In the midst of an arson investigation in Colorado, the police department reached out to Google to find out who had searched over a period of 15 days for an address where a fire killed five people.
While I’m happy that the people suspected of being responsible were apprehended, the method used still seems to be a precursor for bad things, even though the court makes it clear that they only ruled on this specific case. Can this genie be kept in the bottle after this taste of freedom? Or am I overthinking this?
I assume a lot of people are uneasy about google revealing their interest in stepsister porn to authorities. Although perfectly legal, it could be embarrassing. If I’m truly interested in how long it would take fire ants to completely consume a human body, I don’t want to be a murder suspect 2 years later.
Another issue is whether this is allowing the police to circumvent the 4th Amendment. So the police asked, in the nicest possible way, to access a third party’s records, without a warrant. What if they don’t ask in a nice way? In a way that starts to establish the unwritten rule that if the police ask for your records, you should give them the records if you don’t want to get into trouble?
So the concern is they are doing these things without a warrant. That seems reasonable.
All sorts of idiots have use Google to query “Best way to hide a body” and “Do I have to pay for an Amber Alert?”. It’s a good thing so many criminals are largely stupid, I guess.
I don’t see this as being any more interesting than getting a warrant for someone’s video camera recordings , on the off chance that a criminal was caught by the camera on the day of a multiple murder.
Cops weren’t asking for the search histories of 350 million Americans, just information on the tiny number of people who may have searched for a specific address during specific dates. That’s very reasonable, if you ask me.
In this case they did have a warrant. The ruling was whether the warrant was valid or not, and the state supreme court ruled that in this case it was valid. The police have a standing coffee date with some companies (Ring), where they show each other their latest videos. That isn’t what happened here.
I’d probably feel different if it was a public business that could have been searched for by hundreds of people, who are now all suspects. I’d also feel different if after every time the police busted a drug house, they sent a warrant to Google asking for anybody who had searched for that address in the last few months.
We also don’t have detailed information on how the search was conducted.
From the article it sounds like police obtained the names of individual who had performed the search and used a process of elimination to narrow down the list prior to actually bringing anyone in. That’s not inherently a problem and not much different than getting a list of people who had been by an address at a day and time to find possible suspects.
We’re they asking nicely for alibis? Determining who was elsewhere when the fire started? Or were they dragging people into small dark rooms and tasering confessions out of them? That’s where things might have become dicey.
It doesn’t seem to be out of line, it sounds like police work/investigation. In this case. Even if in this case everything was legit I’d still worry about police abusing obtaining names of suspects in that manner in other places and circumstances.
I’m not certain how I feel about the court’s decision, but at the least they made a point that they were only making a ruling of the facts in this one case, not a broad ruling.
All of the comments about searches on terrorism, porn, how to hide bodies and what not are missing the point on what actually happened here (and don’t worry, you’re already on a different list for making those searches ). What the police asked Google to provide was a list of people (or technically IP addresses that they then used to connect with actual people) who had searched for the address where the crime had occurred on the basis of their belief that it was a targeted crime, and the possibility the perpetrators would have looked up directions on how to get there. They weren’t asking for people’s search histories; they were asking who had looked up directions on Google maps. Again, not really sure how I feel about this, but the court did acknowledge that the warrant was constitutionally defective and only allowed it on the basis that the police were acting in good faith what was known about the law at the time.
I’d hope the judge approving the warrant would also feel differently if it was a frequently searched for public business rather than an average private residence.
The difference in terms of traditional search and seizure analysis is that the way you get a list of people who have been by an address is someone tells you from their memory, or you get a sign-in log. If a member of the public was sitting on a bench outside, they would have been able to generate that list just with the naked eye in public.
The way you find everyone who searched for something on the internet is someone accesses every single user’s records and looks for hits, and then turns the list of hits over. If we’re analogizing one-to-one, it’s more like the police obtaining a list of where every person in the country was on a particular day and time, to make sure they weren’t at that address. Well, the police deputizing someone else to do that, more precisely.
This is going to depend on how Google (or whoever) stores the records. It is also possible Google can do a query of a particular address and show all of the searches for that address. Accounts/IPs who did not search for that address are never touched.
I’m trying to think through how different this situation might be from getting a subpoena for a retail storefront’s security camera recordings in order to narrow down the search for a vehicle known to have participated in a home invasion three blocks away.
I could understand that – on a public street – you may not have any expectation of privacy whatsoever, and that the difference between that and your Google search history is the crux of the issue here, amirite?
That’s a helpful correction, thanks. I was relying on the dissent’s claim that every user’s record was searched, but I certainly don’t know if that’s true and maybe the dissent doesn’t either.
To be more specific, the problem there either way would still be that some number of people the police have no reason to be searching are having their records searched.
). What the police asked Google to provide was a list of people (or technically IP addresses that they then used to connect with actual people) who had searched for the address where the crime had occurred on the basis of their belief that it was a targeted crime, and the possibility the perpetrators would have looked up directions on how to get there. They weren’t asking for people’s search histories; they were asking who had looked up directions on Google maps. Again, not really sure how I feel about this, but the court did acknowledge that the warrant was constitutionally defective and only allowed it on the basis that the police were acting in good faith what was known about the law at the time.