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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."
Wouldn't "Airplane Mode" do the same thing, you know, without carrying around a grounded metal cage?
The problem with this is the way crimes get prosecuted in the US. The DA will threaten you with a bunch of charges that will put you away for a long time if you don't plea bargin. It will cost a very large amount of money to defend yourself. So if you happen to be some random person in the area who LE or the DA thinks might have done it, even if you are innocent your life could be wrecked. Perople need to realize carrying tracking devices around with you incurs a small chance of having your life ruined and it might not be something you want to do.
"...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
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."
Same could be said about public CCTVs.
Trust the PRISM brands with their hardware to say off is off?
Trust but verify now works for the faraday cage.
The big telco brands cant be trusted.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This isn't about technology, it's about the fact that the police shouldn't be handed that kind of information without a warrant drawn on probable cause. They don't have probable cause here to say that most of those cellphones belong to a suspect. This is a dragnet, arresting everybody that was present without any specific reason for believing that they did anything wrong.
Except that normally when they do that, there's a police officer present and the people being arrested are usually interviewed before being cuffed and have some knowledge that something illegal just happened that could place them under arrest. In this case, the cops will have an easier time tricking one of those people into confessing because they won't know they need an attorney.
Apologists like you make me sick. If we had real laws on the books, this would be a much smaller problem.
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.
Could not the device continue to collect location data without emitting ref signals?
The 4th Amendment is pretty clear that warrants should only be issued on having probable cause. What they asked for sounds very much like the general warrants that are explicitly banned by the same amendment.
It scares me that google, a greedy for-profit company, has all that personal data. I don't want them and their business partners to have it.
Sure, I'd rather not give that data to law-enforcement either, but it's a lot less bad than google and friends having it.
How are you okay sharing it with google and hundreds of "partner" companies, but somehow not okay with "guvurnment" getting access?
I'm not - which is why I leave location services off on my phone, as would any non-stupid criminal.
My objection is that a warrant for information about "every person who was in a 7 city block area in a 2.5 hour window" is ridiculously over-broad, and will almost certainly put dozens if not hundreds of innocent people under suspicion, while not giving any clue whatsoever about the actual criminal unless they were bone-headedly stupid.
It's only a stone's throw from outright government mass surveillance (which I hope you understand the dangers of) - in any city there's almost certainly several crimes within a 10th of a mile of you on any given day. Only it's even worse because it's completely blind to any even marginally intelligent criminal, and thus can only be used against the innocent and the idiot criminals - and if your criminal is an idiot then it should be easy enough to catch them through real police work.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This is indeed the problem. You might be able to detect things like power draw and RF oscillators if the device is receiving RF signals even when in airplane mode, but it is harder to do than measuring transmissions.
There is also a question about what "airplane mode" actually does. Okay, it prevents transmissions, but what about GPS? It appears to turn it off, but why? GPS is receive only, there is no transmission and no danger to aircraft even if it is turned on. Chances are it turns GPS off just to satisfy clueless airline staff and consumers.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
GPS still works in airplane mode, as it receives a signal, rather than broadcasting one. You think Location Services doesn't log that shit and upload it when you turn airplane mode off?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Very funny, newbie, but the US is conservative relative to other countries (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-USA-as-a-nation-so-conservative-compared-to-Europe).
Yes, the absolutely should let them go until they have more evidence. At a certain point, it's just not worth it to society to have the police pulling over random people without cause.
And what happens if in the course of one of these illegal fishing expeditions they find evidence of an unrelated crime or get frustrated that they haven't made a collar and decide to plant some evidence? Is it still OK?
The courts regularly make incompetent rulings like that. The whole point of the 4th amendment is that we have the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. If they didn't know which car had the thieves in it and had no evidence to suggest which one it was, then they were completely wrong in searching all those people illegally.
People like you that make excuses for this kind of blatantly unconstitutional activity by the cops are why we've lost so many of our rights already. Allowing the police to perform speculative searches without having probable cause is barely any different from allowing them to search random houses for contraband and if people keep making excuses, it's hard to say that it won't go that far.
I could constantly monitor and analyse my network traffic or I could just save myself time and money and not buy something I don't trust.
Doctors save lives, cops mostly destroy lives, in a country that has a 1% incarceration rate. If most doctors were like most cops, they'd be sued into bankruptcy for gross negligence. No need to help cops destroy more lives.
You still wooshed. The technology is not what is being objected to. The objection is turning the location information over to police with no probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.
If the doctor is doing a CAT scan on me, he already has probable cause. Nobody goes to the doctor reporting they feel fine and have no history of serious illness and then gets a CAT scan. Also, even if the doctor wants you to get a CAT scan, you are free to decline. You probably shouldn't, but you can refuse.
What Google is doing is not really as bad. They can't detain me and ask questions about what I was doing. They can ask and I can dismiss the question unanswered. They cannot put me on trial and they cannot jail me. They cannot cause me to need to spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer while they try to convince a jury that I should be locked in a cage for many years.
No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure.
It can - so long as they aren't turning on the transmitters in the phone in short bursts once every minute or so. In that case you need something that can log those short bursts of RF over a specified band or bands. You might be able to put something together around SDR that would do that, but it would take some time and effort. AFAIK the only off-the-shelf solution would be one of the more sophisticated, (read "expen$ive"), spectrum analyzers.
