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There are different incidents here. The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder ho

There are different incidents here. The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that. The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.

godelski 3y ago
I don't understand how either of these are remotely constitutional. They sure aren't what is in the spirit. They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers. I don't think any of this appears legitimate. Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
- changoplatanero 3y ago
  The second one seems a lot more narrow and more legitimate
  - dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
    I remember Larry Ellison (Oracle) in the news saying that Privacy Is Dead a quarter century ago, long enough the article merely referred to it as famous (no date needed) in 2018. It was written six years ago... https://securitycurrent.com/privacy-is-dead-long-live-privacy/ https://securitycurrent.com/privacy-is-dead-long-live-privac...
- mingus88 3y ago
  Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have. Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times. Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera? Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location. Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    This sounds scary, and yet I seem to be unharmed.
    - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
      A case is criminal gangs buying from data brokers to scam elders
    - sriram_malhar 3y ago
      Shall we wait on the laws until you personally come to some harm?
      - skybrian 3y ago
        No, but the argument did use "you" to imply that the reader was harmed. I consider that an illegitimate scare tactic. It would be better to talk about how someone else might be harmed.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        If you weren't one of the 30k watching the video, you are the "someone else".
- vages 3y ago
  Did you forget the link to Blackstone?
  - godelski 3y ago
    yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  I agree that it's egregious, but Sir Blackstone was talking about punishment, especially relating to execution, and I think perhaps the ratio can be adjusted significantly downward when the cost to the innocent is much lower. Otherwise, the only reasonable search would be when a government official is already certain of your guilt.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I'd consider your rights being violated "punishment." Blackstone was talking in the abstract. Clearly Franklin was too considering many of the other things he's known for saying.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > I'd consider your rights being violated "punishment." You are wrong. Punishment is when you impose a penalty as retribution for an offense.
      - godelski 3y ago
        You can call me wrong, but maybe first ensure you understand negative rights. I understand why you think I'm wrong, but I hope you understand why I think that way. We can disagree, and that is fine, but let's not act as if there are objective answers in social constructs. Because, I do think punishment is an imposed penalty. In this case, on your rights. Rights are abstract, and these are not binary nor clearly discrete. House arrest is not jail, nor are fines. But as communicated to you elsewhere, the 4th amendment is about ensuring friction for removing someone's negative rights. But I disagree that punishment is imposed as a penalty as retribution for an offense. You imply that this requires an actual offense to have been made. I assure you that punishment can be imposed for any arbitrary reason. I can also assure you that punishment is a spectrum, from extremely minor (as I think we'd agree is in this case) and extremely harsh.
        CobrastanJorji 3y ago
        You to are having a debate over semantics. Most dictionaries would probably agree that punishment is, definitionally, retribution for an offense. You cannot punish without a reason because that's not punishment, it's just hurting people. Your definition may be different, and that's fine, but you can't logic your way out of a difference of opinion on the definition of the word.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Blackstone: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" So not sure where you got the impression he's okay with up to 100 people being disturbed so we can catch one bad guy. But then, he wasn't really talking about that was he? Better the guilty go free than the innocent suffer what? He was, essentially, talking about the principle of innocent until proven guilty; that innocent people shouldn't suffer by being punished for a crime unjustly. 2999 innocent people, in your formulation, though, are not being punished for a crime. They're not even being accused of a crime.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Well I forgot to link but from the wiki Other commentators have echoed the principle. Benjamin Franklin stated it as: "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" I went with Franklin because we are specifically talking America but let's be honest, the number doesn't matter and it seems you agree. Let's focus on that. Because I'm 100% with you, this isn't even people who have been accused. Which even those accused have rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
