14 ms·

I'm trying to see what the big deal is here (relax, I'll explain). Police are not asking for the entire search history of everyone in the town, then combing th

• jmathai 10y ago
  > which I don't think is warranted That's the point of disagreement.
• hartator 10y ago
  A better analogy will be someone trying to rob a bank with a grey hoody and the police reviewing tapes of people closets to see everyone who bought a grey hoody.
  • seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Not even, the correct analogy would be to view all the CCTV cameras in the city, no matter who owned them, on that day to see who was wearing a particular shade of grey hoody.
    • deleted 10y ago
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    • dagenleg 10y ago
      Sure, if you admit that every closet in the city has a CCTV camera, you analogy is perfectly valid.
      • mulmen 10y ago
        Why would the cameras have to be in closets? If the hoodie is in your closet then you aren't wearing it so it means nothing. If you are seen wearing the same clothes as a suspect in a crime in a nearby location at the same time then I think that's a reasonable way to narrow down a list of suspects.
        • hackuser 10y ago
          The point is, the Google search is done in the privacy of your own home.
          • mulmen 10y ago
            Are phone calls not also done in the safety of your own home? Can police request call records? Google does not exist inside your house, neither does the internet. No reasonable person could believe that they do.
  • Mithaldu 10y ago
    Most people's closets don't fetch their contents from a place outside the people's house. By doing a google search you're explicitly asking a third party to bring you something.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • Ensorceled 10y ago
    No. A better analogy would be someone trying to rob a bank wearing a George grey hoody and the cops asking Walmart for records on who bought grey hoodies in that style. Which they actually do. And nobody freaks out about it.
    • charonn0 10y ago
      What's the Google search equivalent of paying cash?
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        DuckDuckGo. Probably.
      • rhino369 10y ago
        proxy without signing into google? That isn't perfect, but neither is buying in cash. They can pull video tapes or ask the cashier.
  • matthewmacleod 10y ago
    I'm not sure why you're looking in the proverbial closets – aren't you rather looking at all the tapes maintained in stores to see who bought a grey hoody?
  • IanCal 10y ago
    That breaks two of the key parts of this case. 1. You're giving police full access to tapes of everyone's closets. 2. Grey hoodies are common and this therefore feels like massive overkill. More realistic, for the purposes of torturing analogies further, would be the police asking for a list of all people who bought a particular and rare style of designer hat from a particular designer store on the day someone was seen committing a crime while wearing an obviously brand new one. What's being handed to the police is smaller, less revealing and much more targeted than "footage of everyone's closets".
    • _archon_ 10y ago
      I propose further bending the analogy to make it more correct: >a particular and rare style should be "a particular style", since we don't know how prevalent the image is in places that aren't major image search engines, or for other search terms within those engines. >from a particular designer store should be "from a specific location of a particular global discount store" >on the day someone was seen committing a crime while wearing an obviously brand new one. on the Tuesday before someone was seen committing a crime while wearing one. (images, once acquired, last forever; there's nothing saying the image was acquired in the time window of the subpoena)
      • IanCal 10y ago
        I'm not sure I understand your changes. We're talking about searching for a relatively unknown person, so I'd assume we're talking about a rare search term. This is not like asking for who searched about "wire fraud". > >from a particular designer store should be "from a specific location of a particular global discount store" Sure, fair enough, my point was simply that it was a rare thing and pretty identifiable. > (images, once acquired, last forever; there's nothing saying the image was acquired in the time window of the subpoena) I'm sorry, I don't understand this sentence.
    • ryandrake 10y ago
      Both examples should be equally unacceptable. When you're asking for "a list of all people who X" it's a fishing expedition not a targeted investigation of a few suspects. It doesn't matter how many rows the SELECT returns.
• compiler-guy 10y ago
  Yes it is different, because in the convenience store case, the offended party is supplying evidence it collected itself. In this case, a third party would be provided evidence.
