All you need is Google. That’s how things have been going in the law enforcement world. If you don’t know who you’re looking for, just ask Google to do it for you. A variety of warrants that demand Google search its data stores for personal information (that might lead investigators to find potential suspects [who can then be properly targeted with more normal warrants]) have been standard operating procedure for years.
There’s no probable cause to believe Google has committed any crimes. Nor is there necessarily even any reason to believe Google is housing data pertaining to criminal activity. At best, these warrants — ones that seek anything from mass groupings of location data to information on people using certain search words when utilizing Google’s search engine — simply assume Google has collected so much data, it’s a logical place to start an investigation.
The most common form of these Google-centric warrants is the “geofence warrant,” a warrant that asks Google to provide certain information about anybody in a certain area at a certain time. These warrants make anyone in the area a criminal suspect and, if Google complies, citizens are at the mercy of investigators who have the power to decide who is or isn’t a criminal suspect, even when the geofenced areas include things like apartment complexes, churches, or heavily trafficked business areas.
The next most popular is the “keyword” warrant. Using even more specious reasoning, investigators approach courts with warrant affidavits attesting that Google houses information on Google searches that may be relevant to the investigation. Without a doubt, Google stores information about keyword searches. But just because it does store this info doesn’t mean the keywords provided by investigators have anything to do with the crimes being investigated.
This is the latest wrinkle in the Investigatory world. As Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes, keyboard warriors working for federal agencies are now using warrants and court orders to demand Google turn over information on users who may have watched certain videos that have been viewed tens of thousands of times.
Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects.
In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting.
In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times.
The feds couldn’t figure out how to set up a honey pot, nor could they figure out how to monitor these links on their own. Following these failures, they then asked a judge for permission to hassle Google into turning over information on (potentially) 30,000 different YouTube viewers. I’m sure it’s more nuanced than that, but that’s what the plain text conveys.
The unsealed court order wasn’t just fishing for a list of vague identifiers that could be winnowed down to a list of suspects and a follow-up warrant demanding actual identifying information on these ~30,000 YouTube users. No, it appears the feds led with the big ask, demanding names, addresses, phone numbers, and user activity for every viewer of these videos between January 1-8, 2023. AND(!!) it asked Google to provide IP addresses for all viewers who were not logged into (or did not possess) Google accounts.
And if you think that fishing hole is pretty fucking big, just keep reading. Brewster has tracked down a few other similar demands for YouTube viewer data and 30,000 viewers is actually on the shallow end of this metaphor. An attempt to find someone who called in a bomb threat resulted in this spectacular abuse of process:
[Federal investigators] asked Google to provide a list of accounts that “viewed and/or interacted with” eight YouTube live streams and the associated identifying information during specific timeframes. That included a video posted by Boston and Maine Live, which has 130,000 subscribers.
This was supposedly justified by the fact that one camera installed by a local business provided a continuous live stream of the area where the supposed bomb had been placed. (It does not appear that any bomb was actually placed anywhere, but a bomb threat alone is often enough to attract the attention of federal officers.)
If 30,000 users being subjected to a single federal law enforcement search is unequivocally bad, the search of perhaps 130,000 users is an almost unimaginable abuse of government power.
We still don’t know how these inexplicably broad requests were handled by Google, nor whether they were instrumental in the prosecution of criminal activity. The DOJ refused to comment on the court orders or the cases. Google has yet to say whether or not it complied with these ridiculous court orders. The court system itself hasn’t been much help to the general public, even though it’s more than willing to assist another government branch by acquiescing to its requests for secrecy.
It’s not just the Fourth Amendment in play here. There’s also the First Amendment. Much like in cases involving mass keyword searches, citizens should feel free to consume any non-illegal content they want without fearing the government may demand their content provider turn over their identifying info.
This is a scary step forward by law enforcement. Hopefully, Google has been resisting these clearly unconstitutional demands for data. And even more hopefully, courts will start seeing enough of these broad warrants, they’ll start shutting down this new form of government overreach.