Even then, your phone might be receiving in stealth mode, in which case there might be provisions for making it 'phone home' on demand. Then it's likely that you would never catch your phone defying the Airplane Mode setting. If that capability doesn't exist now, it almost certainly will in the future. And in THAT case, the Faraday cage that others have suggested is the only measure, (short of not carrying a phone at all), that will keep you off their radar.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
1) A smartphone is a general purpose computer. At this point, it might be a multicore, >1 GHz computer with lots of memory and storage.
2) There are many things you can do with a general purpose computer that isn't connected to the network. Especially one that is replete with useful sensors like cameras, motion, iris, fingerprint, microphone and so forth, as well as audio and visual output and handy data input mechanisms such as keyboards and touch-sensitivity.
And you think this is a problem? lol...
If I were you, I'd worry about clearing some lower bars before I went there. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Location services create a circumstance where (presumably) the phone does not give location data to apps running on it.
Turning them off does not prevent you from being tracked, either in realtime or after the fact. The cellphone is constantly talking to the towers, and the towers, taken several at a time, constantly locate you fairly precisely - they actually have to in order to hand you off from tower to tower.
Aside from that, if the phone knew were you were at any point, the motion sensors can keep track of you for quite a while under a very wide range of circumstances even if no communications are presently available to it. It can also acquire information from your surroundings that can locate you WRT any particular time.
You may even be complicit in this - taking a photo, making an audio recording, etc. It depends on what's running on the phone at the time. Which is something you aren't in full control of unless you wrote your phone's OS and all its applications and drivers. Which is... unlikely.
If you really don't want to be tracked through the phone's capabilities, in realtime or after the fact, you have very few options: Don't use a phone, let the battery die, take the battery out, or don't carry the phone.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
GPS works fine with airplane mode. I use it to check airspeed when sitting in window seats. There are GPS-only location apps for you to nerd out on individual satellite signal, etc.
Flying in airplanes can get pretty tedious.
Yea, the previous Conservative government as part of their tough on crime agenda really weakened civil rights. It did take them 3 tries as the people did scream but they were patient and finally implemented it to "save the children" after accusing everyone of being a pervert didn't go over well. And of course the current government finds it a handy tool and is not going to revoke it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Blocking traffic and taking a quick look would have been fine. Having people get out of their cars, handcuffing them, and conducting a warrantless search is a horrendous abuse of rights. The guy robbed a bank, not machine gunned a bunch of kids then ran off with a suicide vest yelling something about his next target. That you even phrased your post to imply it's somehow ok for those jackbooted authoritarians to handcuff and search dozens of people simply for being in the wrong spot at the wrong time means you clearly have no respect for the 4th Amendment.
GPS is receive only, there is no transmission and no danger to aircraft even if it is turned on. Chances are it turns GPS off just to satisfy clueless airline staff and consumers.
Radio receivers aren't generally allowed. I assume this dates back from the era whne cheapass radios would piss out the IF and its considerable harmonics (linear? ha!) all over the spectrum to the point where it could interfere with the pilot's radio, so receivers got banned and this rule has been cargo-culted ever since.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
WHOOSH! The Stasi would be the part where judges are issuing warrants they shouldn't. The only reason what Google is doing is a problem is because it might enable police and judges to violate the Constitution.
GPS is GPS is GPS ... ... how often the position is recalculated. ...
Every GPS handles altitude. It us basically impossible not to handle it.
Speed and direction depends in the sample rate
There is on receiving side no difference between consumer or other GPS, it is just a receiver
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not all is at it seems. Not long ago, I was discussing this with some colleagues, the fact Google Maps has a timeline of everywhere I go, how long I was there, how long I drive to get from place to place etc.
I concluded this tracking could be turned right around into a fantastic alibi. Since it tracks everything, every day, establish a normal pattern, for quite a bit of a time (a few years is preferable!), now, one day, leave your phone somewhere it's expected to be for a certain duration of time, while you go without it to commit a heinous crime. Return to collect phone and carry on. You could easily point to this data and say "I didn't do it, phone proves I'm innocent."
The moral of the story? Don't trust that data. It is vastly easy for the common idiot to falsify. If I thought of it, millions of others did too, I'm not exceptionally clever.
GPS works fine with airplane mode. I use it to check airspeed when sitting in window seats.
You cannot check airspeed using GPS. Airspeed is measured by measuring the difference in airpressure from the pitot port and the static port.
What you're measuring is groundspeed. If you have both (that is, groundspeed from GPS and airspeed from the pitot-static system), you can calculate with and wind direction, and a compass heading.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
The GPS chipsets in phones are far and away the biggest sellers of GPS chipsets. With additional specialisations for reducing power (compared to the Garmin GPS which I had in the early 2000s). But why would a phone track fewer satellites than (say) 15kg of suveyor's GPS with a differential base station and another 5kg of battery for each station? Partly for power use - each received signal and decoding cost miliwatt-seconds of battery power - and partly for speed of response.
Three satellites will give you a ground position. Actually, three satellites will give you the crossing point of three arcs of position solutions. Which almost certainly will not cross, but will define a triangle (*) on the ground. What is the probability of the true ground position being inside that triangle ? 12.5% - 1 in 8.
That is why GPS systems are more accurate with more satellites, and why they strive to acquire as many satellites as the system can handle.
The same problem applies to getting an altitude, for which you need a 4th satellite. It's actually a bit worse, since the system is optimised for ground positions not altitudes, so the uncertainty in altitude is almost always bigger than for ground position. (*) triangle - with arc of a conic section edges, not straight lines. But it doesn't change the argument, just makes the geometry much more complex.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"