5 ms·

Google: 'Reverse Warrants' Becoming Law Enforcement's Go-To Investigative Tool

89 points by Atlas 5y ago

atemerev 5y ago
The tech maxim: everything that can be used for evil will be used for evil.
rektide 5y ago
the world governments are incidentally launching an attack on data holding enterprises. the danger of keeping data js rapidly becoming a bigger risk than it's value. this is both good because jt will rebalance how & where data is kept, but bad because the governments of the world are inhibiting the ability of companies to keep many classes of data at all. government is ruining computing in the cloud and there's nothing to stop it from ongoingly fucking it all up.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  Stop using the cloud? Or maybe just stop worshiping it like it’s the answer to everything. I once had a tech lead insist we take everything out of the cloud, and do it on our own bare metal. People thought he was insane. But he did the math again and again: faster and cheaper. Turned out really, really well. Even in personal computing … do we really need the cloud for everything?
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    It's not even a case of stopping using the cloud entirely so much as be aware of all the trade-offs, calculate them as much as possible and make an educated choice which it sounds like your lead did. The problem is that for many dev's who've been inculcated their entire careers with the mantra "cloud first" getting them to a point where they can accurately make an educated choice takes time. Or to put it another way, the pendulum is currently swung way over towards "cloud everything". I'm older than I suspect the average age is on here so I've lived in the "pre-cloud" and "cloud" world and can see the benefits (and drawbacks) of both. The irony is that much of the work done to make things work in the cloud is directly applicable to running similar workloads on your own hardware if you want to (docker, things like minio as a random example) hell even Kubernetes.
    - atemerev 5y ago
      I don't know, in my opinion, "cloud first" is becoming less popular during the last two years. The pendulum is swinging back.
    - slowmovintarget 5y ago
      If someone has been "inculcated their entire career" to be cloud-first, then their career is only six years old. Cloud-first hasn't been a viable solution for much longer than that. For many endeavors these days, cloud-first will be the correct default choice. Get something up, min-max it later. For most devs, for most workloads, the cost of running a data center isn't worth it. I've been building software since before the internet was a thing. I'm fairly certain this isn't a pendulum that will swing back the other way. It is a rising waterline.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        > then their career is only six years old. So they definitely have the Senior Developer title and might even be the lead somewhere.
        noir_lord 5y ago
        Pretty much. I was a lead (or the equivalent since titles change) after 5 years way back in the day and I really shouldn't have been. The thing is the job titles are pretty much meaningless as I've never worked two places that had similar criteria for what they considered junior, regular, senior, lead and in some places seniors are leads (if you only have 1 senior on a team of 8 they are a lead, if you have 6 seniors on a team of 8 and no lead then are they really senior and to who). Other places promote on time served, so you are junior 2 years, regular dev for 2-3 years, senior after that. It's one of the reasons when hiring I completely ignore their previous titles and look at what they actually did. I've seen juniors who where at least equivalent to seniors in other places and "Seniors" who I wouldn't have hired as a junior. My favourite title in my entire career (and it was my actual title) was "Code Monkey"[1], it got entered as a joke in the HR system and everything after that sort of followed on even my business cards (remember those?) said it (since company ordered them and did a mail merge from the HR system). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
  - rektide 5y ago
    > Stop using the cloud? Is this not exactly what I just described as the problem? Governments ruining the ability to hold data safely in online locations? "Stop being an online services company" does not seem like a solution. Being able to provide online services & networks seems to power a vast amount of modernity. A lot of downvotes on my post. But holy shit I have no idea how anyone can see this as anything else. The discussion seems ridiculously off target. The government is making the data-center untrustable: how is this at all debateable? How is this any better than the Chinese authoritarianism that plagues their intranet? In neither world are people free to think or communicate. This is obvious.
    - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
      I agree with you, but I do believe there's a large cohort of people that either believe that data centers were never trustable, or they believe strongly against any kind of data collection so strongly that there is a hope everything will get pushed back out to user's devices.
      - rootsudo 5y ago
        Nothings stopping you from doing it voluntary.
commoner 5y ago
Instructions for deleting your location history and disabling location reporting on a Google account: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687 It's unclear whether this is enough to prevent a geofence warrant from sweeping up your data. For additional security, an Android user can stop using Google Play Services for geolocation. This can be done by disabling Google Play Services or switching to an Android distribution without Play Services, at the cost of slowing down the process of getting a location lock (since Play Services uses Wi-Fi and cell tower trilateration to accelerate this). Another solution is to replace Play Services with microG, which allows you to use a selection of non-Google location providers for trilateration, including ones that work fully offline. Android distributions that pre-install microG include CalyxOS, LineageOS for microG, and /e/. Alternatively, DivestOS includes the location module of microG (UnifiedNlp) but not the other parts.
