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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:59PM (9 children)
My initial reaction was "ugh not more dragnet orwellian crap" but it took only a few seconds to transition to "ok, signed by a judge so this is the same as any other search warrant except on the net". How admissible the evidence is will be another question, but I don't see any issue with the search.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:06PM (7 children)
Yeah, same here. This is due process in action. I'm actually a bit stunned. The system is working as intended without any shady parallel construction or NSA databases or traffic analysis or TLAs running pedo sites or Googtwitface selling the info or just rolling over and handing it over. (That we know of.)
Move along??
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:15PM (6 children)
Agreed, but can we pause for a moment on the request that Google turn in "Social Security Numbers" and even birth dates, alongside the expected email/IP/MAC addresses.
That Google would be expected to have linked the SSN of someone doing an image search is highly troubling, and the whole SSN concept should be revised quickly...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:31PM (2 children)
Yep agreed, Google should only return an IP address and law enforcement should then use that to find their next clue.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:12PM (1 child)
If Google has other information associated with a person / IP address / browser cookies / etc that performed a search, why shouldn't those be disclosed?
Presumably, if you can trust law enforcement, this information will be used in an investigation to locate the perpetrator of a crime. And used for no other purpose.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:02PM
First, let me say in general that I agree a warrant is justified here, and I don't see a problem handing over some search data. But...
If Google has other information associated with a person / IP address / browser cookies / etc that performed a search, why shouldn't those be disclosed?
I suppose it depends on the scope. They specify searches over a 5-week period, which is a good limitation. If that results in 10 suspects, great. If that results in personal data from 10,000 people being given to the police in bulk, is it still justified?
Presumably, if you can trust law enforcement, this information will be used in an investigation to locate the perpetrator of a crime. And used for no other purpose.
It's disturbing enough that Google might have this much information in the first place. But even if you trust law enforcement to "do the right thing" with the data, isn't it potentially a major security risk to give out that amount of personal data? Even if you trust your police department, they could accidentally do all sorts of things with this data, or it could accidentally fall into the wrong hands.
My inclination is that a warrant like this can't be a "fishing expedition," to use a classic legal term. Get Google to tell the police how many such searches it had first -- if it's a very small number, the scope of the warrant is probably justified. If it's 10,000 people, the police should be required to narrow down that search a bit more, perhaps by being given a smaller subset of data on the searches first. Or, have Google cooperate with police to search the data directly, which can narrow down the focus and just give the police a smaller number of records that are likely more relevant.
I'm pretty sure if the police walked into a bank with a warrant and said, "Give us a print-out of all financial transactions for this 5-week period for 10,000 customers meeting criteria X," there'd be some legal backlash. Yes, it's just "customer data," but it's sensitive and I don't think it should be handed over in bulk to law enforcement without justification. If your warrant narrows the scope to a reasonable number of suspects, then maybe you get more than a list of names or whatever. (And maybe the 5-week time limitation will be sufficiently narrow, but that's unclear until you actually know what Google turns up.)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:33PM
Google still shows me adverts in a language which is neither one that I understand, nor is an official language in the country where I live - so I'm still fairly happy that it doesn't appear to know much about me. I've only ever typed my ID number into HTTPS forms for known trusted 3rd parties (mostly governmental, or banking), so I'd be very surprised if google knew that.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:16PM
I don't find it that troubling. Plenty of people have google accounts (and other online services) where they provide phone numbers, email addresses, irl addresses, birth dates, and all kinds of information. What i would find troubling is that information being given to anyone without a (public!) court order.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:33PM
IANAL and I haven't seen the warrant but I suspect the gist of the request is that Google turn over all relevant personally identifiable information on those doing a google search on the victim. It doesn't necessarily mean that google actually has such information, only that they need to turn it over if they have it. On the other hand, I would think it a bit disturbing if google actually was collecting SSN, birth dates, etc. on people doing google searches, no matter what they were searching for. But that seems to me to be a substantially different matter from turning over whatever they have which is related to this police investigation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:47AM
So let's say a judge signs a warrant to search every home in the city for goods stolen in the last month. That's all cool right?
This is a dragnet search, not a particularized search.