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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: 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]