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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."
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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