    - jameshart 3y ago
      You've still got the ratio backwards. Franklin says if you know 101 people watched a video, and 100 of them are guilty of a crime, you can't just round up all 101 and throw them in jail. I.e., if you have a standard of punishment that would convict even one innocent person for every 100 guilty people it catches, it's not a good standard. Which I think we can all agree with. But that's not what's happening here, is it?
      - chii 3y ago
        so it is considered punishment to have the watch information revealed to the state?
      - godelski 3y ago
        > you can't just round up all 101 and throw them in jail Yes. "100 people" (or whatever) had their rights violated. Sure, not as bad as jail, but it is still in the spirit. I'm not sure why you think I have it backwards, I think we're just using different perspectives. But I'm not into being pedantic if we understand one another.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one I think whether their rights are violated depends entirely on what sort of information is handed over. Consider acquiring surveillance footage that has plenty of foot traffic, but a suspect is known to have passed by. The police are typically permitted to review that footage even though plenty of innocent people were captured on that video.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >depends entirely on what sort of information is handed over. Apparently: >The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. That definitely seems like an overreach.
- okr 3y ago
  If it is an order by a court, then i think it is ok. Then it is no mass surveillance and for solving a crime it is useful. I wonder what kind of video it is. Maybe a shared link, so only people who secretly know about it knew about it, and they have become suspects. Is it mentioned in the forbes article? And i wonder if people abuse videos on youtube by encrypting the content with a key and the key is then shared.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > If it is an order by a court, then i think it is ok. Then it is no mass surveillance and for solving a crime it is useful. Why can't a court order be mass surveillance? In these cases, the videos were viewed 30,000 times and more than 130,000 times (if I understand the latter correctly). How is that not mass? Nobody suggests that more than a few of those people are suspects.
    - okr 3y ago
      My understanding of mass surveillance is, that masses are surveilled. :) But here its a court, that allows extracting log data for a specific case and it happened after the fact. I make a difference between leaving loggable traces of living (which we leave all the time, no matter what) and sometimes filtering to recapture the past.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        emphasis on "Specific". This doesn't feel specific at all. Mass surveillance or not, this feels like a failure of the warrant itself passing.
      - jll29 3y ago
        That's right even if the sample size N=30,000, it is still a one-time point event controlled/approved by the proper legal authority. There will be an audit trail of said approval and the process will be documented. In contrast mass surveillance is just "oh, we have a BIG database, and we query whenever for whatever purpose, and nobody knows who searched for what and when and why, and nobody EXTERNAL TO THE AGENCY needs to approve it (lack of control). And today, Bob, who works for the police, background-searched his new girlfriend as well."
- iteygib 3y ago
  Any kind of search can be deemed constitutional if it goes through a warrant process, which is the point of warrants. This story is less about the how the information was taken and more about whether or not the warrant process and 4th Amendment rights were properly followed. This would then be mixed in with the question of whether or not new forms of data (like video views) would equate to previous forms of similar data searches that police have obtained warrants for (like reviewing CCTV).
- lolinder 3y ago
  OP explicitly agrees with you that the 30k is illegitimate, but that's the only one you address. What's your take on the one where the police became aware that they were being watched on a YouTube livestream while responding to a bomb threat and obtained a court order asking for information about who was viewing a set of local livestreams at the specific times where they were searching for the bomb? What makes that one different than a court order demanding that a business release security footage that covers the scene of a crime for the time window in which the crime occurred? Or would you consider such a court order to also be illegitimate?
- mistermann 3y ago
