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Because this sets precedence, the following scenarios can produce material admissible in court: - A state bans certain reproductive pills. An officer asks for

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.

taeric 3y ago
Small nit to start, this sets a precedent. This does not necessarily set precedence. Those are two different things. Again, though, this is a hard hill to want to set the battle on. If this was a case of "searching for contentious thing" than I would be worried, as well. This was literally, "any evidence that someone scoped out a specific location where a crime that we all agree is a crime happened?" And saying there is no oversight is silly. This had a warrant. It went through a process. To claim there is no oversight is overstating the situation and is a bad faith argument. To contrive how this could have led to a lot of false positives completely ignores that it was such a well directed search that it did not, in fact, do that. Last number I heard was that it literally hit single digits in how many results it had. That is beyond well scoped for this sort of thing.
- ttyprintk 3y ago
  These are good points, and supported by the court explicitly stating that they’re not making a judgement on all such warrants, but on the constitutionality of using evidence gathered this way. I think this evidence cannot be used constitutionally, but practically I might be mistaking the application of this ruling to “good” warrants as well as “bad” ones. This might be a well-directed warrant which supports the public good with statistics satisfying a reasonable observer. But, can we tell that apart from a “bad” warrant in which we do not have access to refuting statistics? Honest question, should the search engine’s legal department be the only ones who can make the counter argument.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Fair. I can certainly see how this is close to things that are bad. And I'm all for keeping the watch up, as it were. To your specific question, I don't have an answer. I'm assuming some judgement was made at Google, as well? In that, if they felt it was an unconstitutional request, they can push back. The link someone gave to what libraries can/should do supports that view.

taeric 3y ago

Small nit to start, this sets a precedent. This does not necessarily set precedence. Those are two different things. Again, though, this is a hard hill to want to set the battle on. If this was a case of "searching for contentious thing" than I would be worried, as well. This was literally, "any evidence that someone scoped out a specific location where a crime that we all agree is a crime happened?" And saying there is no oversight is silly. This had a warrant. It went through a process. To claim there is no oversight is overstating the situation and is a bad faith argument. To contrive how this could have led to a lot of false positives completely ignores that it was such a well directed search that it did not, in fact, do that. Last number I heard was that it literally hit single digits in how many results it had. That is beyond well scoped for this sort of thing.

ttyprintk 3y ago
These are good points, and supported by the court explicitly stating that they’re not making a judgement on all such warrants, but on the constitutionality of using evidence gathered this way. I think this evidence cannot be used constitutionally, but practically I might be mistaking the application of this ruling to “good” warrants as well as “bad” ones. This might be a well-directed warrant which supports the public good with statistics satisfying a reasonable observer. But, can we tell that apart from a “bad” warrant in which we do not have access to refuting statistics? Honest question, should the search engine’s legal department be the only ones who can make the counter argument.
- taeric 3y ago
  Fair. I can certainly see how this is close to things that are bad. And I'm all for keeping the watch up, as it were. To your specific question, I don't have an answer. I'm assuming some judgement was made at Google, as well? In that, if they felt it was an unconstitutional request, they can push back. The link someone gave to what libraries can/should do supports that view.