Fast Company reports that Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, have presented Google with warrants to obtain data from mobile phones from not just specific suspects who were in a crime scene area, but from the mobile phones of all people in the area.
The above story links to an investigative piece at WRAL:
In at least four investigations last year – cases of murder, sexual battery and even possible arson at the massive downtown fire in March 2017 – Raleigh police used search warrants to demand Google accounts not of specific suspects, but from any mobile devices that veered too close to the scene of a crime, according to a WRAL News review of court records. These warrants often prevent the technology giant for months from disclosing information about the searches not just to potential suspects, but to any users swept up in the search.
City and county officials say the practice is a natural evolution of criminal investigative techniques. They point out that, by seeking search warrants, they're carefully balancing civil rights with public safety.
Defense attorneys and privacy advocates, both locally and nationally, aren't so sure.
They're mixed on how law enforcement turns to Google's massive cache of user data, especially without a clear target in mind. And they're concerned about the potential to snag innocent users, many of whom might not know just how closely the company tracks their every move.
"We are willingly sharing an awful lot of our lives with Google," said Jonathan Jones, a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. "But do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?"
[...] Users can switch location tracking off to prevent the device from pinging GPS satellites. But if it's on a cellular network or connected to Wi-Fi, the device is still transmitting its coordinates to third parties, even if they're far less accurate than GPS.
In the past, at least, turning off that technology has been no guarantee of privacy.
Business and technology news site Quartz discovered late last year that Google continued to track devices even when all GPS, Wi-Fi and cell networks were supposedly disabled. The tech giant says it has updated its software to stop the practice.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 20 2018, @08:17AM (11 children)
In principle, it's really no different from what might happen in the physical world. Imagine: Someone found freshly murdered in a building. The police seal off all exits, and consider everyone in the building to be a potential suspect. They can and will search all those people.
I'm not seeing this as hugely different, except for one little details: secrecy. There is no reason at all to keep these warrants secret, except for the automatic attitude by government bureaucrats that they are somehow in charge, rather than being the servants of the public. Government actions should be public, with very, very few exceptions.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday March 20 2018, @09:17AM
It's not exactly the same as you describe, but not far off either. I'd more readily compare it to questioning the local gossip who watches all the comings and goings of the people in the area, except the gossip doesn't just know the regulars, but every single individual who passes through, and has near-perfect recall and knows all the search history of all the people who pass through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @09:18AM (3 children)
But if they have immunity to such stuff then no go.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:12AM (2 children)
See, I have a different outlook: as long as the poor and powerless have the same immunity against police state stuff as the well-to-do and connected, then I'm fine with it. Otherwise no go.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday March 20 2018, @09:56PM (1 child)
1:
2:
#2 is the ideal, but sadly we have little chance of that happening unless #1 happens first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @03:26AM
#1 and #2 are effectively the same thing in the real world. The whole idea of being powerful is to have greater immunity to such stuff :).
Only in a few countries is Rule of Law really paramount. In other countries the ruler caste and their pets do what they want, the middle caste get Rule of Law and the lowest caste get "sucks to be you".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:58AM (5 children)
Government actions should be public. There is no right to privacy or secrecy for a government. It is the people that are safe from unreasonable searches etc., not the government. You should be able to walk into any gov building and look at anything you want with only one exception, it should not intrude on the privacy of individual persons. (Persons != gov employees on the clock)
Now this would of-course be a practical issue for several gov organisations that handle private data, but all agencies for businesses, park services, national transportation, ... should be free game.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:00PM (4 children)
The government also has to hire from the labor market. As a former government employee I'll say that working there is already super annoying. There are websites where you can look up any gov. person's salary, and all the red tape rules make working there a pain if you care about getting things done. I guess if you're an R who basically wants to shut the government down, rules that make the workplace annoying and unproductive are a good thing.
Sure, law enforcement has a lot of power and transparency = oversight is a good thing. Government rule making is similar. But as a made up example, if I'm a National Parks person who counts deer and trees, I don't need Joe Schmoe waltzing into my office to dig through my email and sensationalize it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)
Why not? You work for Joe Schmoe, and your boss traditionally has the right to dig through everything you do.
