I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I would bet SCOTUS rules this kind of warrant illegal. Google certainly has the resources to take the case that far.
AFAIK a warrant usually is tied to a specific person or a specific crime. In other words, if an explosion killed Harry McHarryface, then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
Or if the fertilizer used in the bomb was shown to have been purchased on March 10, then maybe a search for "fertilizer" in the weeks before March 10 would be allowed.
Look at it this way, if a car is involved in a drive-by shooting the police can't get a warrant to search every single home that has the same year/make/model of car registered to with that address. For a legal warrant you have to have probable cause that a specific person committed a crime. You can't just search everybody and see what sticks, that's blatantly unconstitutional.
> For a legal warrant you have to have probable cause that a specific person committed a crime. You can't just search everybody and see what sticks, that's blatantly unconstitutional.
Sure, though it’s worth noting that nothing prohibits the police from walking down the street and asking people. Those people don’t have to talk to the police, but…
Google will fight warrants like this. AT&T doesn’t. Other companies have varying policies on this.
Obviously, one can’t assume data is not available to law enforcement merely because the police would need a warrant to get it over a possessor’s objections.
On the other hand, if a specific type of nail is used as shrapnel in a homemade bomb, investigators can go around to all hardware stores in the area and get security camera footage of customers who recently bought large quantities of that type of nail.
This isn't a hypothetical situation - according to the LA Times, it's how they ended up cracking the Austin bombing case that involved the Google warrant [1]:
> Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials “went to every hardware store” in the area to find customers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, McCaul said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
> “The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him — because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras — was when he walked into Home Depot,” McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance video of Conditt walking into the store in a wig and walking back out to a vehicle with a license plate connected to his name.
So I think there's a little more nuance here. Certainly matching a list of generic terms seems too broad. But a warrant for specific keywords that was limited to a specific city and time frame might be analogous to going to all the hardware stores in the city and pulling security footage?
I can imagine a scenario where the warrant is for searches that you would not believe a human would naturally make on their own. I think SCOTUS would allow that.
Scenario:
Hello fellow criminals. Instead of point to point communication, we will make random posts/pages that have our combination of words on them. So if you want to read our communication, do a google search for the exact quote "purple antelope shoe couch can squirrel."
A few years ago, in the context of justifying automatic license plate readers, the LAPD told a court that all cars in Los Angeles are under investigation:
Presumably this isn’t some easily-drawn line though, wouldn’t it be a judgment call (literally, made by a judge)? If the car was a specific color and model only 2 of which were registered in the state, would the judge issue a warrant for those 2 addresses?
I'd guess the analogy the government would make is that it's more similar to a DUI checkpoint. They're searching everyone (or a random subset) of everyone coming through an area.
If the car was used multiple shootings, the same phone was in that area and the phone was used to search for the victims name every time then we have everything we need but are unwilling to use it?
We can probably figure out how to extract such data and cross reference it without making any of it available to random government employees.
Say you take pictures of license plates, store the data some place safe and allow a query of 5 recent armed robbery locations. If the result contains multiple cars matching 2 locations no results are returned. The moment a 6th robbery happens and a single car matches 3 out of 5 law enforcement can start looking for it immediately.
Sure, you'd get pretty mad if every time you get robbed the police searches your vehicle but they don't need to break anything and you will get over it.
There's a big problem insofar as you need to have legal standing in order to bring the malfeasance to court (implying you must be able to demonstrate this has been used)
This is so difficult, more or less impossible. Prosecutors and LE will likely not bring forward a criminal case based on this sort of unlawful search, as the discovery would detonate the case if brought before a mildly competent defense. The defense would have a really great speaking season following the court proceedings if they were to catch such a windfall.
I speculate that these sort of illegal searches are conducted regularly, and serve to fuel parallel construction.
In the OP article, it says that LE "did not need to use these search warrants to find the bomber" whose picture is inline, instead they correlated his "unique pink construction gloves" to some home depot footage of his purchase, linking his identity to the purchase with video evidence.
I think it is very possible for parallel construction to provide the required leads to locate this video footage. The search warrants can be as illegal as the day is long, but their effect may remain invisible so long as it generates a lead which is not obviously poisoned fruit.
Starting replying then saw your comment. Just wanted to note you are spot on in my opinion. It will be hard to showcase parallel construction and I am not sure how some ngo of some sort can pursue this at court.
Honestly, my feeling is the moment judges and congress felt OK with actions even pondering such acts we had a fundamental democratic problem in our hands.
As they say if you put a cop car on someone's tail they are going to get a ticket.
