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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:46PM (3 children)
So what makes disclosing such a thing, assuming it can be done at all, "Orwellian?" That Google might retain such data? That in order to solve a crime a warrant is signed asking for release of the information, assuming it is held?
Yes, yes, slippery slope. And I'm not saying one might not exist here. But the notion that such a thing shouldn't be done, "to solve a wire-fraud crime worth less than $30,000," implies that there's some magic number that would suddenly make it more worthwhile. That justice should be invoked according to financial severity. *That's* the real slippery slope, friend.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:14PM (1 child)
The problem with declaring the slippery slope a fallacy is that, outside of the world of theory and academic rhetoric, a lot of slopes turn out to be slippery, and this is usually practically demonstrated once you've fallen halfway down and you're too late to avoid the bottom. In such situations the only real way to keep from falling is to be smart enough not to get on the slope in the first place, no matter what some textbook insists is accurate for abstract arguments and philosophical logic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:49AM
Textbooks don't insist that all slippery slope arguments are fallacies, but that doesn't stop morons from acting like every slippery slope argument is a fallacy even in situations where history shows that slippery slopes do exist.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:45AM
Like how a purse snatching became the basis for mass surveillance? Is that the slippery slope you are poo-pooing?
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/nsa-smith-purse-snatching/ [wired.com]