  > I don't think any of this appears legitimate. It isn't. Democracy is fake. Our justice system is fake. Everything is fake. (Where "fake" = "not what they are advertised or perceived to be.) If all of the same things were occurring in another country, or even better: in a video game, you would have little difficulty and zero aversion to accepting these facts. However: put a person into these things, and the brain malfunctions. If you are a reasonably normal person, your mind will now be filled with objections to this proposition, reasons why I am incorrect. But if you were to state those objections, I can punch holes in every single one of them without even breaking a sweat. We live in a literal simulation, but not the kind that everyone has been hypnotized to believe is the only kind possible - have you ever noticed that when the notion of simulation theory comes up, it is always The simulation theory (Nick Bostrom's)? This is a pretty neat trick eh? And there seems to be nothing that can be done about it, because people will fight tooth and nail (using Meme Magic, aka "The Facts", "The Reality", etc) against being extracted. Thankfully, it is simultaneously hilarious. Well, except the part where millions of children are dying, but nobody cares....but oh boy when a big scary "pandemic" comes along, pull out all the stops. I hope that there is a Hell, because I would like to see every single member of this despicable 21st century society end up there some day. Seeing justice finally being served for once would be worth suffering for eternity.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Well, except the part where millions of children are dying, but nobody cares....but oh boy when a big scary "pandemic" comes along, pull out all the stops. You MAY have had a point somewhere in those ramblings, but this right here just kind of undoes any credibility.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      A rather bold (yet oh so common) metaphysical & cognitive claim. I think it's fun to imagine that pandemics are some sort of supernatural punishment for human hubris in Western nations.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Better one person not be crushed to death than two thousand nine hundred ninety nine suffer essentially no harm whatsoever. No, that doesn’t seem very familiar.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    If we're being honest here: it's money laundering. It's not an inherently harmful crime except to the IRS. so apparently it's the most heinous thing imaginable (meanwhile, every corporation...). No one is in danger, this is an absurd request for an absurd result of... catching a dude using cryptocurrency the way the government doesn't like. Screw the government.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I certainly concur with this. On the one hand, a narrow warrant that reveals a lot of people (classic example are warrants on motels to provide the names of everyone who checked in on a certain date, or was registered on a certain date) are certainly constitutional and have been upheld many times. The first seems, odd.
- initplus 3y ago
  The first is a somewhat clever attempt to unmask someone ann undercover investigator was already talking to. Police should have narrowed scope of the warrant by only asking for data on viewers within a narrow window after they sent the link. Even better might have been to directly link to some service that they already control on a honeypot URL, and then gone after the ISP for customer details.
  - ametrau 3y ago
    Nah actually pretty dumb overall. And sending an open link when a private one looks the same is even more dumb.
- godelski 3y ago
  In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times. This is the first case. This doesn't seem that narrow to me.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. Wait, what? So is Bitcoin illegal to use as a currency now? Special casing exchanges for cash seems completely pointless if you could just buy some of <any commodity> for cash and then turn around and sell it back to the same person for the same amount in Bitcoin, but if every customer has to do KYC of the merchant when they're paying with Bitcoin, how is that ever going to be feasible?
phire 3y ago
> The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that. The police didn't upload they videos. It's not entrapment, and it doesn't sound like the actual content of the videos is illegal. Instead, they had an open communication channel with their target and were able to send them various links to youtube videos. Their theory being if they can find any user who clicked on all (or most of) those links, it's probably their target. And it's unlikely some random user would have accidentally viewed all those videos. The actual request for the raw list of all viewers seems unconstitutional to me. Too broad, gives the police a lot of infomation about all users who watched just one of the videos. But I suspect a much narrower request where google identified the target user and past just that user's info on would be constitutional.
- csomar 3y ago
  > But I suspect a much narrower request where google identified the target user and past just that user's info on would be constitutional. Isn't that worse? Essentially making Google do the job of the police and the police having to trust the work of Google for it.
  - phire 3y ago
    I don't see any problem with trust. The police will still get the exact same raw data of that one target user. The change just means that they won't get any data on other users.
supposemaybe 3y ago
If you see a YT which is remotely dodgy, don’t watch it… It very well could be planted there as bait. And that’s great Google are trying to fight back, a little. Though I wonder that for us Non-American Brits that they’d do the same for us too (doubtful)
helpmefindpurp 3y ago
A person from rdrama managed to find the FBI victim's anon reddit profile (public information), and apparently it was IRS evasion? https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/255754/google-ordered-to-identify-who-watched/6156261#context https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/255754/google-ordered-...

