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North Carolina Police Obtained Warrants Demanding All Google Users Near Four Crime Scenes (wral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the public records reporter from North Carolina TV station 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... The demands Raleigh police issued for Google data [in two homicide cases] described a 17-acre area that included both homes and businesses... The account IDs aren't limited to electronics running Android. The warrant includes any device running location-enabled Google apps, according to Raleigh Police Department spokeswoman Laura Hourigan...
On March 16, 2017, a five-alarm fire ripped through the unfinished Metropolitan apartment building on West Jones Street... About two months later, Raleigh police obtained a search warrant for Google account IDs that showed up near the block of the Metropolitan between 7:30 and 10 p.m. the night of the fire... In addition to anonymized numerical identifiers, the warrant calls on Google to release time stamped location coordinates for every device that passed through the area. Detectives wrote that they'd narrow down that list and send it back to the company, demanding "contextual data points with points of travel outside of the geographical area" during an expanded timeframe. Another review would further cull the list, which police would use to request user names, birth dates and other identifying information of the phones' owners.
"Do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?" asks a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. And Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also criticized the procedure. "To just say, 'Criminals commit crimes, and we know that most people have cell phones,' that should not be enough to get the geo-location on anyone that happened to be in the vicinity of a particular incident during a particular time." She believes that without probable cause the police department is "trying to use technology as a hack for their job... It does not have to be that we have to give up our privacy rights in order to participate in the digital revolution."
Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly. "At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people."
On March 16, 2017, a five-alarm fire ripped through the unfinished Metropolitan apartment building on West Jones Street... About two months later, Raleigh police obtained a search warrant for Google account IDs that showed up near the block of the Metropolitan between 7:30 and 10 p.m. the night of the fire... In addition to anonymized numerical identifiers, the warrant calls on Google to release time stamped location coordinates for every device that passed through the area. Detectives wrote that they'd narrow down that list and send it back to the company, demanding "contextual data points with points of travel outside of the geographical area" during an expanded timeframe. Another review would further cull the list, which police would use to request user names, birth dates and other identifying information of the phones' owners.
"Do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?" asks a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. And Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also criticized the procedure. "To just say, 'Criminals commit crimes, and we know that most people have cell phones,' that should not be enough to get the geo-location on anyone that happened to be in the vicinity of a particular incident during a particular time." She believes that without probable cause the police department is "trying to use technology as a hack for their job... It does not have to be that we have to give up our privacy rights in order to participate in the digital revolution."
Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly. "At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people."
"...no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, ..."
What judge signed the warrant? They're a clear and present danger to the Constitution.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Trust the PRISM brands with their hardware to say off is off?
No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure. And what are the odds that no one would have noticed and blown the whistle if airplane mode didn't actually work?
Sigh. This site used to be populated by people with a clue. This is like all of those people who believe that smart speakers must be sending 24/7 audio to the cloud, but don't bother to simply measure the data the devices send/receive at their routers and do the math.
Paranoia is well and good, but being paranoid about a possibility that you can easily check yourself is stupid. Computers aren't magic.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Even that was far more tightly constrained. The people they looked at were within a 1 minute window, not 2 hours. They were at the exact spot the criminals were known to be in, not within a several block area.
Still, they should not have been cuffed, and they should not have even been asked for their names unless or until the money or weapons were found in their car. Everyone else should have received a heartfelt apology. Anything seen that was not related to the specific crime should have been ignored.
The one big difference is that they have reasonable evidence to believe it's one of those 25 people. Arguably, all of those people are suspects.
In this case, they're using Google to find suspects. "We have no suspects, so let's demand that Google tell us all of the people who were in the area around that time and we'll make them suspects."
It's one thing to investigate suspects. It's another thing to investigate whether someone is a suspect.