  • BoysenberryPi 10y ago
    >In this case, a third party would be provided evidence. It's a pretty common thing for a completely unrelated store's surveillance cameras to have footage of a robbery of another store. That's why police ask every store in the area when one is robbed.
    • compiler-guy 10y ago
      Police asking, and a judge ordering are pretty different things.
      • harryh 10y ago
        "a judge says yes" is right there in the title on HN.
      • ptaipale 10y ago
        Depends on jurisdiction, but I think over here, the store owners give it routinely, firstly because it is in their best interests (to catch criminals in the area) and secondly, because if they wouldn't, a judge would anyway give the order.
        • _archon_ 10y ago
          The judge would give the order after ascertaining that the video was relevant to catching the criminal, and specific enough that it only included the time period when the criminal would have been likely to be captured and no longer, and that no unnecessary camera angles or other information be included in the order. There is a difference between shop owners volunteering camera information and this case. This is closer to all shop owners in town being ordered to turn over the personal information of everyone who bought a shovel, because they found a body that had been buried.
• baumandm 10y ago
  You make a compelling point, but the convenience store analogy is slightly different in that the footage is likely direct evidence of a crime, making it easy to identify the culprit. Whereas a Google search is entirely circumstancial. Now ideally our justice system would work as you describe, but there's still a risk of an innocent person being charged.
• rayiner 10y ago
  > Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery. The crux of the debate is whether Google is a quasi public place, like a convenience store, or something private, like your closet. I think legally, Google is no different than any other business. Following the appropriate process, police can ask a convenience store to search their sales records to see who bought something on a particular date. They can ask a credit card company about someone's purchases on a particular date. On the other hand, people disclose information to Google that they don't disclose to their convenience store clerk. That information is even more intimate than what people disclose to a credit card company. Someone's searches can reveal the deepest darkest things about them. On the other other hand, Google as a service is not really one of trust. It's not like a bank that provides a safe deposit box and promises to not look inside (and is usually legally barred from doing so). Google rummages through your personal information for its own profit. Twenty years ago, if you had asked people: "If you had a service that data mined the information you gave it for advertising purposes, where potentially dozens of engineers and operators have access to that information--would you consider that a trusted and private system?" They would have said "no."
  • Mithaldu 10y ago
    > People might think of it as a trusted, private service I think the problem is a little worse. Most people don't think about it in the first place, so the reason this question becomes interesting is that for most people it's a question they never asked themselves. The answer is clear and obvious already based on the current legal framework, but it's news- and ask-worthy because for many people it's the first exposure to it.
  • mulmen 10y ago
    This seems a bit different though, the police are asking Google for a list of people who searched for a specific term, they aren't asking for the entire search history of those people. In that way I think the potential for revealing personal secrets is much more limited than it appears in the headline.
    • Ntrails 10y ago
• libertymcateer 10y ago
  Thank you for this very good tl;dr.
• guelo 10y ago
  > who had $28K stolen from him It was attempted bank fraud, they did not succeed.
  • _archon_ 10y ago
    Perhaps, but the perpetrator should be found and charged nonetheless.
• mtalantikite 10y ago
  In public I have no reasonable expectation of privacy, I know that as a citizen and (reluctantly) accept that. Expectations are different on the Internet.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • jdmichal 10y ago
    If Google search history was considered public information, they wouldn't need a warrant at all. The fact that they need a warrant confirms that this was an otherwise private communication.
• mulmen 10y ago
  That's a compelling argument, do you think a Google search for a person's name (or maybe any term) is similar to calling a phone number? If the police asked the phone company for the name of everyone who called (555) 867-5309 on a given date or time I don't think that sounds unreasonable.