Neither am I a constitutional scholar, but I'm less optimistic about this being ruled illegal.
But it's for a somewhat meta-reason: there have been numerous cases where something strikes me as blatantly unconstitutional, but the SCOTUS has allowed it anyway.
You'd think so. But for 20 years plus justices at all levels have been very happy signing off secret warrants, ultra wide warrants, back dates warrants and other bs. It seems the judiciary don't (want to) understand computers well enough. They just accept government claims of necessity.
It's sadly more nuanced than that because the answer to the question Can police do X? Is not effectively answered til binding precedent is created in the Courts, which requires someone to fight it all the way up. Remember, judges are signing these blatantly overbroad warrants in the first place. So there's a judiciary crisis already at play
> then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
I don't think putting people that want to inform themselves under suspicion is feasible and it probably should not be legal. This isn't conductive to solving crimes and has severe chilling effects.
For something like catching a bomber or people that just kidnapped a girl even if this warrant is deemed illegal the cops are probably making a bet that they'll be swimming in better evidence once they nail on a suspect and do regular surveillance.
"probable" has a very specific meaning. If the police can construct a query that returns 1-2 results and on average one of those results is the killer than its "probable" otherwise its not.
The President is basically the head of law enforcement in the federal government. Police organizations in the USA have a long history of pushing the limits of what is Constitutional. After all, they just want to get their job done and leave it up to the judiciary to decide what is Constitutional.
"Accidental leak reveals US government has secretly hit Google with 'keyword warrants' to identify ANYONE searching certain names, addresses, and phone numbers"
This is historical - it is disclosure.
Talk about the constitution all you like, but was anyone in any doubt that they were already doing this? That they suck up all the data from media companies to have a mega-graph? That they are running accurate simulations of us (Sentient World Simulation), in order to better manage us?
And don't expect anything to change - Google et al could change this is a minute - they have the lobbyists to get whatever they want. They don't want. This is good for the government and the corporations. In fact, what's the difference? We are living in technocratic fascism.
Maybe the correct response to unconstitutional, secret warrants is to refuse to comply, maybe even refuse to respond?
It's not clear to me what would happen next but I can't imagine Pichai would be arrested. Maybe a datacenter would be raided (could FBI even guess where this data might be physically located?) but at least then some public action would have to happen and break the secrecy.
I would love for this to be viable. But I can't help but think there are all sorts of ways for our intelligence agencies to ruin a person's life for not complying. I'm not even suggesting some kind of spy-novel intrigue, you can just tell them to comply or they'll drag you and your company through the mud until they get what they want. Imagine taking a principled stand and then suddenly having your life examined under a microscope by the FBI or the IRS. It would be a totally unrelated audit, just how some people tend to be subject to random additional screening at airports.
It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.
This is what I fear is going to happen once surveillance-type robots start appearing in the streets. The narrative is that we'd somehow destroy them on sight but the truth is that that would be criminally persecuted.
The recent documents made public have shown that google doesn't give a shit about moral integrity. What makes you think that they would put themselves at risk for some kind of non-monetary public good?
According to Forbes (who published the unsealed the docs), nothing is known about whether or not Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are even complying with the requests, or to what extent if they are.
I know a guy that was working for a defense contractor in the 2000s that searched his military ranked boss's name on Google and told me he was told the next day not to do that anymore.
I mean yea, everything you do at work in a defense contractor is keylogged. They don't need to ask Google, they know what you're doing on their network.
I'm not disputing the idea that he was told this but that's a weird thing to be told just for googling someones name. Maybe he was just curious about his background and wanted to read his wikipedia page.
In principle, by the letter and spirit of the law (bad as it is in this case), sure. In practice, I very much doubt anyone would dare arrest someone with Sundar Pichai's money and social standing for anything less than murder or insider trading basically.
If Sundar decided to fight this (I'm not saying he would), then Google would probably file for an injunction to quash the request. No arrests, no raids.
The judge that issued the warrant would order Google into court and administer hefty fines for a few days. if they still refused the court could order arrest warrants for executives of the company until they comply.
Federal agents raided the home of John Doe this morning, accused of searching for terms such a “PipeBombJS” and “IED components for React”. The suspect was making pour over coffee when he was apprehended.
