, yeah?

Touting this method as being a more useful mechanism for investigation, when that was countermanded by the evidence of the events - as told in the article, is disingenuous - at best.

[0] - https://img.apmcdn.org/170e8a92a0f2ddb41b4a415707a8e4db547af...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Prairie,_Minnesota

The additional search areas limit the potential for collateral intrusion though, because they are essentially going to be ANDed with the list from the main crime scene not ORed. Even if the whole town visited those markets, it could never be more intrusive. Also, the reasonably wide rectangle is precisely because the location data is not particularly accurate, I am not sure why you think this supports the idea that it should be smaller.

I'm honestly shocked that people think that the police are overstepping the mark by requesting anonymised phone data from around the scene of a home invasion murder.

Over the last few years I've watched the privacy debate on HN evolve from completely legitimate criticism of mass surveillance programs with insufficient transparency and oversight, to criticising a detective getting a warrant from a judge, that is specifically written to request anonymised data! While investigating a murder in his community!

> The original police-work methods they were using, which they admitted in their court-filings as having actually led to the suspects? The confidential informant being chief amond those, yeah?

The level of proof required in a criminal case is incredibly high, what's more police have a responsibility to find all assailants as well as test the veracity of witness reports and follow all reasonable lines of enquiry.

"Witness is lying", "Someone stole my car" etc etc. All these will be presented as defences. They don't even need to be probable, because the prosecution needs to clear a very high bar of proof. This is why police collect as much evidence as they can and don't just stop when they think they know who did it.

Ultimately the detective has a responsibility to the wife who's husband is dead - and to society in general - to make sure people face justice when they offend, and they can't half arse it.

(Disclosure: I am a detective)

>I'm honestly shocked that people think that the police are overstepping the mark by requesting anonymised phone data from around the scene of a home invasion murder.

I think you're trying to tout that the ends justify the means by obfuscating the facts. There was no murder. The man died of a heart attack. While the home invasion was undoubtly the cause, to arrive at the conclusion that it was murder is disingenuous. Manslaughter, possibly, if you could prove that the heart attack wouldn't have occurred without the home invasion but that's extremely difficult.

>Over the last few years I've watched the privacy debate on HN evolve from completely legitimate criticism of mass surveillance programs with insufficient transparency and oversight, to criticising a detective getting a warrant from a judge, that is specifically written to request anonymised data!

Because the latter can directly lead to former. What happens to this data, when it's "no longer needed" because the police believe that they have a suspect? Do you honestly believe that it's deleted? This is in the United States, after all.

>While investigating a murder in his community!

Just because you repeat a lie, it doesn't mean it is the truth.

>...what's more police have a responsibility to find all assailants as well as test the veracity of witness reports and follow all reasonable lines of enquiry.

and

>Ultimately the detective has a responsibility to the wife who's husband is dead - and to society in general - to make sure people face justice when they offend, and they can't half arse it.

Negating the continual lie you're propogating, this line of justice-boner thinking is exactly how the "Investigation Center" (for lack of a better moniker at the moment) in Chicago[0] came to be. Whatever it takes to make sure that justice is served, yeah? After all, from the inference that I get from your statement, the police owe it to the community that justice is served and it's their responsibility to make sure that it happens, no matter what, yeah?

Furthermore, I don't think that you quite understand that anonymised data doesn't implicitly mean that an end-user is anonymous. The two principles are quite distinct and far-removed.

(Disclaimer: I lean heavily towards anti-authoritarianism.)

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

I'm going to duck out of this because I don't believe you are assuming good faith on my part

> There was no murder. The man died of a heart attack. While the home invasion was undoubtly the cause, to arrive at the conclusion that it was murder is disingenuous.

This isn’t the detective obfuscating facts, this is you being unfamiliar with felony murder doctrine.

>...this is you being unfamiliar with felony murder doctrine.

Someone isn't aware of the merger doctrine, I see. To point: Where's the felony murder charge[0,1]?

[0] - https://www.newrichmond-news.com/news/crime-and-courts/45488...

[1] - https://kstp.com/news/lennie-dwayne-brooks-randy-lorenzo-bro...

How does this implicate the merger doctrine? Isn't that for lesser included offenses — which felony murder would not be here? It does appear that the suspects were not charged with felony murder here, but it's not clear why that was.

