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FBI examined Google records to see if anyone had knowledge of Guccifer persona
- ColanR 6y agoWow. Quote: > But I can’t think of a prior case where the feds unambiguously acknowledged using Google search logs this way: to, apparently, zero in on people who searched the wrong word at the wrong time.
- darawk 6y agoThey're not actually using it to zero in on someone, though. What they're doing is using it to build a case against someone they already suspect: Roger Stone.
- RandomBacon 6y agoToday, sure. Tomorrow, it may be what OP said.
- mike_d 6y agoToday, federal police randomly snatch protesters off the streets in to unmarked vans. Tomorrow, who knows... You can always make a slippery slope argument, but it doesn't make it reasonable.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoI can't imagine what you are trying to insinuate. What's the difference between a trend and a slippery slope?
- darawk 6y agoAll changes are trends. Assuming that the trend will extrapolate to its logical extreme without supporting evidence is unreasonable, however.
- im3w1l 6y agoInstead of abstract arguments and unrelated parallels let's get back on track with the specifics here. Why/why not will scope increase in this particular way? What temptations are there? What safeguards are there?
- unishark 6y agoUnfortunately, building a case in FBI terms often means entrapping someone in a crime related to the investigation itself, when they can't get any proof of the actual crime they are supposed to be investigating.
- analyte123 6y agoEverybody’s worst nightmares when it comes to surveillance keep coming true. I’ve started to suspect the “I got nothing to hide” attitude that many privacy advocates criticize is at some level a defense mechanism for the realization that you’re completely owned and completely powerless. In other words, they know that if they really sat down and thought about what was in their Google searches, DNS lookups, or credit card purchases they would be very disturbed, so they choose not to think about it to maintain sanity. People are smarter than we give them credit for. Because many on HN know and consciously recognize the facts here, my question would be: how do you all cope with surveillance?
- jeffbee 6y agoI'm not seeing the problem. The feds got a search warrant to find searches for the term "guccifer" from before the term existed, and got a direct hit on the actual culprit. Not some kind of dragnet at all.
- analyte123 6y agoThe affidavit does not say these were the only Google records, and the rest of the thread in the link talks about how this information was already public knowledge at the time.
- onionisafruit 6y agoJust what you said. I ignore it because I know the other option is living offline and maybe off grid.
- sjtindell 6y agoSeconded. Essentially hope that you’re such a small fry the machine won’t turn it’s gaze on you. Trying to vote for people who will curb it’s power and support those who blow the whistle or sound the alarm.
- runbyfruity 6y agoAre we really that lacking in creativity that we can't imagine a world in between "Panopticon" and "Oregon Trail"? Legislation that makes this illegal would be a great (and really easy) start.
- sneak 6y agoSigh. “Don’t be evil” presumes a lot when there are organizations that have machine guns and legal jurisdiction over you, and a public, decades-long track record of doing evil.
- jlarocco 6y agoTBH, I think this is the wrong situation to trot out "Don't be evil." Law enforcement has always been able to subpoena this type of information. From phone companies, credit card companies, ISPs, etc. If Google wants to legally operate in the United States then they don't have any choice but to comply. The bigger issue, IMO, is that nobody has any idea who else has access to this information. Google can share this information with anybody. It's entirely on good faith that people trust them not to.
- sneak 6y agoThat’s exactly my point: it’s entirely naive and insufficient for Google alone to promote “Don’t be evil” if, at any time, known-racist and known-politicized “law enforcement” in the US can do whatever evil they wish with the data they’ve collected. When PRISM came along, they had no choice but to comply or suffer the same fate as Joseph Nacchio. One would have to be a total fool to think that an internal prohibition on evil would be at all meaningful, even if somehow it were strictly adhered to. Literally nobody at Google is willing to be imprisoned to defy the orders of the nation in which its situated. (Before you point out that it requires judicial oversight: please read a dozen federal search warrants. The standard for search warrants is hilaribad, and feds suffer no consequences whatsoever for putting whatever fantasies they want into their applications for same.)
- jlarocco 6y agoOh yeah, that I agree with. "Don't be evil," was always a gimmick, IMO. Not sure there's any real solution, though. As long as there's a government, there's going to be somebody who thinks it's evil.
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- donmcronald 6y agoHere’s the scary part to me. They say they identified searches from certain networks and make it sound like those were the ONLY searches for those terms. However, it seems obvious they took his IP address, went through his search history, picked relevant terms, and presented it like they started by finding out who searched for specific terms. I call bullshit. There’s no way he’s the only one that searched for those terms in that time period, right?
- jeffbee 6y ago> There’s no way he’s the only one that searched for those terms Why not? Why would anyone search for both dcleaks and guccifer months before dcleaks was a web site or guccifer was a persona?
- donmcronald 6y agoIMO they’d say that explicitly if it was the case. In reality I bet lots of people searched for those individual terms and linking a combo back to a pair of /24s seems iffy to me. Why can’t they link it back to his exact IP? If the answer is that Google and Facebook have logs and the ISP doesn’t, that’s another whole conversation, especially if they can be linked back to a specific individual like in this case. I doubt anyone would be ok with having a lifetime search history.
- jeffbee 6y ago> Why can’t they link it back to his exact IP? Because permanent logs don't contain full addresses, because of GDPR.
- donmcronald 6y agohttps://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-03-01%202016-09-30&geo=US&q=guccifer https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-03-01%202... What’s the spike on May 5 there? It’s 12 days earlier.