- jcadam 5y ago
  I suppose it's time to stop carrying tracking devices around with us everywhere we go.
  - ThinkBeat 5y ago
    I find it is always instructive to ponder how intelligence services or law enforcement had to work prior to the high technology we have these days. If a government body wanted to know where you were - always, they would need to send a team to watch you. This could be made much easier by recruiting a coworker or two, a neighbor or two, to keep an eye out if you did something other than what was expected. Informants help scale the system. If they wanted to know who you were contacting, they would need someone to tap your phone (in one way or another). Your mail is easily intercepted and checked. All of it would consume resource that were not endless. There were limits on how many people Stasi could watch at the same time, even with informers. Now, nearly all of this can be done without any human resources being spent and truly little cost overall. It even worse retroactively. Where were you two years ago in December 12? That would be hard to figure out for even a nation state in 1930. (Unless you were already being watched). Now it is trivial. It is available to the US, and all Western nations, as well as most nations at a certain technological level. The US uses fragments of it to kill people on a regular basis. Without any bothersome judicial oversight. I keep thinking that Stasi leaders would have continues orgasms if they had access to the tools that are available for a nation state now.
threatofrain 5y ago
Prior relevant discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 (23 Aug 2021)
zug_zug 5y ago
I guess I support this for only "serious crimes". Probably best to limit it to violent crimes against citizens mostly for now (e.g. murder, etc), and then consider expanding it on a case-by-case basis.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  It's a slippery slope situation. The same as how an invasive technology would first be used for the worst imaginable offenses that hardly no one would be opposed to. The critical thinkers would recognize the pattern that it's a foot in the door. Saying the ends justify the means in these cases unwittingly endorses the means used for other ends. It's like saying "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply for serious accusations.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    this is the slippery slope fallacy, claiming that everything is bad because something worse could be done later. Not allowing warrants is a slippery slope to permitting all murder by making evidence gathering illegal.
tyingq 5y ago
It seems like it would be relatively easy to poison a geofenced area with a mountain of fake data during a crime.
karmakaze 5y ago
The source of the problem is the metrics and motivations are not aligned with keeping the population safe. It is more about self-serving the existence and growth of law enforcement.
torstenvl 5y ago
> They're called "warrants" but they can't possibly be supported by probable cause. Treating everyone in the area of a suspected crime as a criminal suspect until things can be sorted out inverts this concept. This not a good faith analysis. Probable cause to make an arrest of a suspect is different for probable cause of a search. Only the former requires probable cause to believe that a crime was committed and that the person in question committed it. Probable cause for a search means probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the area to be searched contains relevant evidence. It is the question of whether "there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 214 (1983). If there was a murder in your neighborhood and your neighbor saw a random person digging a large hole in your back yard and putting a body bag in it, there would be probable cause to search your property without regard to whether you yourself were implicated as a suspect.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  But there would not be probable cause to place GPS trackers on every car in the neighborhood, or wire taps on every phone. Tracking phones and capturing metadata or search results is not investigating the scene of a crime.
hiram112 5y ago
When is it legitimate to "punch of Googler"?
France_is_bacon 5y ago
I don't carry my phone anywhere. However, I have it in a Faraday bag at all times, even a the place where I store it. No signals can get through a Faraday bag, so there is no tracking you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage I never use my mobile phone, except rarely. Unfortunately, having a phone is becoming 100% mandatory. One cannot get financial services, for example, without a mobile phone. The companies will not accept you as a client. If I could get away with not having a mobile phone, I would never buy one. So I broke down and bought the least expensive mobile phone that I could a few months ago, paid the cheapest plan ($15/month), and keep it for those singular occasions where I need it. I need it maybe once every few months, and have to pay $50 for the phone, and $180 per year for the phone plan. Just to use it a few times a year. Anyways, if you don't want to be tracked everywhere, get a Faraday bag and keep your phone in it all the time, except when you use it. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=faraday+bag&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=faraday+bag&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