  • _archon_ 10y ago
    A procedural request for static information is very different than an intentional action to create interaction with another person. Also, in this case, the warrant asks for (to adapt your analogy) the numbers of anyone who called such phone: -only during a small time window, when in reality it doesn't matter when the query happened -from a phone only in town, when in reality the scammer could have called (google searched) from amywhere -also assumes the caller was the end user of the dialogue, and that the dialogue was relevant to the crime (images can be traded and downloaded from places other than GIS) I think a more correct analogy is to say that a crime happened to a certain phone number, and now a warrant exists to find everyone in town who looked at that page in their phone book in a certain time range. edit: formatting
    • mulmen 10y ago
      We don't know what other investigation the police have done. By limiting it to a geographic area I can at least imagine they have done some other investigation to narrow it down to that area. I don't know this but I do think it is promising that the police are narrowing their search to a specific time and area, that seems like something that should happen in an investigation. I don't think that is a more correct analogy because as I read it the police are asking for people who searched for pictures that were used in the fraud. The term doesn't sound like it was for the victim it was for some supporting material to attempt the fraud. "Douglas" (the search term/phone number) is not the victim. You do make a good point about the page in the phone book, that is something I had not considered.
      • _archon_ 10y ago
        >as I read it the police are asking for people who searched for pictures that were used in the fraud. Yes. This is the crux of why I'm uncomfortable with the court order. If the police don't have the criminal and files in custody, there's no way for them to know how the criminal got the image. If they do, how the criminal got the image is immaterial, since google image search is a legal way to obtain images. Maybe they got it from a source before Google indexed it for search. Maybe they got it from a file directory at work, or from someone else's computer, etc. Or from GIS, which is the only thing the police are searching. Without more information than is presented in the article, all the police will be able to definitively say is "These IPs from our region are a small subset of the people who had access to this image." I'm harping on this thread a bit, both because I think the subpoena won't result in meaningful information, and because no judge should have given de jure authority to such a poorly thought out request which breaches privacy. Long-term, the victim of this case might be everyone affected by the legal precedent of granting broad, unnecessary subpoenas for private information. That kind of cost is well over the $28k the victim lost.
• bogomipz 10y ago
  >"Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery?" Yes it is different, what I do in the privacy of my own home is not comparable to a security camera in a public place or a security camera in a grocery store. In the latter I do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy as I am in a public space. >"In either case, obviously innocent bystanders will be quickly eliminated from the list of possible suspects." How do you know this? What if during such a dragnet they see something completely unrelated that they find "interesting"? Also the granularity of GEO-IP information is notoriously unreliable, I don't believe you could limit the scope of a such a request to a particular suburb as the article mentions.
• deleted 10y ago
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• jacquesm 10y ago
  This is exactly what is wrong with dragnet surveillance. So say they get 1 name, and that name happens to be you. I'm sure you had a perfectly good reason to google that name, no matter how obscure it was, and it happens to be a day and a bit before the money was taken (which, btw according to TFA it wasn't). No matter how you spin it, you will look suspicious. Maybe you'll even admit to doing it when you didn't, maybe you'll be offered a plea if you confess. Case closed, crime solved, right? Or rather not, because it is you and you'd never do such a thing? A similar thing happened here in NL. A number of burglaries in a region that was only accessible via a single bridge, and that bridge had a camera on it. Correlate the license plates crossing the bridge with the nights of the burglaries and only one car was left. So that had to be the person that did it. Which, in fact it was! Still, the judge threw out the evidence because it was gathered without specific intent to confirm, not discover that such a person existed, and in theory anybody that crossed that bridge suddenly became a suspect in the case until they could be ruled out. So +1 for clever thinking, -100 for botching a case where there might have been a legitimate way of obtaining this information. Total surveillance means very little crime, but as a society we should push back against that because it also means that we are enabling an element of government that already has a lot of power over our lives. It's worth the occasional $28K loss (presumably to insurance companies) in order to safeguard the rights of the rest of us. Oh, and that's besides the potential for a Joe Job, where you would go to someone else's computer that you access in a coffee shop or some other place where you can get momentary access to someone's computer (co worker, whatever) and then google the name of the person you intend to hit causing them loss of their job and potentially much more. This is just wrong, on many levels.
