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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, @11:01PM (9 children)
Unreasonable search and seizure.. There goes the 4th.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:35AM (8 children)
What exactly do you find unreasonable about this? To help you out, this is the full text of the Fourth Amendment:
It looks to me like there is ample evidence to support probable cause (i.e., it appears that someone had money fraudulently transferred out of their bank account using a fake passport photo and a spoofed phone number). The warrant gives particular information on what specifically they are looking for and where they ae looking for it. So, what do you see here as being unreasonable about this search?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:51AM (7 children)
Someone in your county is growing pot illegally. A warrant to search all homes would meet your interpretation of the 4A.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:52AM (5 children)
You (and the person who modded you up) don't seem to understand the idea of probable cause. Probable cause does not mean that a crime might have occurred. It doesn't even mean that a crime is likely to have occurred. Probable cause typically means that there is an actual identifiable complaining victim that has standing and the police have credible evidence that the place to be searched has evidence that is material to the case. This is why judges don't sign warrants for the police to go on fishing expeditions because they think that a crime is likely to have occurred; they need more than just a hunch to produce a warrant.
Now, in this particular case, they had a complaining victim who suffered actual harm (they lost a substantial amount of money from their bank account). By contacting the bank they determined that the "passport photo" used to complete the transaction likely came from a google search on the victim's name. I'm guessing that Douglas has a unique enough name so that the scope of the warrant will be very limited (i.e., they want information on who made a search for images associated with a particular name during a particular time frame). In other words, they are not looking for google searches for Douglas Jones or Douglas Smith but for Douglas <Something or other> which is unique enough that it will stand out as peculiar in google's records.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:53AM (4 children)
Except they are asking for the searches of an entire city. Back in film days, it would be like asking every photo processor to turn over a set of all negatives.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ticho on Wednesday March 22 2017, @10:13AM
No, they are asking to see records of exactly one private entity (Google). Sounds reasonable to me.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:44PM (2 children)
No, they're asking ONE photo processor (Google) who they ALREADY KNOW is in possession of the photo they're looking for (or at least one that's very similar).
Google is not a fucking public utility. It is not public infrastructure. It is not a city. It is ONE BUSINESS. One made of almost pure distilled evil, but a single business nonetheless.
People like you are why the Internet as we know it is dying. People who don't see the difference between building a website and building a Facebook or Google page. THIS is the difference. If it's just a page on someone else's platform, YOU DON'T OWN IT. You don't own your profile, you don't own your searches, you don't own your inbox, you don't own anything. Google does. And they can do damn near anything they want with it.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 23 2017, @02:54AM (1 child)
The question you aren't asking, is should the be able to do anything they damn well want? This is a matter of law, not technology. Anyway, if you had read my posts, you would know that I'm keenly aware of the third party doctrine, and, you may not realize it, but if you are building your website on a shared host, VPS, some cloud service, whatever, that too probably falls prey to the third party doctrine because you don't actually own the hardware.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday March 23 2017, @02:39PM
I did ask that question, the answer is absolutely not, but this isn't "anything they damn well want." They certainly should be able to hand over their own information about their own servers in response to a lawfully approved request as part of a legitimate investigation.
They perhaps shouldn't be able to sell that information to anyone who wants it...but they already do that. I don't see why police officers with a warrant should be more restricted than Snakeoil & Scumbag LTD.
Yeah, that's why my servers are in my living room. My hardware on my property using my connectivity.
But I'm not sure you're *entirely* correct either -- A VPS I would actually expect could be treated the same as hardware that you own. You pay for exclusive access to that "machine", much like how your apartment is considered your property when it comes to police searches, even though it's technically owned by your landlord. Might depend on the details of the contract though.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @02:27PM
While on the surface I don't like this warrant I find it is at least easier to understand if one instead views it as something more physical, sorry no good car analogy. Lets say that instead of google we have a storage unit company, and instead of a warrant for info on who searched for something it is a warrant for a stolen item. Would the police be able to get a search warrant for all storage units at one location of the storage unit company for said item or would they need some more information to justify the warrant or narrow it to a specific storage unit. Actually when looking at it like this it seems that this ruling is pretty shitty. I think any sane judge would say that the police need to do more foot work to narrow down the search in this case so that they aren't opening every storage unit and digging through everyone's shit (yes if you have you stuff in a storage unit it is likely shit and you should get rid of it).
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