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I'm not sure I buy the dragnet scare used on this. After a house is burned down, they are likely to ask everyone around if they saw or heard anything. Heck, t

• theptip 3y ago
  They may ask, and you may plead the fifth, and I might decline to talk to the police on principle. Executing a general warrant compels everyone to “answer the question” in your analogy, which is clearly very different. You keep saying “ask” but here they seize.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • taeric 3y ago
    That doesn't really change much, though? For one, they couldn't compel you, even with a warrant, to testify against yourself. They can compel you to provide information against others, though. If we are against that entire concept, that is one thing. But that is not the argument here, is it?
    • heavyset_go 3y ago
      You can be compelled to provide evidence that incriminates you, but not testimony. It's the difference between "tell us if you committed this crime" and "we're going to comb through records of your past speech to see if you said anything suspicious and there's nothing you can do to stop us".
      • taeric 3y ago
        That is what I said, isn't it? Not clear on the relevance here, though. Google had information that they were compelled to hand over on someone else. If we want to argue that Google should not be obligated to record that information. I can get behind that. I could go as far as to say they shouldn't retain it for long, period.
• squigz 3y ago
  Holy wow you have a really high opinion of your local police.
  • taeric 3y ago
    Not necessarily. I just have a low opinion of weak arguments. Slippery slopes do exist. But so do systems working as intended, sometimes.
• Kerbonut 3y ago
  All someone would need to do to frame another for a crime like that is to hack their WiFi and set up a small device to run a very specific google search for a period? Hopefully they found more evidence than just the search queries.
  • taeric 3y ago
    And if this was the only evidence in the case, you would have a point? They did, in fact, find more evidence. Is why the defense took a long shot approach to try and break the first link in the chain.
• hn_acker 3y ago
  > After a house is burned down, they are likely to ask everyone around if they saw or heard anything. Heck, they are likely to ask the library in town if anyone had checked out a book that outlined how to make a firebomb or similar. Ask local stores if they saw anyone buy fuel that could be used as an accelerant. Expectations are a no in all cases for questions like this, but they still ask. In this case, they asked, "any chance anyone has been looking at this particular address?" When police ask for information in person, the people being asked know about it. When police instead go to Google with a dragnet warrant, the people included in the search never hear about it. But there's a much more fundamental problem, a problem of constitutional rights. A warrant is based on probable cause to believe that someone commmitted a crime. The Fourth Amendment expects a flow like this: Police get a report about a crime. Police investigate the crime scene. Police go in person asking about suspects. With this preliminary evidence, the police have probable cause to pick suspects and get warrants to search the suspects. A keyword search warrant is a general warrant. Police get a keyword search warrant. They search people who aren't suspects. Even if Google does the searching and decides which people to recommend to the police, Google does the searches because the government forces Google to search in the first place. The police use the information to get probable cause to pick suspects. This is backward: the searching comes before the probable cause. The Fourth Amendment breaks in this model.
  • taeric 3y ago
    If you think the warrant wasn't requested well, you kind of have a point. If the police simply had the "you know, I bet the arsonist would have used google maps to get directions to the place they burned down," that seems legit to ask for the information from Google. They would have already scanned phone records, and that seems... fine? I could see arguments that they need to scope down the time of request for that warrant, as well. But flat out disallowing it feels just as wrong as opening it up for no process.
• deleted 3y ago
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• heavyset_go 3y ago
  It can stifle speech and knowledge, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the consequences are the same. People are less likely to look up, or say, things in private that can get retroactively interpreted in the worst possible way by state actors who are looking for an easy arrest and/or conviction. In the past, it was nearly impossible to round up everyone based on what they looked up in an encyclopedia, or on a map, in private. Your pursuit of knowledge wasn't limited by the very real threat of "Can just having curiosity about something land me in prison for terrorism/murder/arson/etc?" It borders on thoughtcrime and feels like a fishing expedition to me. > After a house is burned down, they are likely to ask everyone around if they saw or heard anything To continue this analogy, simply asking is different than getting a warrant/subpoena for everyone in a neighborhood to search through records of their past speech to see if they said anything they deem suspicious.