  • mulmen 10y ago
    You're making a lot of assumptions here though. Is wire fraud just an unsolvable crime? Is all crime on the internet unsolvable because the police cannot gather any evidence at all? I agree that privacy is more important than security but I think you are going a little too far with this comment. Sure, the police should be careful with this evidence and it doesn't prove any wrongdoing but I don't see how it's unreasonable for police to ask who searched for a specific term at a specific time in a specific place.
• fragmede 10y ago
  Is the water getting warm in here or is it just me? -Mr Frog The police are not your friend. In pursuit of the $28k, which I'd hate to have stolen from me, they will callously and casually wreck the lives of anybody this search turns up, especially for any poor, or "immigrant looking" people. Recovering drug addict who's just gotten their life back on track after coming out of prison who's managed to get a stable job, who happened to Google the name of some guy a passenger told him a story about while driving for Uber (in the evenings to make some money on the side)? Yeah he's fucked, despite doing literally nothing wrong here. Call me "jumpy" all you want, that's not at all far fetched.
  • mulmen 10y ago
    This sounds like a very targeted request for information. Sure, police attention is not something anyone should seek out but I don't see how this is different than any other established investigative technique. You have constructed an entirely fictional example to make your point but you have not cited an actual example of the police overstepping their bounds with this type of search. Sorry, that's not compelling to me. I don't completely disagree with you but this doesn't make a convincing case against this type of request to me.
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      > This sounds like a very targeted request for information. To me it sounds like the exact opposite. A targeted request would look like this: We'd like the search history for ip address 212.55.12.23 between Sept. 16 2016 1 am and Sept. 21 2016 9 am related to 'name'. That's a specific request. The present one is a fishing expedition where the police is not confirming something they already know but are looking for someone they theorize might exist.
      • mulmen 10y ago
        Ok yes, that's a fair point. What I mean is that this is much more targeted than the headline makes it sound. At first glance the police department wants access to the entire search history of everyone in some town. In reality they are asking for something much more specific than that.
• _archon_ 10y ago
  >Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery? This is closer to police asking for all security camera footage from all stores in town which sell a product that may or may not have been used in a particular crime. How do police know the image was procured firsthand from google? How do police know the google search was executed from within town? How do police know the image was procured in the given date range? You propose that the obviously innocent users will quickly be removed from the suspect pool after police investigate them. This may be true. I posit that it is unacceptable for the list to exist under these circumstances, because a warrant for information that users have a reasonable expectation of privacy should be specific enough that no innocent people should be affected. I say "reasonable expectation of privacy" here to mean that laypeople expect no tracking, and educated users expect information to be contained entirely in advertising businesses and their partners (google et al.). At no point does a user reasonably expect that, as a matter of course, their search history will be tied to them and presented to law enforcement. I strongly disagree that providing total transparency to law enforcement and trusting them to look only into the matter at hand, and dismiss and destroy all information relevant to the matter at hand, is the best course from a government perspective. Privacy advocates cry shrilly about big brother, but the end result of this policy is too close to call it anything else. Abrogation of a citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary, and if the procured information leads nowhere pertinent to the investigation at hand, it should be destroyed. With the information I have, this particular case does not meet the constraints necessary for such a broad warrant to have merit (or be issued). >Unfortunately, I think obvious invasions of privacy (e.g., PRISM) have made folks very jumpy about any electronic evidence collection, which I don't think is warranted. This opinion makes sense from your point of view, but it may not hold up when you consider the matter from a "what is the role of government in this situation?" standpoint. The government was created, fundamentally, to uphold and guarantee the rights of citizens. I would be much more comfortable with your statement if it read more along the lines of "...electronic evidence collection, which I don't think is warranted, but I understand that other people can reasonably care more about privacy than I do."
• tlogan 10y ago
  And here the problem: somebody did search for that name and ended up in that report. That person did not commit wire fraud but some other minor crime. And that person will get in trouble too - the evidence will be allowed in the court but the detectives will get on him and find something else. Typical fishing expedition.
  • rhino369 10y ago
    That is an argument against any investigation period.
• thrillgore 10y ago
  "See guys, it's not really a dragnet! We're just being specific about one query for one region!" That's what you sound like right now.
