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Colorado Supreme Court Approves Use of Google Search Data in Murder Case

43 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

ImAnAmateur 3y ago
From the two paragraphs at the start that I can read, I've gotta say that this is more novel than I expected. "Who looked up the address of the house that burned down before it happened?" It got them 5 leads.
- ghaff 3y ago
  "Lawyers for one of the suspects, Gavin Seymour, who was found to have Googled the home’s address 14 times in the days before the fire, argued that the keyword warrant constituted an illegal search and that any evidence from it should be suppressed. His motion is the first known challenge to the constitutionality of keyword search warrants. The case is ongoing. In its 74-page decision, the court found that law enforcement had acted in good faith when it obtained the warrant for the teen’s search history. Still, it stressed that the findings were specific to the facts of the case, and it refrained from weighing in about the use of Google’s search data more broadly." On the one hand, it sounds like a pretty, umm, smoking gun in this case. (And the court was fairly careful to emphasize that this wasn't a general carte blanche for this sort of warrant.) On the other hand, it's easy to imagine broader warrants returning results that are more ambiguous than seems to be the case here.
  - isk517 3y ago
    I feel like it was just a case of good luck (assuming that the suspect they found is actually guilty) that the suspect googled the home's address 14 times. This feels like the type of thing if allowed to become more mainstream will just result in harassment of unrelated parties for having the bad luck to have coincidentally search something at a bad time.
thedigitalone 3y ago
Paywalled, mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20Gee https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20Gee
paxys 3y ago
It wasn't the data itself that was questionable. Search history has been commonly used as evidence for a while now. The difference is that usually you identify a suspect and then pull up their history, while in this case it was the reverse. I personally do think that "give me a list of everyone who searched for XYZ in this time frame" is a clear case of a search warrant being unconstitutionally broad, but then this is generally where surveillance is going so it's futile to think it won't just continue to get worse.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  It's not like they ask for all searches in this time frame. It's who searched for this specific address. That's pretty narrow, one can expect the only people to search that address did so because they had business there (or perhaps nearby, and someone messed up the street number). I suspect with geofencing and a adequate window, you can further narrow the scope of the warrant (likely people looking up this address years ago have nothing to do with the arson, but people looking it up last week/month are suspect). In my opinion, it was reasonable, and not broad at all. That it only returned 5 accounts and not 500+ speaks to how narrow it is given the volume of search queries Google handles.
  - bsder 3y ago
    So, 5 accounts and 3 teens. So a 40% miss rate? In what way did the 2 accounts that weren't guilty get harassed by the police?
    - DistractionRect 3y ago
      You're confusing accuracy and precision. You want search warrants to be precise, but the only way to guarantee accuracy is to know in advance the fruits of the search. You can have a solid foundation for a warrant against an individual, but find out they aren't responsible, a 100% miss rate! But that's the problem, you don't know what you dont know, which is why you need a search warrant (and justification for it) to begin with.
silisili 3y ago
So the take away here is to either use a VPN when searching, or use a less well known search engine. Would he have been caught if he'd just Bing'd the address 14 times?

43 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

From the two paragraphs at the start that I can read, I've gotta say that this is more novel than I expected. "Who looked up the address of the house that burned down before it happened?" It got them 5 leads.

ghaff 3y ago
"Lawyers for one of the suspects, Gavin Seymour, who was found to have Googled the home’s address 14 times in the days before the fire, argued that the keyword warrant constituted an illegal search and that any evidence from it should be suppressed. His motion is the first known challenge to the constitutionality of keyword search warrants. The case is ongoing. In its 74-page decision, the court found that law enforcement had acted in good faith when it obtained the warrant for the teen’s search history. Still, it stressed that the findings were specific to the facts of the case, and it refrained from weighing in about the use of Google’s search data more broadly." On the one hand, it sounds like a pretty, umm, smoking gun in this case. (And the court was fairly careful to emphasize that this wasn't a general carte blanche for this sort of warrant.) On the other hand, it's easy to imagine broader warrants returning results that are more ambiguous than seems to be the case here.
- isk517 3y ago
  I feel like it was just a case of good luck (assuming that the suspect they found is actually guilty) that the suspect googled the home's address 14 times. This feels like the type of thing if allowed to become more mainstream will just result in harassment of unrelated parties for having the bad luck to have coincidentally search something at a bad time.

thedigitalone 3y ago

Paywalled, mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20Gee https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20Gee

paxys 3y ago

It wasn't the data itself that was questionable. Search history has been commonly used as evidence for a while now. The difference is that usually you identify a suspect and then pull up their history, while in this case it was the reverse. I personally do think that "give me a list of everyone who searched for XYZ in this time frame" is a clear case of a search warrant being unconstitutionally broad, but then this is generally where surveillance is going so it's futile to think it won't just continue to get worse.

DistractionRect 3y ago
It's not like they ask for all searches in this time frame. It's who searched for this specific address. That's pretty narrow, one can expect the only people to search that address did so because they had business there (or perhaps nearby, and someone messed up the street number). I suspect with geofencing and a adequate window, you can further narrow the scope of the warrant (likely people looking up this address years ago have nothing to do with the arson, but people looking it up last week/month are suspect). In my opinion, it was reasonable, and not broad at all. That it only returned 5 accounts and not 500+ speaks to how narrow it is given the volume of search queries Google handles.
- bsder 3y ago
  So, 5 accounts and 3 teens. So a 40% miss rate? In what way did the 2 accounts that weren't guilty get harassed by the police?
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    You're confusing accuracy and precision. You want search warrants to be precise, but the only way to guarantee accuracy is to know in advance the fruits of the search. You can have a solid foundation for a warrant against an individual, but find out they aren't responsible, a 100% miss rate! But that's the problem, you don't know what you dont know, which is why you need a search warrant (and justification for it) to begin with.

silisili 3y ago

So the take away here is to either use a VPN when searching, or use a less well known search engine. Would he have been caught if he'd just Bing'd the address 14 times?