godelski 3y ago

I don't understand how either of these are remotely constitutional. They sure aren't what is in the spirit. They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers. I don't think any of this appears legitimate. Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

changoplatanero 3y ago
The second one seems a lot more narrow and more legitimate
- dirtyhippiefree 3y ago
  I remember Larry Ellison (Oracle) in the news saying that Privacy Is Dead a quarter century ago, long enough the article merely referred to it as famous (no date needed) in 2018. It was written six years ago... https://securitycurrent.com/privacy-is-dead-long-live-privacy/ https://securitycurrent.com/privacy-is-dead-long-live-privac...
mingus88 3y ago
Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have. Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times. Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera? Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location. Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.
- skybrian 3y ago
  This sounds scary, and yet I seem to be unharmed.
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    A case is criminal gangs buying from data brokers to scam elders
  - sriram_malhar 3y ago
    Shall we wait on the laws until you personally come to some harm?
    - skybrian 3y ago
      No, but the argument did use "you" to imply that the reader was harmed. I consider that an illegitimate scare tactic. It would be better to talk about how someone else might be harmed.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        If you weren't one of the 30k watching the video, you are the "someone else".
vages 3y ago
Did you forget the link to Blackstone?
- godelski 3y ago
  yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
I agree that it's egregious, but Sir Blackstone was talking about punishment, especially relating to execution, and I think perhaps the ratio can be adjusted significantly downward when the cost to the innocent is much lower. Otherwise, the only reasonable search would be when a government official is already certain of your guilt.
- godelski 3y ago
  I'd consider your rights being violated "punishment." Blackstone was talking in the abstract. Clearly Franklin was too considering many of the other things he's known for saying.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > I'd consider your rights being violated "punishment." You are wrong. Punishment is when you impose a penalty as retribution for an offense.
    - godelski 3y ago
      You can call me wrong, but maybe first ensure you understand negative rights. I understand why you think I'm wrong, but I hope you understand why I think that way. We can disagree, and that is fine, but let's not act as if there are objective answers in social constructs. Because, I do think punishment is an imposed penalty. In this case, on your rights. Rights are abstract, and these are not binary nor clearly discrete. House arrest is not jail, nor are fines. But as communicated to you elsewhere, the 4th amendment is about ensuring friction for removing someone's negative rights. But I disagree that punishment is imposed as a penalty as retribution for an offense. You imply that this requires an actual offense to have been made. I assure you that punishment can be imposed for any arbitrary reason. I can also assure you that punishment is a spectrum, from extremely minor (as I think we'd agree is in this case) and extremely harsh.
      - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
        You to are having a debate over semantics. Most dictionaries would probably agree that punishment is, definitionally, retribution for an offense. You cannot punish without a reason because that's not punishment, it's just hurting people. Your definition may be different, and that's fine, but you can't logic your way out of a difference of opinion on the definition of the word.
jameshart 3y ago
Blackstone: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" So not sure where you got the impression he's okay with up to 100 people being disturbed so we can catch one bad guy. But then, he wasn't really talking about that was he? Better the guilty go free than the innocent suffer what? He was, essentially, talking about the principle of innocent until proven guilty; that innocent people shouldn't suffer by being punished for a crime unjustly. 2999 innocent people, in your formulation, though, are not being punished for a crime. They're not even being accused of a crime.
- godelski 3y ago
  Well I forgot to link but from the wiki Other commentators have echoed the principle. Benjamin Franklin stated it as: "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" I went with Franklin because we are specifically talking America but let's be honest, the number doesn't matter and it seems you agree. Let's focus on that. Because I'm 100% with you, this isn't even people who have been accused. Which even those accused have rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
  - jameshart 3y ago
    You've still got the ratio backwards. Franklin says if you know 101 people watched a video, and 100 of them are guilty of a crime, you can't just round up all 101 and throw them in jail. I.e., if you have a standard of punishment that would convict even one innocent person for every 100 guilty people it catches, it's not a good standard. Which I think we can all agree with. But that's not what's happening here, is it?
    - chii 3y ago
      so it is considered punishment to have the watch information revealed to the state?
    - godelski 3y ago
      > you can't just round up all 101 and throw them in jail Yes. "100 people" (or whatever) had their rights violated. Sure, not as bad as jail, but it is still in the spirit. I'm not sure why you think I have it backwards, I think we're just using different perspectives. But I'm not into being pedantic if we understand one another.
naasking 3y ago
> Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one I think whether their rights are violated depends entirely on what sort of information is handed over. Consider acquiring surveillance footage that has plenty of foot traffic, but a suspect is known to have passed by. The police are typically permitted to review that footage even though plenty of innocent people were captured on that video.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >depends entirely on what sort of information is handed over. Apparently: >The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. That definitely seems like an overreach.