89 points by Atlas 5y ago

The tech maxim: everything that can be used for evil will be used for evil.

the world governments are incidentally launching an attack on data holding enterprises. the danger of keeping data js rapidly becoming a bigger risk than it's value. this is both good because jt will rebalance how & where data is kept, but bad because the governments of the world are inhibiting the ability of companies to keep many classes of data at all. government is ruining computing in the cloud and there's nothing to stop it from ongoingly fucking it all up.

pyuser583 5y ago
Stop using the cloud? Or maybe just stop worshiping it like it’s the answer to everything. I once had a tech lead insist we take everything out of the cloud, and do it on our own bare metal. People thought he was insane. But he did the math again and again: faster and cheaper. Turned out really, really well. Even in personal computing … do we really need the cloud for everything?
- noir_lord 5y ago
  It's not even a case of stopping using the cloud entirely so much as be aware of all the trade-offs, calculate them as much as possible and make an educated choice which it sounds like your lead did. The problem is that for many dev's who've been inculcated their entire careers with the mantra "cloud first" getting them to a point where they can accurately make an educated choice takes time. Or to put it another way, the pendulum is currently swung way over towards "cloud everything". I'm older than I suspect the average age is on here so I've lived in the "pre-cloud" and "cloud" world and can see the benefits (and drawbacks) of both. The irony is that much of the work done to make things work in the cloud is directly applicable to running similar workloads on your own hardware if you want to (docker, things like minio as a random example) hell even Kubernetes.
  - atemerev 5y ago
    I don't know, in my opinion, "cloud first" is becoming less popular during the last two years. The pendulum is swinging back.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    If someone has been "inculcated their entire career" to be cloud-first, then their career is only six years old. Cloud-first hasn't been a viable solution for much longer than that. For many endeavors these days, cloud-first will be the correct default choice. Get something up, min-max it later. For most devs, for most workloads, the cost of running a data center isn't worth it. I've been building software since before the internet was a thing. I'm fairly certain this isn't a pendulum that will swing back the other way. It is a rising waterline.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      > then their career is only six years old. So they definitely have the Senior Developer title and might even be the lead somewhere.
      - noir_lord 5y ago
        Pretty much. I was a lead (or the equivalent since titles change) after 5 years way back in the day and I really shouldn't have been. The thing is the job titles are pretty much meaningless as I've never worked two places that had similar criteria for what they considered junior, regular, senior, lead and in some places seniors are leads (if you only have 1 senior on a team of 8 they are a lead, if you have 6 seniors on a team of 8 and no lead then are they really senior and to who). Other places promote on time served, so you are junior 2 years, regular dev for 2-3 years, senior after that. It's one of the reasons when hiring I completely ignore their previous titles and look at what they actually did. I've seen juniors who where at least equivalent to seniors in other places and "Seniors" who I wouldn't have hired as a junior. My favourite title in my entire career (and it was my actual title) was "Code Monkey"[1], it got entered as a joke in the HR system and everything after that sort of followed on even my business cards (remember those?) said it (since company ordered them and did a mail merge from the HR system). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
- rektide 5y ago
  > Stop using the cloud? Is this not exactly what I just described as the problem? Governments ruining the ability to hold data safely in online locations? "Stop being an online services company" does not seem like a solution. Being able to provide online services & networks seems to power a vast amount of modernity. A lot of downvotes on my post. But holy shit I have no idea how anyone can see this as anything else. The discussion seems ridiculously off target. The government is making the data-center untrustable: how is this at all debateable? How is this any better than the Chinese authoritarianism that plagues their intranet? In neither world are people free to think or communicate. This is obvious.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    I agree with you, but I do believe there's a large cohort of people that either believe that data centers were never trustable, or they believe strongly against any kind of data collection so strongly that there is a hope everything will get pushed back out to user's devices.
    - rootsudo 5y ago
      Nothings stopping you from doing it voluntary.

commoner 5y ago

Instructions for deleting your location history and disabling location reporting on a Google account: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687 It's unclear whether this is enough to prevent a geofence warrant from sweeping up your data. For additional security, an Android user can stop using Google Play Services for geolocation. This can be done by disabling Google Play Services or switching to an Android distribution without Play Services, at the cost of slowing down the process of getting a location lock (since Play Services uses Wi-Fi and cell tower trilateration to accelerate this). Another solution is to replace Play Services with microG, which allows you to use a selection of non-Google location providers for trilateration, including ones that work fully offline. Android distributions that pre-install microG include CalyxOS, LineageOS for microG, and /e/. Alternatively, DivestOS includes the location module of microG (UnifiedNlp) but not the other parts.