  • taeric 3y ago
    If you had been yelling that you would be happy that someone's house burned down, I suspect you would be a suspect in the event that said house burned down. Does that mean we are stifling free speech that hopes harm on people? I can see some concern over this, but just not in this case. If it was, "all people that searched pyromancy" and that included people that were looking up fireworks, for example. Or if it was all people that looked at any house on redfin in that state. This was a fairly targeted search, all told. "Anyone been asking around about the victim?"
    • godd2 3y ago
      I didn't know we became pyromancers on July 4th.
    • heavyset_go 3y ago
      Nobody is loudly and publicly expressing malice towards the victims of the arson, they privately, not loudly and publicly, Googled innocuous things that in no way express malice.
      • taeric 3y ago
• dtgriscom 3y ago
  > they are likely to ask the library in town if anyone had checked out a book that outlined how to make a firebomb or similar I'm hoping that the town library would stonewall any such request: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy
  • taeric 3y ago
    But your own link has https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/lawenforcement/guidelines https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/lawenforcement/guidelin... That is, there is a good chance something like this request would be honored by any library. "Any chance you saw a person following the victim out of the building?".
  • autoexec 3y ago
    Libraries haven't really been that big on privacy lately. They did fight against the government collecting our reading lists but when they lost that battle it feels like they just gave up. Now they encourage people to use 3rd party DRM filled apps that collect personal information including people's reading lists so that those apps can use that data to (among other things) push ads at them. That's the kind of thing a librarian would have strongly opposed a decade or two ago, but today they push those apps on adults and children without even mentioning the privacy issues.
    • Ylpertnodi 3y ago
      Would that be because they are dealing with an uneducated public? I gave up discussing privacy of late...too darn depressing.
      • taeric 3y ago
        Sadly, the DRM is because they are fighting copyright holders, more likely.
• deleted 3y ago
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• Guvante 3y ago
  Rulings aren't only about the case. Precedent is important. Loosing rulings here can lead to expanded power and suppression of speech for fear of backlash. Saying "checking for searches of an address in two weeks" is materially different than "searched for X suspected terrorist organization in four years".
  • taeric 3y ago
    I don't know that I follow your example. Searching a specific address is a fairly rare thing to do, all told. Such that I suspect you have a tighter target for that than you do any organization search.
    • heavyset_go 3y ago
      If you click anywhere on Google Maps it enters the address as a search query request.
      • taeric 3y ago
        And how many people are regularly clicking on a specific address? Compared to any searches on an organization, I just don't see it comparing.
        • ttyprintk 3y ago
          Because this sets precedence, the following scenarios can produce material admissible in court: - A state bans certain reproductive pills. An officer asks for all searches for the address of a certain pharmacy across state lines. - Some measure of crime is up around the new housing development. An officer asks for searches for webcams around an address. There is no oversight when that address happens to be a mosque. - Your DHCP lease grants an IP address that belonged to a real estate office plugging thousands of addresses in. The police department only asks for a few addresses, so it’s incorrigibly suspicious that you are the only IP who searched for all three addresses where a catalytic converter was stolen. You do not get the legal benefit of being able to see the exculpating history kept by the search giant.
• idiotsecant 3y ago
  Do you think that this is the most objectionable use of this new power that the state will think of? Supreme Court cases are not about the case. They're about the implications of precedent.
  • taeric 3y ago
    This is just paranoia, though. Leaving aside that state supreme court decisions are overturned often, case law tries to be narrowly applied where it can. And this specific case is fairly narrow.
    • autoexec 3y ago
      > This is just paranoia, though. I think we're well past the point where concerns about the state abusing personal data collected by corporations can be called "paranoia" in good faith. It's reality that the government abuses their ability to access the data being collected about us. The more abuses the law enables the more abuses we should expect to see. It's possible that this will be overturned at some point, or that other courts will rule differently in similar circumstances, but I wouldn't count on it. The courts don't have a great track record when it comes to preventing police from violating our rights or when it comes to preventing spying on the American people.
      • taeric 3y ago
        If this is just a call to keep oversight on the process, I'm perfectly fine with it. If there is evidence that this particular process is getting abused, make a scene and lets correct that. My assertion is that this is just not that case.