Police sweep Google searches to find suspects; facing its first legal challenge
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Meanwhile, this:
> “If Google is allowed or required to turn over information in this Colorado case, there is nothing to stop a court in a state that has outlawed abortion to also require Google to turn over information on that kind of keyword search.”
seems like it's of entirely different magnitude, far less amenable to such a narrow scope.
If the past has taught us anything it's that law enforcement will use any tool to the maximium of what is allowed and then beyond (e.g. coerced phone searches, racially motivated stop and search, drug dogs to force vehicle searches, privately sourced licence plate tracking and face recognition, criminal DNA testing from rape kits, forced biometric collection and more).
> 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
Legally, the term is "particularity".
>The FBI's role in the process is a condition of the Federal Communication Commission's equipment authorization issued to the Harris Corporation.
The result is that members of the public, judges, and defense attorneys are denied basic information about local cops' use of invasive surveillance gear that can sweep up sensitive location data about hundreds of peoples' cell phones. For example, when we sought information about Stingrays from the Brevard County, Florida, Sheriff's Office, they cited a non-disclosure agreement with a "federal agency" as a basis for withholding all records. When the ACLU of Arizona sued the Tucson Police Department for Stingray records, an FBI agent submitted a declaration invoking the FBI nondisclosure agreement as a reason to keep information secret.
Yeah it works really well
(I'm of the opinion they're a Fourth Amendment violation, and quite a few court cases are winding their way through the system. Quite a few judges have already ruled against their warrantless use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...)
This whole system really highlights a flaw in using a 200 year old document as the basis of our legal system. Pervasive surveillance in the form of video cameras, photographs, audio, and now Google search requests wasn't really a thing at the time. I suspect with the present conditions, the authors of the 4th amendment would have put in an even stronger requirement for warrants regarding data from third parties and maybe even searches generally given how non-consensual consensual searches often feel to everyday citizens. Unfortunately, I think textualism is more in vogue with the current SCOTUS.
And SCOTUS can knock them down, or make them irrelevant via qualified immunity.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
"The Reuters analysis supports Sotomayor’s assertion that the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police. Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did. The court’s acceptance rate for police appeals seeking immunity was three times its average acceptance rate for all appeals. For plaintiffs’ appeals, the acceptance rate was slightly below the court’s average."
"In the cases it accepts, the court nearly always decides in favor of police. The high court has also put its thumb on the scale by repeatedly tweaking the process. It has allowed police to request immunity before all evidence has been presented. And if police are denied immunity, they can appeal immediately – an option unavailable to most other litigants, who typically must wait until after a final judgment to appeal."
In some cases, it takes only a single Congressman to prevent a law from being passed. If the minority party is dead set a bill -- if only for political reasons -- it often requires absolute unanimity on the other party to pass it, an unreasonably high bar to pass.
Legislation is nearly always trivial. They are only barely capable of passing even the most basic, crucial, mandatory law appropriating funds for the executive branch -- and that's only possible because the filibuster does not apply to appropriations bills. Real legislation is sometimes bundled into appropriations bills precisely to piggyback on that exception.
Theoretically, the legislature can do lots of stuff. Pragmatically, you can't simply say "well, the legislature should act". There is an enormous thumb on the scale in favor of the status quo.
A fair point, but the controlling "document" isn't 200 years old. In fact, it's 46 years old[0] and is called the Third-Party Doctrine:
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant"
The tl;dr is that if you voluntarily give a third party (not the government and not you) information (e.g., web search requests), that information is not protected under the 4th Amendment.
As such, even though the police got a warrant, it wasn't necessary for them to do so unless Google balked at providing the information.
However, backdoor sunset clauses exist & the bill to reauthorize it have already been passed and sit on the back burner, as Trump threatened to veto it. I suppose when the sunset clause is no longer exploitable, they'll get the sitting POTUS's sig. More in TFA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-215-expired-ye...
The case of this is fine to me on it's face. But examples like the above are terrifying.
To me the ultimate problem isn't the scope of the search. It's that the guardrails against partisanship are gone via takeover of law by Republicans and christian crusaders.
Attorneys general and judiciaries have huge power and are so lopsided depending on geography and political party in charge. and I don't trust the ultimate Supreme Court to do what's right in the end
that it's illegal now is crazy. That is seems likely that they will try to prosecute people (more likely TX style citizen suits) for getting healthcare in a different state is crazier.
Just scary all around imho
That's all from a legal perspective. From a policy perspective, I think our search histories should not be collected in the first place as much as practically possible. In meatspace, libraries are actually very protective of what books you look up/checkout. Seattle City Library actually requires you to opt-in for tracking of your checkout history because they know this sort of data is sensitive.
Why?
If the police finds a burnt house, and check who googled for an address... how is that different to them finding an illegal abortion clinic, and checkng who googled for that address?
I don't think that sentence refers to illegal abortion clinics; I think they're referring to state laws that attempt to punish out-of-state abortions (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-05-1...).
That said, a clinic is more like a house that burns down several times daily, which dramatically expands the scope of any such warrant.
> Google delivered information on 61 queries, according to court filings, along with the IP address — a unique number for each computer on the internet. Investigators focused on a handful of those queries, asking Google to provide detailed user information for them. One of them was linked to the 17-year-old.
That's pretty narrow.
It shouldn't just be the kid in court being represented, but the "billions of other users" whose search history was subject to this dragnet.
"Does God exist" seems out of place, though I do think my lack of religion has made me ineligible for elected positions.
Now, when it comes to the fear about being used to prosecute abortions, that is really a totally separate issue, as doing a reverse keyword search for "get abortion pills by mail" is too broad. But I think the broader issue with the abortion examples is that many people fundamentally believe the laws are unjust and deserve to be broken. Whatever the case may be, the legal system itself surely cannot differentiate between "unjust" and "just" laws.
The big question here is "how much authority should the government have?", or the similar "how much crime is the right amount?". Don't say "complete authority" and "zero crime", unless you think the American revolution was a bad move, slavery should still exist as an institution, civil rights should never have happened, the Pentagon papers should still be a secret, etc.