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Police in a small suburban town of 50,000 people just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, have won a court order requiring Google to determine who has used its search engine to look up the name of a local financial fraud victim.
The court order demanding such a massive search is perhaps the most expansive one we've seen unconnected to the US national security apparatus and, if carried out, could set an Orwellian precedent in a bid by the Edina Police Department to solve a wire-fraud crime worth less than $30,000.
Investigators are focusing their probe on an online photo of someone with the same name of a local financial fraud victim. The image turned up on a fake passport used to trick a credit union to fraudulently transfer $28,500 out of an Edina man's account, police said. The bogus passport was faxed to the credit union using a spoofed phone number to mimic the victim's phone, according to the warrant application. (To protect the victim's privacy, Ars is not publishing his name that was listed throughout the warrant signed February 1 by Hennepin County Senior Judge Gary Larson.)
The warrant demands Google to help police determine who searched for variations of the victim's name between December 1 of last year through January 7, 2017. A Google search, the warrant application says, reveals the photo used on the bogus passport. The image was not rendered on Yahoo or Bing, according to the documents. The warrant commands Google to divulge "any/all user or subscriber information"—including e-mail addresses, payment information, MAC addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth, and IP addresses—of anybody who conducted a search for the victim's name.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:44PM (13 children)
I already know which political ideologies this viewpoint is going to rub the wrong way, but this is a perfectly reasonable application of a constitutional search for a suspect with appropriate legal controls along the way.
It won't necessarily lead to finding a suspect or particularly useful evidence in court against whomever they do find, but it seems like perfectly reasonable policework to me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:23PM (6 children)
There are enough real things to criticise and worry about, getting in a fuss about a non-thing is counterproductive.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:06PM (5 children)
But in this case, it's more like asking all the shops down the street if any customer talked about bayonets with them.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:11PM (2 children)
Seems like a great way to help you find suspects.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:56PM (1 child)
OK, how about this.
It's akin to going to a library and demanding someone's book and video history.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:05AM
Actually it's akin to asking for the history of who checked out a specific book.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:17PM
IANAL but that sounds like perfectly legitimate police detective work to me. How would you propose they investigate a crime? By consulting a psychic?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:26PM
They're saying they "know it's Google," not asking Yahoo, Bing, or any others.
So, if the perp is any kind of clever, he "found" a library card and logged in to a public computer with it while wearing enough obscuring clothing to thwart the security cameras, in a town neither he nor the mark lives in.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:01PM (3 children)
I'm unclear how political ideologies will affect one's reaction to this warrant; or to your assertion that it is perfectly reasonable.
My own reaction, initially, almost instinctively, is negative towards both the judge and the law enforcement requesting this information. That reaction is the opposite of what I would have had, say, two decades ago. This is conditioning resulting from having seen corruption, abuses of power, and other bad behavior in all levels of government, including judicial and law enforcement resulting in general distrust.
On further consideration, I'm not sure that this warrant is a bad thing. It asks for a narrow range of time. For searches of variations of a specific person's name. The results of that would be (hopefully) properly investigated in an effort to find the true perpetrator of the crime. Hopefully not to manufacture a case, to ensure that someone, somewhere is prosecuted, even if no real case can be built.
One potentially negative effect that concerns me is that this would seem to open the floodgates to local law enforcement requests to Google and other internet sites for information. The requests will become larger and larger in scope. And the basis for them will become less and less substantial. Soon law enforcement will begin to think that all police investigation begins and ends with a computer search -- like on TV.
Coming Soon to a warrant near you: police getting warrants for information from Google to settle personal scores.
Maybe Google, FaceTwit, Bing, Yahoo and other large data should be moved into a branch of the government.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:10PM (2 children)
So, even though this has nothing to do with political ideology, I'd still say the chances you're a libertarian are one hundred quadrillion percent.
And that your objections are silly. A judge duly authorizing a search for a specific piece of related information in the course of an investigation of a specific crime is a slippery slope to jack shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:42AM (1 child)
This is going to return some vague information associated with an IP assigned to a person or persons who may or may not have been involved in the crime. It feels like issuing a general warrant to search everyone's garage in the city, because a lawnmower got stolen last weekend.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:53PM
Guess what? All sorts of components of investigations return results that may or may not have something to do with the perpetrator.
You gonna object to doing a quick check on someone because their DNA was found at a murder scene? There's literally millions of ways that could happen without them being the murderer, but it's what we in the head-outside-of-ass community call a "clue".
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:12PM (1 child)
I already know which political ideologies this viewpoint is going to rub the wrong way,
Looks like a lawyer for the EFF is taking issue with it (not necessarily on behalf of the EFF though). I don't get the impression they lean the direction you are implying.
Their complaint is that it resembles a "general warrant" in that it doesn't name the person whose google-records are to be searched.
I agree with you, though. It doesn't seem much different than asking for a surveillance tape from location x,y at time z. That doesn't name a person, either.
(I fully support the EFF and even donate periodically. I didn't look into deep enough to know whether they've taken a stance on this issue or if it's just this lawyers' personal opinion)
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:06AM
Their complaint is that it resembles a "general warrant" in that it doesn't name the person whose google-records are to be searched.
The warrant does name the person whose records are to be searched - and that "person" is Google. The records belong to Google. Can't be any more specific.
If the found information creates leads (such as repeated fetches from the same IP in the city where the deed was done,) then *that* person or the IP will be searched separately and on another warrant.