Colorado Supreme Court Upholds Keyword Search Warrant
eff.org
eff.org
[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-search-arson-suspects-colo...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust
It's weird how easily we've acclimatized to creepy tech-company spying. For Google to snoop on your searches, record them, and permanently archive them for retrieval years in the future was a very creepy and ignominious business model, and it's embarrassing how readily we all went along with it, for the convenience.
It says the same "No activity" for YouTube but I can clearly go on YouTube watch history right now and see every video I've played. That's extremely fishy.
If I go to youtube activity controls and click "turn off" then my history stops being saved (checked by watching a video) then when I click "turn on" then the history starts working again.
Holy batman no they are not. Kagi is the only thing I've seen come close. Even brave search mentioned below struggles when giving more specific queries.
It would be one thing if they asked for general access to every search that had been done in town. But, wasn't this a case of asking if they searched on a specific address, and it turning up a silly low number of results? And then they were able to find other leads and data?
Or is there a more sinister vibe that I'm just not seeing here?
People are less likely to look up, or say, things in private that can get retroactively interpreted in the worst possible way by state actors who are looking for an easy arrest and/or conviction.
In the past, it was nearly impossible to round up everyone based on what they looked up in an encyclopedia, or on a map, in private. Your pursuit of knowledge wasn't limited by the very real threat of "Can just having curiosity about something land me in prison for terrorism/murder/arson/etc?"
It borders on thoughtcrime and feels like a fishing expedition to me.
> After a house is burned down, they are likely to ask everyone around if they saw or heard anything
To continue this analogy, simply asking is different than getting a warrant/subpoena for everyone in a neighborhood to search through records of their past speech to see if they said anything they deem suspicious.
I can see some concern over this, but just not in this case. If it was, "all people that searched pyromancy" and that included people that were looking up fireworks, for example. Or if it was all people that looked at any house on redfin in that state.
This was a fairly targeted search, all told. "Anyone been asking around about the victim?"
This isn't even hypothetical in light of current world events.
I'm hoping that the town library would stonewall any such request:
That is, there is a good chance something like this request would be honored by any library. "Any chance you saw a person following the victim out of the building?".
Saying "checking for searches of an address in two weeks" is materially different than "searched for X suspected terrorist organization in four years".
- A state bans certain reproductive pills. An officer asks for all searches for the address of a certain pharmacy across state lines.
- Some measure of crime is up around the new housing development. An officer asks for searches for webcams around an address. There is no oversight when that address happens to be a mosque.
- Your DHCP lease grants an IP address that belonged to a real estate office plugging thousands of addresses in. The police department only asks for a few addresses, so it’s incorrigibly suspicious that you are the only IP who searched for all three addresses where a catalytic converter was stolen. You do not get the legal benefit of being able to see the exculpating history kept by the search giant.
Again, though, this is a hard hill to want to set the battle on. If this was a case of "searching for contentious thing" than I would be worried, as well. This was literally, "any evidence that someone scoped out a specific location where a crime that we all agree is a crime happened?"
And saying there is no oversight is silly. This had a warrant. It went through a process. To claim there is no oversight is overstating the situation and is a bad faith argument. To contrive how this could have led to a lot of false positives completely ignores that it was such a well directed search that it did not, in fact, do that. Last number I heard was that it literally hit single digits in how many results it had. That is beyond well scoped for this sort of thing.
I think this evidence cannot be used constitutionally, but practically I might be mistaking the application of this ruling to “good” warrants as well as “bad” ones. This might be a well-directed warrant which supports the public good with statistics satisfying a reasonable observer. But, can we tell that apart from a “bad” warrant in which we do not have access to refuting statistics? Honest question, should the search engine’s legal department be the only ones who can make the counter argument.
To your specific question, I don't have an answer. I'm assuming some judgement was made at Google, as well? In that, if they felt it was an unconstitutional request, they can push back. The link someone gave to what libraries can/should do supports that view.
I certainly think there is an argument for disallowing but am not trying to argue about that.
If you assume it is allowed then being careful about the controls put on police is important. Giving them unlimited access would be problematic.
So it could be true that this is okay but the ruling allows things that shouldn't be.
I'm very sympathetic to the concerns of drug/behavior searches for things that I feel should be legal. My aim there would be to argue for success in making those things legal. I just don't see the argument that keyword searches are somehow off limits for searching.
And again, don't construe this in the realm of the search being the crime. If this person was convicted because they searched for something, I'd be far more open to the argument. They were found because they searched something.
The problem is creating boundaries that prevent that kind of behavior from law enforcement.
The article proposes that is too difficult and removing the tool is a better solution.
Parallel evidence is a very very weird thing in police work IMHO. We give police incredible power with the only oversight being blocking evidence from court.
As long as police are rarely punished for crossing lines we should minimize expanding their tooling whenever possible.
That is, the fact that so few accounts were hit by the warrant shows to me that it was a better warrant to grant. If you are wanting it codified that size of result list should be a consideration, for example, I would support that. If you are saying we need better controls, I'm all for it. To completely disallow this data, though, feels weirdly misguided. I'm guessing they have already run phone records for all calls to the residence that was burned, such that that is allowed with warrant. Why is the search extra protected?
I'll again state that I'm all for strengthening privacy and security of people. I'm just not seeing this case being the place to make that battle. Nor do I think it is reasonable to make it illegal for police to get the data. If you want the data to not be used, I'd actually rather support making it illegal for companies to store it.
Supreme Court cases are not about the case. They're about the implications of precedent.
Leaving aside that state supreme court decisions are overturned often, case law tries to be narrowly applied where it can. And this specific case is fairly narrow.