okr 3y ago
If it is an order by a court, then i think it is ok. Then it is no mass surveillance and for solving a crime it is useful. I wonder what kind of video it is. Maybe a shared link, so only people who secretly know about it knew about it, and they have become suspects. Is it mentioned in the forbes article? And i wonder if people abuse videos on youtube by encrypting the content with a key and the key is then shared.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > If it is an order by a court, then i think it is ok. Then it is no mass surveillance and for solving a crime it is useful. Why can't a court order be mass surveillance? In these cases, the videos were viewed 30,000 times and more than 130,000 times (if I understand the latter correctly). How is that not mass? Nobody suggests that more than a few of those people are suspects.
  - okr 3y ago
    My understanding of mass surveillance is, that masses are surveilled. :) But here its a court, that allows extracting log data for a specific case and it happened after the fact. I make a difference between leaving loggable traces of living (which we leave all the time, no matter what) and sometimes filtering to recapture the past.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      emphasis on "Specific". This doesn't feel specific at all. Mass surveillance or not, this feels like a failure of the warrant itself passing.
    - jll29 3y ago
      That's right even if the sample size N=30,000, it is still a one-time point event controlled/approved by the proper legal authority. There will be an audit trail of said approval and the process will be documented. In contrast mass surveillance is just "oh, we have a BIG database, and we query whenever for whatever purpose, and nobody knows who searched for what and when and why, and nobody EXTERNAL TO THE AGENCY needs to approve it (lack of control). And today, Bob, who works for the police, background-searched his new girlfriend as well."
iteygib 3y ago
Any kind of search can be deemed constitutional if it goes through a warrant process, which is the point of warrants. This story is less about the how the information was taken and more about whether or not the warrant process and 4th Amendment rights were properly followed. This would then be mixed in with the question of whether or not new forms of data (like video views) would equate to previous forms of similar data searches that police have obtained warrants for (like reviewing CCTV).
lolinder 3y ago
OP explicitly agrees with you that the 30k is illegitimate, but that's the only one you address. What's your take on the one where the police became aware that they were being watched on a YouTube livestream while responding to a bomb threat and obtained a court order asking for information about who was viewing a set of local livestreams at the specific times where they were searching for the bomb? What makes that one different than a court order demanding that a business release security footage that covers the scene of a crime for the time window in which the crime occurred? Or would you consider such a court order to also be illegitimate?
mistermann 3y ago
> I don't think any of this appears legitimate. It isn't. Democracy is fake. Our justice system is fake. Everything is fake. (Where "fake" = "not what they are advertised or perceived to be.) If all of the same things were occurring in another country, or even better: in a video game, you would have little difficulty and zero aversion to accepting these facts. However: put a person into these things, and the brain malfunctions. If you are a reasonably normal person, your mind will now be filled with objections to this proposition, reasons why I am incorrect. But if you were to state those objections, I can punch holes in every single one of them without even breaking a sweat. We live in a literal simulation, but not the kind that everyone has been hypnotized to believe is the only kind possible - have you ever noticed that when the notion of simulation theory comes up, it is always The simulation theory (Nick Bostrom's)? This is a pretty neat trick eh? And there seems to be nothing that can be done about it, because people will fight tooth and nail (using Meme Magic, aka "The Facts", "The Reality", etc) against being extracted. Thankfully, it is simultaneously hilarious. Well, except the part where millions of children are dying, but nobody cares....but oh boy when a big scary "pandemic" comes along, pull out all the stops. I hope that there is a Hell, because I would like to see every single member of this despicable 21st century society end up there some day. Seeing justice finally being served for once would be worth suffering for eternity.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Well, except the part where millions of children are dying, but nobody cares....but oh boy when a big scary "pandemic" comes along, pull out all the stops. You MAY have had a point somewhere in those ramblings, but this right here just kind of undoes any credibility.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    A rather bold (yet oh so common) metaphysical & cognitive claim. I think it's fun to imagine that pandemics are some sort of supernatural punishment for human hubris in Western nations.
singleshot_ 3y ago
Better one person not be crushed to death than two thousand nine hundred ninety nine suffer essentially no harm whatsoever. No, that doesn’t seem very familiar.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  If we're being honest here: it's money laundering. It's not an inherently harmful crime except to the IRS. so apparently it's the most heinous thing imaginable (meanwhile, every corporation...). No one is in danger, this is an absurd request for an absurd result of... catching a dude using cryptocurrency the way the government doesn't like. Screw the government.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I certainly concur with this. On the one hand, a narrow warrant that reveals a lot of people (classic example are warrants on motels to provide the names of everyone who checked in on a certain date, or was registered on a certain date) are certainly constitutional and have been upheld many times. The first seems, odd.