Real case: the default installer for GNUradio is called "pybombs". Last time I searched for it, google tried to auto-correct to one of those bad terms:
> Glock 26 - a ceramic handgun that can't be detected by airport scanners (a reader informs us that the Glock 26 is only partly ceramic, the bullets are metal and is can be detected at airports - so we should really shift this one into the X-file list)
They pulled this directly from "Die Hard", the Glock 26 is just a cut-down Glock 19, with a big fat metal slide being integral to the gun's functionality.
heh, Crypto AG is on that list. prescient. though so is "speedbump" and "meta" so meh. such a weird list, extremely specific keywords like listening post codenames but then extremely common ones too.
Saying the word "privacy" triggers the global warrantless surveillance system? That's pretty amusing. They must have quite the dossier on a lot of people here, including me.
I'm not really sure it's a idea that's usable, I mean the results of the framework would end up below results on actual explosions, so it'd be a PITA to search for information... I remember one tool called Beaver that was part of a deployement, really annoying to track down the documentation and existing issues
There was a free to play FPS game called "Dirty Bomb" (made by Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory's Splash Damage). Always felt a little weird googling that name.
Various leaks over the years have showed us how when programs doing icky stuff are revealed, they are "shut down" only to be recycled as new secret programs with "new" mandates doing exactly the same thing.
After Snowden, it'd be naive to assume that the US government isn't still vacuuming up every possible source of data that it can.
It is also naive to assume that the various data brokers doing the same thing for commercial purposes aren't also open books to the various 3-letter agencies.
I think that's the point. It gives the government an easy in to collect more data on any and all of these users, regardless of whether it is pertinent to a specific case.
Exactly. Gotta start collecting danger on every teenager who downloads the anarchist cookbook on the off chance they become a far right truck bomber in the next 20yr.
Yet every time something happens it seems like the suspect was on law enforcement's radar and they did nothing. Odd. Oh well, I'm sure a bigger data haystack to find needles in will solve that. /s
>> It gives the government an easy in to collect more data on any and all of these users, regardless of whether it is pertinent to a specific case.
That seems a little tinfoil hat to me. Like there are government people with lots of time on their hands to chase leads on things that are not related to a case. OTOH there seems to be a lot of pre-emptive searching going on, particularly in the area of terrorism related activity. On the other other hand, in that case I think we want them to foil plots before they are enacted right? It seems to be a hard set of concerns to balance. We could opt for the most privacy oriented approach, but I don't think there's much public data on what the consequences of that would be in terms of bad things happening.
If the image is accurate I think "motion led" would also be in scope for initial collection. There is a filtering process after the search term net that determines whether it is in scope for the warrant. Given the dubious framing of these search terms and past examples like the NSA watching every Linux Journal visitor I'm disinclined to trust such a process. RIP to work schedule of the poor intern who has to weed out all the results for suburban parents setting up Halloween decorations with glowing eyes.
I made the switch from DDG to Startpage.com the day when Bing/DDG censored "tank man" results on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, haven't looked back.
I do miss the !bangs, so I have a browser shortcut to access those when I need them.
Google is also censoring a large list of search terms when used in combination with reddit. For example, you'll get zero results for "site:reddit.com underage".
I find it interesting that to this day, a search for the phrase “Bing/DDG censored 'tank man' results on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square“ returns very few results in DDG, but several pages in Google.
I would not cite this as an example of why to use one search engine over another. It's a good example of why to use more than one search engine.
Readit News
AFAIK a warrant usually is tied to a specific person or a specific crime. In other words, if an explosion killed Harry McHarryface, then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
Or if the fertilizer used in the bomb was shown to have been purchased on March 10, then maybe a search for "fertilizer" in the weeks before March 10 would be allowed.
But not a generic search.
Just my opinion that's not legal advice.
Sure, though it’s worth noting that nothing prohibits the police from walking down the street and asking people. Those people don’t have to talk to the police, but…
Google will fight warrants like this. AT&T doesn’t. Other companies have varying policies on this.
Obviously, one can’t assume data is not available to law enforcement merely because the police would need a warrant to get it over a possessor’s objections.
This isn't a hypothetical situation - according to the LA Times, it's how they ended up cracking the Austin bombing case that involved the Google warrant [1]:
> Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials “went to every hardware store” in the area to find customers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, McCaul said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
> “The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him — because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras — was when he walked into Home Depot,” McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance video of Conditt walking into the store in a wig and walking back out to a vehicle with a license plate connected to his name.
So I think there's a little more nuance here. Certainly matching a list of generic terms seems too broad. But a warrant for specific keywords that was limited to a specific city and time frame might be analogous to going to all the hardware stores in the city and pulling security footage?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-austin-bombings-suspect...