I think we're well past the point where concerns about the state abusing personal data collected by corporations can be called "paranoia" in good faith. It's reality that the government abuses their ability to access the data being collected about us. The more abuses the law enables the more abuses we should expect to see.
It's possible that this will be overturned at some point, or that other courts will rule differently in similar circumstances, but I wouldn't count on it. The courts don't have a great track record when it comes to preventing police from violating our rights or when it comes to preventing spying on the American people.
Executing a general warrant compels everyone to “answer the question” in your analogy, which is clearly very different. You keep saying “ask” but here they seize.
When police ask for information in person, the people being asked know about it. When police instead go to Google with a dragnet warrant, the people included in the search never hear about it.
But there's a much more fundamental problem, a problem of constitutional rights. A warrant is based on probable cause to believe that someone commmitted a crime. The Fourth Amendment expects a flow like this: Police get a report about a crime. Police investigate the crime scene. Police go in person asking about suspects. With this preliminary evidence, the police have probable cause to pick suspects and get warrants to search the suspects.
A keyword search warrant is a general warrant. Police get a keyword search warrant. They search people who aren't suspects. Even if Google does the searching and decides which people to recommend to the police, Google does the searches because the government forces Google to search in the first place. The police use the information to get probable cause to pick suspects. This is backward: the searching comes before the probable cause. The Fourth Amendment breaks in this model.
I could see arguments that they need to scope down the time of request for that warrant, as well. But flat out disallowing it feels just as wrong as opening it up for no process.
So the warrant required producing information about a small number of Google users.
> Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case, queries by one billion Google users.
...but they talk about the total number of people's records Google had to look at to find the small number that satisfied the warrant. I'm not sure why they are bringing that up.
As far as I know that's never been relevant when it comes to the 4th amendment. It's the result set that matters, not how many records you had to look at to find that set which can vary greatly depending on just how how you happen to organize your records.
E.g., suppose that two rental cars were involved in a crime, one from Hertz and one from Avis. Police know the license numbers of the cars and get warrants to find out who was renting the cars at the time of the crime. Let's also say this was in the days when the records would be paper records in filing cabinets.
Let's say Hertz's files are sorted by year and customer name. To find out who had the Hertz car at the time of the crime someone has to just go through all the customer records for the current year looking for the one that had the car.
Hertz then ends up looking at the records of about half of the people who rented cars from them so far this year in order to find the one person whose identity the warrant asks for.
Let's say Avis's files are sorted by year and car. They just have to go to the current year's records, pull this years file for the car, and then look at the list of customers in that file to see which one had it at the time of the crime.
Avis ends up looking at the records of just the people who have rented that one car so far this year to find the one person whose identity the warrant asks for. That's a much smaller number of people's records than Hertz has to look at.
Those two warrants would be identical as far as the 4th Amendment goes, because what they are asking for, "who had this particular car at this particular time?", is reasonable.
I don't see how it would be any different for records in an electronic database instead of a paper database. The constitutionality of a warrant is not going to turn on whether the query planner can use indexes or has to do a full table scan.
Searching for abortion clinics could be the next thing targeted.
I’m having a hard time getting worked up about this. To me it’s the equivalent of getting a warrant to find out who bought matches. It’s not like the police got access to all of the users browsing history, they just got a list of IP address who had been casing the joint.
Police then get warrants for users' electronic devices when they're under investigation because they're on that list, so the police get more than access to users' browsing history.
> they just got a list of IP address who had been casing the joint.
Or they got a list of completely innocent people who made deliveries, live nearby, etc, who are now treated as suspects for arson and murder they didn't commit.
But that’s not what happened. I don’t practice in Colorado, but my guess is that a judge would deny such a warrant without something more, e.g. the person has a prior conviction for arson, or there’s a personal connection with the victims. If you’re just the Amazon delivery guy, I don’t see it happening.
> my guess is that a judge would deny such a warrant without something more, e.g. the person has a prior conviction for arson, or there’s a personal connection with the victims.
Or they're the wrong religion, race, nationality, seem "suspicious", know/related to felons, don't belong to the good ol' boys club, etc.
That definitely happened.
98. Law enforcement also served an additional warrant on Google for the account information belonging to E.M. There was no connection between Mr. Seymour, Mr. Bui, D.S., and E.M., except that E.M. searched for the address of the fire within the specified time frame. As a result, law enforcement obtained E.M.’s entire Google history, including all of her location history and search history, but did not find any connection to the fire.
https://www.nacdl.org/getattachment/343f777f-46d4-4c04-b85a-...
Someone searches for something that is related to arson for some innocent reason.[1] The police decide that is enough evidence to make them a suspect and eventually prosecute. Due to fear of being found guilty or inability to afford a competent lawyer, the person takes a plea deal even though they are innocent.
The government does something questionable like dropping a bomb on a suspected terrorist that also kills a lot of civilians. Someone hears about it; however, they do not investigate further because they fear that a search history related to bombs could make them look like a potential criminal. This results in them not holding the government accountable.
[1] Perhaps they are a fan of true crime shows. Perhaps they remembered an urban legend they heard as a kid about flammable clothing and were curious if it was true. etc.
Next time it could be something that you find much less clearcut.
Someone had an abortion (if you favor abortion rights), someone bought a gun/ammunition (if you favor the second amendment), someone was just around a given location (if you favor free association and movement). The dragnet could have been over drugs (if you are against the war on drugs). I don't know what conservatives/right-wingers fear these days, but imagine its a dragnet over those things pushed by a liberal political system.
And this request produced only a handful of hits, but there's nothing stopping them from getting search results that produce a hundred hits in the dragnet.
When it comes to crime there are real actual slippery slopes. You can justify capital punishment with some horrible serial killer like Ted Bundy, but then that winds up with Texas killing innocent, poor, mentally handicapped people who get shitty legal representation.