initplus 3y ago
The first is a somewhat clever attempt to unmask someone ann undercover investigator was already talking to. Police should have narrowed scope of the warrant by only asking for data on viewers within a narrow window after they sent the link. Even better might have been to directly link to some service that they already control on a honeypot URL, and then gone after the ISP for customer details.
- ametrau 3y ago
  Nah actually pretty dumb overall. And sending an open link when a private one looks the same is even more dumb.
godelski 3y ago
In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times. This is the first case. This doesn't seem that narrow to me.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. Wait, what? So is Bitcoin illegal to use as a currency now? Special casing exchanges for cash seems completely pointless if you could just buy some of <any commodity> for cash and then turn around and sell it back to the same person for the same amount in Bitcoin, but if every customer has to do KYC of the merchant when they're paying with Bitcoin, how is that ever going to be feasible?

phire 3y ago

> The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that. The police didn't upload they videos. It's not entrapment, and it doesn't sound like the actual content of the videos is illegal. Instead, they had an open communication channel with their target and were able to send them various links to youtube videos. Their theory being if they can find any user who clicked on all (or most of) those links, it's probably their target. And it's unlikely some random user would have accidentally viewed all those videos. The actual request for the raw list of all viewers seems unconstitutional to me. Too broad, gives the police a lot of infomation about all users who watched just one of the videos. But I suspect a much narrower request where google identified the target user and past just that user's info on would be constitutional.

csomar 3y ago
> But I suspect a much narrower request where google identified the target user and past just that user's info on would be constitutional. Isn't that worse? Essentially making Google do the job of the police and the police having to trust the work of Google for it.
- phire 3y ago
  I don't see any problem with trust. The police will still get the exact same raw data of that one target user. The change just means that they won't get any data on other users.

supposemaybe 3y ago

If you see a YT which is remotely dodgy, don’t watch it… It very well could be planted there as bait. And that’s great Google are trying to fight back, a little. Though I wonder that for us Non-American Brits that they’d do the same for us too (doubtful)

helpmefindpurp 3y ago

A person from rdrama managed to find the FBI victim's anon reddit profile (public information), and apparently it was IRS evasion? https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/255754/google-ordered-to-identify-who-watched/6156261#context https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/255754/google-ordered-...