The CA legislature recently attempted to narrow their felony murder law [1], but I don't think MN has done the same (and even the CA attempt may have failed due to a conflict with the CA Constitution [2]).

Could you explain on how the merger doctrine is involved?

1: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...

2: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/19/felony-murder-law-rep...

you familiar with this ?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Pretty sure "grab that pile of anonymous bits" isnt a proper description ;)

How do you expect a group of politicians from the 18th century to weigh in on the acceptability of this type of warrant? Even politicians from this century don't understand technology.

How do you invalidate a legal concept like "define that which you want to seize" because old people founded the nation ?

The old coots dont have to know how to define it. The modern police do and I want the phone records for those several thousand people doesnt cut it

> How do you expect a group of politicians from the 18th century to weigh in on the acceptability of this type of warrant?

Because they lived through a time when blanket warrants were common and decided that they were not to be allowed in this new political framework?

--edit--

err, "general warrant" is what I meant to say...

>to criticising a detective getting a warrant from a judge, that is specifically written to request anonymised data! While investigating a murder in his community

Exactly. I'm extremely pro-privacy (and don't hold a particularly high opinion of police either), but I see nothing wrong here. They made sure to get warrants, made sure the data obtained via the first warrant was anonymized, and then obtained a much more narrowly scoped warrant once they identified a single phone in the dataset that closely corresponded to the facts of the murder. This should be a textbook example of properly protecting privacy while investigating and closing a crime case.

This reminds me of some of the handwringing over police submitting cold case DNA samples to ancestry companies and catching their perpetrator via a match with one of their relatives. That should be something to celebrate, not be concerned about.

If your goal is to arrest someone for the crime, then this may be the best way; but if you optimise society for catching criminals you aren't optimising for prosperity, comfort or sustainability.

The country with the greatest personal liberty, currently probably the US, is consistently a place that people would choose to live if they had a choice. This is a hint that moving away from personal liberty will end up with a society that is (1) free of crime and (2) not a desirable place to move to.

I'm not really going to expand the argument; I hope it is self-evident why having your activities reviewed by a person who might choose to arrest you is going to make your life worse. Statistically and at the macro scale that is a bigger threat to you than a home invasion (even if you think you aren't committing any crimes - I hope you've read all the laws that apply to you, don't ever get into a grey area and the police never make a mistake!).

>The country with the greatest personal liberty, currently probably the US

What's their prison population again?

There's countries where the percentage is lower, yet it's basically illegal to criticize the government.

More importantly, what does that change about the argument that arresting criminals is hardly the only thing to consider? Here's the same argument with enhanced contrast: If you threw Earth into the sun, all crimes would stop. If that's all we care about, everything else is just kicking the can down the road. But that would be a "crime" in and of itself, right? IMO the same could be said about mass surveillance, it's stripping humans of their rights to preserve their rights, burning the village to save it.

Generally I can't help but notice that it's really not the size of the crime that seems to matter, but whether it's aligned with centers of power or not. We're aiming at a world where a tyrant can't be assassinated, and the defenseless can be murdered without consequence, with a bit of playing for time and lip service to principles here and there.

> It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

-- Voltaire

Are you ignorant or choosing to ignore how much of the prison population is there due to criminalising the use of narcotics and much of the violent crimes committed is a result of this policy? Are you also ignorant or choosing to ignore that the policy has been used to target especially minorities who get sentenced much more often than whites despite drug use being at similar levels across races?

Calling all these people simply "criminals" is a bit too straightforward term when the system has been set up to mainly jail black men for crimes that have no clear victim. That's a serious issue for a country that claims to be all about liberty.

> Are you ignorant or choosing to ignore how much of the prison population is there due to criminalising the use of narcotics and much of the violent crimes committed is a result of this policy?

Neither, that's simply besides the point.

How's putting people in jail based on racism besides the point when it comes to liberty? What good is being able to criticise leaders if you're in jail and can never vote again?

It's beside the point because the discussion is about mass surveillance, which will only make the problems you mention worse. If we give police more and more ability to track people, who do you think they'll track, murderers or drug dealers/users? As a hint, the latter is far more profitable to the police station.

Yes we need to change laws that disproportionately put non-violent offenders in jail, but that's beside the point when talking about mass surveillance. Both are bad, and both should have separate discussions.