jcadam 5y ago
I suppose it's time to stop carrying tracking devices around with us everywhere we go.
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  I find it is always instructive to ponder how intelligence services or law enforcement had to work prior to the high technology we have these days. If a government body wanted to know where you were - always, they would need to send a team to watch you. This could be made much easier by recruiting a coworker or two, a neighbor or two, to keep an eye out if you did something other than what was expected. Informants help scale the system. If they wanted to know who you were contacting, they would need someone to tap your phone (in one way or another). Your mail is easily intercepted and checked. All of it would consume resource that were not endless. There were limits on how many people Stasi could watch at the same time, even with informers. Now, nearly all of this can be done without any human resources being spent and truly little cost overall. It even worse retroactively. Where were you two years ago in December 12? That would be hard to figure out for even a nation state in 1930. (Unless you were already being watched). Now it is trivial. It is available to the US, and all Western nations, as well as most nations at a certain technological level. The US uses fragments of it to kill people on a regular basis. Without any bothersome judicial oversight. I keep thinking that Stasi leaders would have continues orgasms if they had access to the tools that are available for a nation state now.

threatofrain 5y ago

Prior relevant discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 (23 Aug 2021)

zug_zug 5y ago

I guess I support this for only "serious crimes". Probably best to limit it to violent crimes against citizens mostly for now (e.g. murder, etc), and then consider expanding it on a case-by-case basis.

karmakaze 5y ago
It's a slippery slope situation. The same as how an invasive technology would first be used for the worst imaginable offenses that hardly no one would be opposed to. The critical thinkers would recognize the pattern that it's a foot in the door. Saying the ends justify the means in these cases unwittingly endorses the means used for other ends. It's like saying "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply for serious accusations.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  this is the slippery slope fallacy, claiming that everything is bad because something worse could be done later. Not allowing warrants is a slippery slope to permitting all murder by making evidence gathering illegal.

tyingq 5y ago

It seems like it would be relatively easy to poison a geofenced area with a mountain of fake data during a crime.

karmakaze 5y ago

The source of the problem is the metrics and motivations are not aligned with keeping the population safe. It is more about self-serving the existence and growth of law enforcement.

torstenvl 5y ago

> They're called "warrants" but they can't possibly be supported by probable cause. Treating everyone in the area of a suspected crime as a criminal suspect until things can be sorted out inverts this concept. This not a good faith analysis. Probable cause to make an arrest of a suspect is different for probable cause of a search. Only the former requires probable cause to believe that a crime was committed and that the person in question committed it. Probable cause for a search means probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the area to be searched contains relevant evidence. It is the question of whether "there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 214 (1983). If there was a murder in your neighborhood and your neighbor saw a random person digging a large hole in your back yard and putting a body bag in it, there would be probable cause to search your property without regard to whether you yourself were implicated as a suspect.

jvanderbot 5y ago
But there would not be probable cause to place GPS trackers on every car in the neighborhood, or wire taps on every phone. Tracking phones and capturing metadata or search results is not investigating the scene of a crime.

hiram112 5y ago

When is it legitimate to "punch of Googler"?

France_is_bacon 5y ago

I don't carry my phone anywhere. However, I have it in a Faraday bag at all times, even a the place where I store it. No signals can get through a Faraday bag, so there is no tracking you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage I never use my mobile phone, except rarely. Unfortunately, having a phone is becoming 100% mandatory. One cannot get financial services, for example, without a mobile phone. The companies will not accept you as a client. If I could get away with not having a mobile phone, I would never buy one. So I broke down and bought the least expensive mobile phone that I could a few months ago, paid the cheapest plan ($15/month), and keep it for those singular occasions where I need it. I need it maybe once every few months, and have to pay $50 for the phone, and $180 per year for the phone plan. Just to use it a few times a year. Anyways, if you don't want to be tracked everywhere, get a Faraday bag and keep your phone in it all the time, except when you use it. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=faraday+bag&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=faraday+bag&ref=nb_sb_noss_2