You don't want him coming in and gumming up the works with his demands, but especially today when a large and growing percentage of everything is digitized anyway, there's a good argument to be made that the public should have full online access to everything that doesn't personally identify non-government employees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @10:56PM
Public companies also don't let their shareholders read every employee email. Why is that? Because it would cause trouble for the company. There are internal inspections and audits to make sure things are on the up-and-up. The government is not so different from a company where everyone is a shareholder, and government agencies have inspectors general and whistleblower protections to look for wrongdoing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
so you want to steal our money by threat of force, or by actually using force, then tell us not to question how you spend it? you're just a leech doing a job that is almost guaranteed to be outside the scope of the government's rightful authority. IOW, you are likely guilty of sedition and should just be glad no citizen did their duty and removed you as a threat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:12PM
Most government spending goes to the military and entitlement programs (social security, medicare, etc). Discretionary spending, where the government employees you hate work is a small fraction. And even that is mainly pass-through spending for Veterans, Agriculture, Education, HUD, etc. So you think Education and HUD shouldn't be federal departments? Take it up with your Congresspeople or the Supreme Court. Those departments were established by Congress as an expression of the will of the people because the people thought education and housing for the poor were important enough that the US government should give support. Threatening the use of force is channeling Timothy McVeigh and the Taliban.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:43PM (4 children)
I can see why many of you aren't really troubled by this. given the information in TFS.
What's more, even those of you who read TNSFA might not be bothered. Except both TFS and the crap linked article leave out important details.
The FastCompany article is a short excerpt from an investigative piece from WRAL in Raleigh, NC [wral.com]. It goes into much greater detail about these fishing expeditions^W^W warrants:
Hmm...That seems a bit less kosher, no? After all, the Fourth Amendment reads:
IANAL, but that pretty clearly seems to preclude what the Raleigh police are doing with these "warrants" and the judges who are issuing them should be roundl chastised and probably not re-elected.
And regardless of who (whether, rich or poor, politically connected or not) is impacted, I'm not sure how the actions of the police/judges can be construed as anything other than wide net fishing expeditions.
I'm not going to Raleigh any time soon, as I don't need to visit any authoritarian hell holes.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:16PM
Yeah basically. I'm surprised though that nobody has brought up the third party doctrine yet. Not that I believe it is anything more than a made-up excuse to expand the power of the government to search whatever they want...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:12PM (2 children)
They did - the place to be searched is several city blocks, or Google's servers, depending on how you look at it. The things to be seized are all location data recorded for anyone who passed through that area.
It does seem extremely over-broad, but also seems to fall within the letter of the law. At least as one isolated incident. The problem is that I really doubt that data gets deleted, and given the frequency of crime reports in an urban environment you wouldn't need to get much broader to have it practically translate to "all location data recorded for everyone, all the time", at which point de-anonymizing the data is relatively trivial, and you've got your handy-dandy surveillance state population tracking infrastructure in place.
Even without going full surveillance state it would be really easy to abuse as though it were. You know where there's a meeting of an inconvenient group like the Black Panthers, KKK, voting-integrity activists, etc? No need to do actual police work to track everyone, just arrange a car-jacking or something in the neighborhood, and collect all the location information of everyone at the meeting - where they came from, where they went afterwards, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @01:00AM (1 child)
There's an easy workaround - don't carry a smartphone anywhere you don't want to be tracked. Or put it in a faraday cage. Any group that considers government to be a threat to their organization should be following these procedures anyway, given Snowden and all that other fun stuff.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 21 2018, @04:48PM
I feel no contradiction in simultaneously advocating for both practical "workarounds", and reasonable limits on government. Especially since there's no practical way to simultaneously eliminate the collection of location data while still getting the many benefits of having that data available. Meaning that most people, most of the time, will have that tracking data collected about them, and the resulting "data holes" caused by those taking precautions will thus stand out in stark relief, inviting further attention.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Virindi on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:04PM (4 children)
This is equivalent to a general warrant, the reason the 4th Amendment was written. The problem is that the concept of generality is difficult to put into words, and thus law.
The police think someone with a Google phone might have done this, so they want to search the data of everyone with a Google phone.
An analogy would be if the police thought someone in town might have done this, so they got a warrant that allowed them to search every house in town.