• marme 10y ago
  so this is more like the police asking 7-11 for the security footage of anyone who bought a red bull, loaf of bread and six pack of beer in the city over the past month. If this request was made it would be insane for 7-11 to have to go through their footage and figure it out. Why should it be any different because google could do it more quickly? It is not google's job to find suspects for a case it is the police's job to find suspects
• differentView 10y ago
  > Police are not asking for the entire search history of everyone in the town, then combing through it to see what they've searched for. Rather, police are asking Google who, in a narrow amount of time, searched for the name of a relatively unknown person who had $28K stolen from him. Where would you draw the line? Suppose they don't find what they're looking for in that request. Would you be okay with them expanding the time little by little? Perhaps adding other search terms? What about for other crimes? Other services (Facebook, Bing, Yahoo!, etc...)? Wouldn't capable prosecutors for future cases simply use this as precedent and expand the parameters little by little? There is no clear line to draw after you cross this line.
  • jdmichal 10y ago
    The judge is who would be responsible for drawing this line. I would think they would get pretty tired of signing warrant after warrant that was slightly broader than the last.
  • bigbugbag 10y ago
    > Other services (Facebook, Bing, Yahoo!, etc...)? Actually when you read the actual news[1] and not the clickbait rehashed version that has been posted to HN you'll learn why it only targets google: The Edina Police Department figured out that while searching Google Images for the victim’s name, they found the photo used on the fake passport, and investigators couldn’t find it on Yahoo or Bing. So, they theorized the suspect must have searched Google for the victim’s name while making the fake passport. [1]: https://tonywebster.com/2017/03/minnesota-search-warrant-anyone-who-googled/ https://tonywebster.com/2017/03/minnesota-search-warrant-any...
• dazc 10y ago
  > "I'm trying to see what the big deal is here.." It sets a precedent and the danger is that it becomes standard practice for anything they want to use it for. An attempted fraud that didn't succeed isn't exactly a high bench mark is it? It's like the police saying that they solved a historical crime because they happened to obtain DNA from someone who committed some other random misdemeanour. So let's just take everyone's DNA and solve a bunch of other crimes too.
• marcosdumay 10y ago
  > In either case, obviously innocent bystanders will be quickly eliminated from the list of possible suspects. This is a big assumption that may or may not hold in practice. I'd argue that it's more productive to work towards it becoming universal than fighting this kind of request... Or maybe both, because, why does Google has all this information anyway? I partially agree with you here. I see two big problems, none of them being spying or judicial overreach.
• moomin 10y ago
  It is, nonetheless, a blanket search on the entire residents of the city, though? Which seems like it should be way unconstitutional.
• Homunculiheaded 10y ago
  What if the police asked for the names of everyone who discussed using cannabis in their email exchanges? Would you really argue that in states where cannabis use was illegal that it would be perfectly okay to do this, collect just the names of people who had used mentioned cannabis in email and then visit their homes to question them further about this? I'm pretty surprised how many people on HN seem to find this acceptable when this is clearly a form of dragnet surveillance.
• Tomte 10y ago
  This overenthusiastic reaction is rather typical. We had a case in Germany some time ago where police caught a child porn seller and wanted to find the buyers. The reaction in the usual circles was predictable: "All credit card users in Germany are under suspicion! Everyone is investigated!". Even lawyers close to certain political parties participated in that disinformation campaign. What did the court order actually allow? SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient==$seller The credit card company was ordered to give a list of people to the police who got charged a specific amount of money(!) by the known seller. But since the database engine touches every record in the database it "logically" follows that everybody was searched...
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    Better run an EXPLAIN on that... :/
  • wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    >But since the database engine touches every record in the database it "logically" follows that everybody was searched... Not sure why "logically" is in quotes, because it is both technically and logically true that they were searched. If it is illegal for a person to manually parse thru the private information (i.e. financial transactions, search history) of millions of innocent people, then why should it be legal when a person uses a more automated (and thus more dangerous) means to do so?