- mike_d 6y agoAt the time the terms likely did not have statistically significant search volume. I'm not going to say he was the only one, but the other three might have been people who then corrected their search from "dcleaks" to "dc voltage leak" or something. If you search for "[government agency] mailing address" three days before they receive anthrax in the mail, it isn't a slam dunk case. But if it was also mailed from your zip code, you had placed 6 phone calls to that agency in the prior month, etc. it makes you a pretty damn good candidate.
- mike_d 6y agoThe most likely explanation here is that Google was conducting its own investigation into Russian disinformation and discovered the suspicious search queries. They then turned the anonymous query records over to the FBI with the understanding that they would then generate the necessary court order to request Google de-anonymize them. That is why the second sentence explicitly says "records from Google." I've done this dance before. It is the cleanest way to turn over evidence of a crime that is discovered in a private investigation.
- jeffbee 6y agoWhy is that the most likely explanation, rather than something you just produced from your butthole? The FBI had already requested all Google records pertaining to Stone's accounts on May 4, 2018[1]. The warrant for the search records wasn't issued until June 18, 2018[2]. The FBI were not randomly trolling search logs; they were already on to Stone. 1: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.204569/gov.uscourts.dcd.204569.29.7.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.204569/... 2: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6879593-180820-Stone-AT-T.html#document/p13 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6879593-180820-Stone...
- mike_d 6y agoMuch more likely than Google giving in to a dragnet warrant (of which there is no evidence to support) for anyone who conducted a search. Google has fought similar requests in the past [1]. Google has a dedicated group that investigates government backed attacks, like Russian disinformation and hacking. I never worked on that team while at Google, but I worked on a similar team at another company. Normally nothing in a warrant will bar you from conducting your own internal investigation in support of producing relevant records. Sometimes that investigation yields results that are relevant but not within the scope of the warrant (the order you cite is only for a single Google account, not all Stone accounts). One way the legal department can handle such a situation is exactly what I laid out in my comment. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/12/11/google-gives-feds-1500-leads-to-arsonist-smartphones-in-unprecedented-geofence-search/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/12/11/googl... 2. https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/ https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/
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- ummonk 6y agoI mean you can see from Google Trends that a ton of searches for Guccifer were happening in that time period: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=guccifer https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
- adsenseclient 6y agoThis is just like Pelosi with the hair salon. They do what they need
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoThis reminds me of reading “Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter” where they used his real correspondence to make it look convincing like he was some kind of American vampire hunter. It was amazing. The reality is that when you have unrestricted access to anyone’s life, you can make them a criminal, whether by framing or surreptitiously surveillance. There’s a reason why a principle of our legal system is that you must first have reasonable suspicion of a crime before you investigate.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoCan someone answer whether this includes deleted search histories? I specifically go through and delete my search history. I’ve never searched anything illegal to my knowledge. But according to this you never know what will be illegal in the future.
- stuntkite 6y agoYou cannot delete your search history in any meaningful way from google. You can delete it locally and they have some account tools. They also have all of their request logs, trends, and other compiled data. The best thing you can do is set up your own VPN and do other steps to anonymize as a constant practice.
- haolez 6y agoWon't the absent of traffic on your "normal" accounts make you stand out?
- stuntkite 6y agoMaybe I wasn't clear, to protect your privacy you cannot have "normal" traffic. There are some browser plugs, I think chrome banned them, but you can still build them and install them yourself that will constantly make random searches in the background and click every advertising link on a page. If you have "normal" traffic, something like that may help. There is no free lunch in this problem. You have to consistently protect yourself and your household network to avoid tracking. Also you will probably never be able to stop it fully. Understanding the ecosystem and how tracking works will help a lot and understanding your individual tolerance for tracking is crucial. I personally think it's hygienic to test out anti-tracking measures and I go for sprints with all of them running but also I use the internet like a nearly normal user a lot of the time. If you want to take steps to learn more a good place to start is using an old computer or raspberry pi and try out some network level filtering like PiHole, having separate networks for IoT devices/mobile devices/home users/guests and doing routing to a VPN you set up yourself via a cloud host selectively for traffic, times of day, and device.
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- angel_j 6y agoThere is a glaring legal disconnect with popular web services, where they are not responsible for the content you post, yet the content does not really belong to you, for if it did belong to you, the service would have no right to give it up to police, that information being your property. This double standard allows tech giants to profit precisely at the expense of our fundamental rights. For further proof, ask yourself why they can arbitrarilly censor users despite claiming no responsibility for that content, because "they can do what they want with their platform". It is one or the other: they act like tbey own and are responsible for content, but without the legal ramifications of that reaponsibility.
- stickfigure 6y agoCan someone ELI5 this for me and explain why I should/shouldn't be outraged about it? Neither the link nor the existing commentary seems to help.
- lma21 6y agoDon't bother (or maybe bother if you really want to get into both "US politics vs. Roger Stone" or "FBI/Google vs privacy of the individual")
- crashbunny 6y agoThis is why switching from google to duckduckgo isn't as effective as switching to a search engine based in europe.
- benmmurphy 6y agoI suspect these IP address ranges are used for Mobile data as well so probably shared between multiple users. I recognised the TMO IP because I've used TMO 4G proxies that have IP addresses in a similar range. It should disturb you that someone in Florida may have searched for 'wrong' terms and then that was used as justification to investigate another person in Florida who happened to share the same IP range as the wrong searcher.