The 4th Amendment requires that the places to be searched be particularly described. Were you to interpret that as being fulfilled by a statement like, "every house on this list containing every house in town", the requirement would be meaningless...you could just ask for a warrant that covers searching every person and place on the planet (one of them probably did it right?). What it means is that there must be a specific connection between the particular description and the evidence presented. That is, the evidence must point to that particular place.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 20 2018, @08:50PM (3 children)
I could be wrong and haven't read TFA. Did the article actually say the police think someone with a Google phone (or connection to Google's data) is the perpetrator? Or is this simply securing potential witnesses?
Let's say there is a place that has security cameras running. Cops ask for the data to hopefully identify potential witnesses, and the company balks and says no you can't have the footage. The police may indeed get a warrant for the footage.
How is that different from the police saying, "persons who were in the area may be witnesses, and we have a right to question them as to whether they are, or are not, so here is a warrant for all traceable users of Google services."
If that data reveals a common pattern, that's allowable fruit of searching for witnesses. (Thinking of cases that are solved by finding a common person or connection to crime scenes.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday March 21 2018, @09:55AM (2 children)
Good point, and obviously that's similar to the way the thinking goes for proponents of the third party doctrine too. But, I do not agree.
It does seem somewhat similar: a store owner makes a video recording of you, and google takes a 'recording' of your movements.
The difference of course is expectation of privacy, or perhaps more accurately, nature of data. The much more intrusive nature of phone monitoring, showing your every move all the time, makes it more along the lines of private data (sadly the Court has failed to muster a majority for this line of thinking eg. in US v. Jones). Of course, where you would draw the line is an issue. But modern tracking is so incredibly intrusive that if it is not private information, I don't know what is.
The other question is does it make a difference that Google holds this information and not you, and I say no. The problem with only caring about the rights of the entities actually being searched (and not those whose data is being held) is that if this data is private, Google is essentially acting as your agent in holding it (and of course you have an agreement that lets them do what they please with it, but in practice you would not be happy if they printed it on a public website). Surely it should not matter whether I or my agent is actually holding my papers, when the police wish to search them.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 21 2018, @03:01PM (1 child)
I would agree that the standards surround data privacy should not be equal to those of say, cameras (while at the same time noting the increase in England that seems to be spreading here of having CCTV cameras everywhere making that surveillance pervasive also.) And asking for all data of users in an area (individual bits of data gathered in a central location) is not the same as asking for a singular video of an area and isolating the individuals in it. But instead we end up taking the same laws as before and making them fit (or not).
On the agency question, I think I see. The counter argument would be if I hand you a satchel with contents in it, and the police come along and ask you, "Can I look in that satchel," does the person holding it have the right to turn it over? What if the contents of it are not lawful? Do I get away with drug dealing by handing you the satchel and it can't be searched? But that argument isn't fully parallel I think.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday March 21 2018, @05:19PM
Yeah clearly I would not argue that should be the case. I am just saying that if you are holding my bag and the police want to search it, my rights should be the ones that apply. It should be no different if you are holding the bag for me, or if I am holding it myself, when it comes to whether the police can compel a search.
Whether you have the authority to consent on my behalf is really a question between you and I and the nature of our agreement, which is separate. In this case it is doubtful that Google would consent to a warrantless search either; they want people to feel like Google is a good custodian of their data, so they don't get uncomfortable about sharing it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:23PM
The "investigative" piece doesn't answer the important question: did they get the data? Because Google rejects 30-40% of requests, according to its transparency report [1]. (Of course, they probably can't find that answer due to non-disclosure clauses. So much for that.)
But really, the party at fault are the courts for issuing these warrants. Google can't defy warrants any more than you can when the SWAT team comes to confiscate all your computers. The courts need to get their fucking shit together.
[1]: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview [google.com]
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(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday March 21 2018, @12:21AM
The problem here is not that the police are issuing warrants for information that is clearly relevant to their mission. Once the information exists it is entirely reasonable to request access to it to solve crimes. The problem is that it exists. The problem is the cell company, Google / Apple and a long list of app vendors maintain such accurate location data on each of us. The root problem is that they CAN access location data. The cell carriers must have it to make the modern network work, beam forming requires a location to aim at. None of the others needs it and the carriers should be required to purge it after a very short time.