> How's putting people in jail based on racism besides the point when it comes to liberty?

The point made upstream was that optimizing for jailing criminals and ignoring all else is not a good metric, while also making the terrible mistake of calling the US pretty free, which was "refuted" by with, well, a single metric, incarceration rate -- I asked what that changes about the original point, and said incarceration rate is not the one and only metric by which to measure liberty. If you wish to contest either of those points, actually do it.

Excuse me, what? I think you should step out of whatever propaganda feed you are sucked in.

Literally all of the EU have a massively lower rate and in none of the countries it is remotely illegal to criticize the government.

In Germany for example, you have multiple programs on TV dedicated to make political satire of current politics. On basically tax funded TV.

And you won't have your name published for criticizing the white house [1] like in the country some people apparently unironically think of as the place with the most personal freedom.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/07/15/white_hous...

> Literally all of the EU have a massively lower rate and in none of the countries it is remotely illegal to criticize the government.

Yes, and? I didn't say that's the case in every country with a lower rate, I said there's countries that have a lower rate, but can hardly be called free. To judge something as complex as this by a single metric doesn't even pass the smell test.

>There's countries where the percentage is lower, yet it's basically illegal to criticize the government.

Don’t you see how deeply ironic that statement is? There are countries where even trivial things like criticising the government are illegal, and yet somehow the United States manages to imprison more of its own population than anyone else.

Put another way, you are more likely to have your liberty completely revoked if you live in the United States than if you live anywhere else in the world, both by population and per capita.

I'm aware of all of that, and that changes none of the points I made, nor the questions I asked. 3 comments freaking out, not one addressing the meat.

If you think its not illegal to criticize the govt get on twitter and start ranting.

Ask ted nugent how a secret service visit feels ?

or go local... simply go outside and start criticizing the local govt agents ( police )

I promise you will get a couple doses of freedom and likely be given the chance to donate to their cause

> The country with the greatest personal liberty, currently probably the US, is consistently a place that people would choose to live if they had a choice

You haven't been around the world very much, have you? I wouldn't say that many people in the Nordic countries, for example, would choose to move to the US. If they do, liberty is certainly not among the reasons why.

If I'm strictly honest, I'd choose Switzerland. But there is not really any evidence that the models of countries that small can scale to any meaningful number of people; which is the same problem the Nordics have. The geography of economics doesn't really work in a linear way. At the 100M+ people America stands out.

Even if you want to make the argument that the US is coming 2nd to the EU or 3rd to someone else; it doesn't really alter the core point here. People prefer liberty; they aren't going to move to, say, China despite the fact that China is developing a more sophisticated surveillance network that will be used to fight crime.

Please note that my point wasn't about making a pissing contest on which country is the best or whether the US should adopt anything from any other country. I was simply replying to the claim that America is the beacon of liberty that everyone wants to go move to. That's a bit ridiculous statement to a bunch of people around the world.

I have visted a few countries.

In the US you have the potential to make more money but you damn sure arent more free.

Even Mexico has more freedoms

> Even Mexico has more freedoms

Citation needed.

personal experiences when driving 4 wheelers around drinking beer and other things.

weed is legal nationwide so is prostitution

is that enough ?

Replacing IDs by Psuedonyms does not really give anonymity. Consider correlation with CCTV cameras, or identification based on sleeping in a house.

As an hypothetical, suppose there is data on two people, who were in the same house at 11:00 pm. Then, at 12:00 pm, one of those people moved over to a neighboring house for 1:00 hour, after which they went back.

It looks a lot like two people who live together, where someone snuck out to spend the night with someone else. This is sensitive data, and not really anonymous.

> So essentially they asked for anonymised lists of phones (i.e. not even the actual numbers) that had been in the locations where the suspects had been, then cross-referenced these to find potential suspects, presumably finding some phones that exactly matched the reported movements of the suspects which they then made a second application to de-anonymise.

In what conceivable way does that count as an "anonymised list?"

Suppose Google happens to sell geodata for everyone in your area of town to a third-party. Are you reassured if they tell you, "It's ok, we removed your phone numbers first."

We have no reason to trust either the sensitivity oe specificity of such an identification, and every reason to assume police and juries will think it's foolproof.

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