Scenario: Hello fellow criminals. Instead of point to point communication, we will make random posts/pages that have our combination of words on them. So if you want to read our communication, do a google search for the exact quote "purple antelope shoe couch can squirrel."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434448
Come back with a warrant
I'd get one, but I'm afraid someone would steal it.
We can probably figure out how to extract such data and cross reference it without making any of it available to random government employees.
Say you take pictures of license plates, store the data some place safe and allow a query of 5 recent armed robbery locations. If the result contains multiple cars matching 2 locations no results are returned. The moment a 6th robbery happens and a single car matches 3 out of 5 law enforcement can start looking for it immediately.
Sure, you'd get pretty mad if every time you get robbed the police searches your vehicle but they don't need to break anything and you will get over it.
This is so difficult, more or less impossible. Prosecutors and LE will likely not bring forward a criminal case based on this sort of unlawful search, as the discovery would detonate the case if brought before a mildly competent defense. The defense would have a really great speaking season following the court proceedings if they were to catch such a windfall.
I speculate that these sort of illegal searches are conducted regularly, and serve to fuel parallel construction.
In the OP article, it says that LE "did not need to use these search warrants to find the bomber" whose picture is inline, instead they correlated his "unique pink construction gloves" to some home depot footage of his purchase, linking his identity to the purchase with video evidence.
I think it is very possible for parallel construction to provide the required leads to locate this video footage. The search warrants can be as illegal as the day is long, but their effect may remain invisible so long as it generates a lead which is not obviously poisoned fruit.
Honestly, my feeling is the moment judges and congress felt OK with actions even pondering such acts we had a fundamental democratic problem in our hands.
As they say if you put a cop car on someone's tail they are going to get a ticket.
But it's for a somewhat meta-reason: there have been numerous cases where something strikes me as blatantly unconstitutional, but the SCOTUS has allowed it anyway.
I don't think putting people that want to inform themselves under suspicion is feasible and it probably should not be legal. This isn't conductive to solving crimes and has severe chilling effects.
Deleted Comment
Edit: why am I being downvotes? The president explicitly stated his plan to ignore another SCOTUS ruling
People only think executive overreach is cool as long as they can ignore the downsides.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
This is historical - it is disclosure.
Talk about the constitution all you like, but was anyone in any doubt that they were already doing this? That they suck up all the data from media companies to have a mega-graph? That they are running accurate simulations of us (Sentient World Simulation), in order to better manage us?
And don't expect anything to change - Google et al could change this is a minute - they have the lobbyists to get whatever they want. They don't want. This is good for the government and the corporations. In fact, what's the difference? We are living in technocratic fascism.
It's not clear to me what would happen next but I can't imagine Pichai would be arrested. Maybe a datacenter would be raided (could FBI even guess where this data might be physically located?) but at least then some public action would have to happen and break the secrecy.
It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.
Ummmm, no. Correct response is courts and then comply. Pichai would lose his job in a minute.
The Board is not going to fire Pichai over this, provided he appears to be fighting through the courts rather than practicing outright defiance.
If you want to see actual symbiotic entities, go look at social media in China or American defense contractors.
it never ever goes this far
https://github.com/gnuradio/pybombs
Deleted Comment
"Yeah in my last project I developed a web app based on BinLaden Framework and IsisDB"..
Deleted Comment
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words/
They pulled this directly from "Die Hard", the Glock 26 is just a cut-down Glock 19, with a big fat metal slide being integral to the gun's functionality.
After Snowden, it'd be naive to assume that the US government isn't still vacuuming up every possible source of data that it can.
It is also naive to assume that the various data brokers doing the same thing for commercial purposes aren't also open books to the various 3-letter agencies.
> ("fragmentation") AND ("bomb" OR "explosive" OR "ied" OR "explosion" OR "pipebomb" OR "pipe bomb" OR "PVC bomb")
Yet every time something happens it seems like the suspect was on law enforcement's radar and they did nothing. Odd. Oh well, I'm sure a bigger data haystack to find needles in will solve that. /s
That seems a little tinfoil hat to me. Like there are government people with lots of time on their hands to chase leads on things that are not related to a case. OTOH there seems to be a lot of pre-emptive searching going on, particularly in the area of terrorism related activity. On the other other hand, in that case I think we want them to foil plots before they are enacted right? It seems to be a hard set of concerns to balance. We could opt for the most privacy oriented approach, but I don't think there's much public data on what the consequences of that would be in terms of bad things happening.
I do miss the !bangs, so I have a browser shortcut to access those when I need them.
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
I would not cite this as an example of why to use one search engine over another. It's a good example of why to use more than one search engine.
Dead Comment