  • manarth 10y ago
    A child-porn seller self-evidently deals in illegal material. What if they deal in other, non-child-porn material? Cocaine? Ecstasy? Marijuana? Legal marijuana, in some jurisdictions? Fake/non-prescription Viagra? Hard-core/niche porn (e.g. watersports, which could be considered illegal in the UK [1], but is legal in a number of other countries)? Is it justified, that everyone involved in non-child-porn (and potentially legal) purchases, is caught up in the same dragnet? This is the inevitable result of overly-broad fishing expeditions. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-porn-legislation-what-is-now-banned-under-new-government-laws-9898541.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-porn-legi...
• alasdair_ 10y ago
  Imagine the search term was, say, an unusual fetish or an uncommon medical condition or an uncommon religious or political belief. I would have real problems with giving police the power to demand these sorts of things.
• alasdair_ 10y ago
  Imagine the search term was, say, an unusual fetish or an uncommon medical condition or an uncommon religious or political belief. I would have real problems with giving police the power to demand these sorts of things.
• ggggtez 10y ago
  One of the key facts is that they assume Google even knows who "everyone who lives in that county" even includes.
• kafkaesq 10y ago
  Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery? Yes. Because it's much more like asking for the footage from every camera in (large) area for "guys wearing baseball caps." The distinction is that the reach of the search has been expanded from an individual suspected of harboring the data (or in your example, from a single convenience store) to a much larger class of individuals. Or in other words, from a targeted subpoena to a full-scale dragnet.
• macspoofing 10y ago
  Sounds like a fishing-expedition to me.
• michaelmrose 10y ago
  I know this is a tired argument by now but argument by analogy is generally terrible a raven isn't like a writing desk and your google history isn't like convenience store footage. If we skip the obvious step of proving that unalike things are in fact unalike we can address things as they are and examine them truthfully. In an ideal world your privacy ought not to be invaded by the authorities unless there is a reasonably good expectation that violating your privacy in particular will produce evidence relevant to the case at hand, that there is no narrower means to address the same cause, and that there is real harm in not doing so. Obviously the way these concerns intersect is complex but we ought also to attend to the poorly thought out idea that we can justify invading everyone's privacy on the argument that surely SOMEONE is guilty because this line of reasoning would be so fantastically prone to abuse that we should have no privacy at all if we go this route. In this case there isn't even reason to believe that any evidence should turn up even if we violate everyone's privacy, the logical alternative is real police work, and the potential consequences of letting a low level dirty bag slip away for a while are inconsequential. The vast majority of us give away more personal data to search engines and ISPs than we ever gave to our local libraries it just seems that this data doesn't have the same protection not because such a rule wouldn't be socially useful but because the law hasn't adapted to modern times and search engines and isps don't have the tradition of social responsibility that libraries do. In the context of all of the above it seems puzzling to me that you are advocating for a position that is so bad for nearly everyone. If we allow fishing expeditions in the name of expediency I very much doubt this will be end of the matter. Please reconsider your positions or at least provide a better justification for same.
• Steko 10y ago
  > big deal is here One big deal is that google keeps this data and police/DAs have in the past used even flimsier evidence as part of cases that sent innocent people to prison. So another reason to use DDG.
• exadeci 10y ago
  Your argument is no better than: I have nothing to hide. One name, Snowden. He has criminal charges for releasing all these informations about the NSA. Now in the following scenario if the NSA knew that one of their employees was about to release all that to the public and all they knew about was a flight number he booked to leave the country. Do you think that in that scenario it's not a big deal if they got Google to provide them the names of everyone that searched that flight?
• bigbugbag 10y ago
  > Police are not asking for the entire search history of everyone in the town. As usual this is a rehashed story with a clickbait title and the article content shows that the title is at best untrue. Look at the source cited in the article: https://tonywebster.com/2017/03/minnesota-search-warrant-anyone-who-googled/ https://tonywebster.com/2017/03/minnesota-search-warrant-any...