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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google is boldly opposing an attempt by the US Justice Department to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data, warning that the changes would open the door to US “government hacking of any facility” in the world.

In a strongly worded submission [PDF warning] [regulations.gov] to the Washington committee that is considering the proposed changes, Google says that increasing the FBI’s powers set out in search warrants would raise “monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide”.

...In particular, Google sounds the alarm over the FBI’s desire to “remotely” search computers that have concealed their location – either through encryption or by obscuring their IP addresses using anonymity services such as Tor. Those government searches, Google says, “may take place anywhere in the world. This concern is not theoretical. ... [T]he nature of today’s technology is such that warrants issued under the proposed amendment will in many cases end up authorizing the government to conduct searches outside the United States.”

(apologies, I'd love to post excerpts from the "strongly worded submission", but the PDF packing a scan of the hardcopy submission and I'm too lazy to either transcribe or fire an OCR for the job. Maybe you could commit the sin of reading TFA once in a while, makes an interesting reading: there's an example of a Texas judge having to deny a warrant to search a computer of unknown location because the IP pertained to a block assigned to a South-Asia country and lots of good argumentation why seizure of data on unknown location computers can easily amount to government hacking).

Original Submission