Google Complies with Federal Request to Conduct a Digital Dragnet of Users Searching Specific Key Terms
Google and its affiliated products account for roughly 90 percent of all Internet searches. “Google organizes information about web pages in a search index, which contains more information than ‘all of the world’s libraries put together,’” according to Medium. The Medium article details the extensive lengths to which Google calibrates user queries into actionable insight via the Search tool. For years, privacy advocates have expressed concern about Google’s level of information collection and its potential use cases.
Forbes Exposes Google’s Compliance with Federal “Keyboard Warrants”
On October 4th, Forbes reported that federal investigators are “secretly ordering Google to provide data on anyone typing in certain search terms.” Forbes notes that privacy advocates fear that these so-called “keyboard warrants” may be used more broadly, which would potentially result in the implication of “innocent Web users.” Forbes specifically notes a 2019 federal investigation in Wisconsin whereby investigators were chasing perpetrators of a specific crime. Specifically, “investigators turned to Google, asking the tech giant to provide information on anyone who had searched for the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name and her address over 16 days across the year. Google responded to the federal investigators in 2020 after being asked to provide “all relevant Google accounts and IP addresses of those who made the searches.”
The warrant at issue is a so-called “keyboard warrant.” This type of warrant has all of the elements of a fishing expedition whereby the requested search attributes are broad enough to capture a wide range of possible suspects. “Keyboard warrants” demonstrate similar qualities to so-called “geofence warrants.” There has been much more public reporting on “geofence warrants” so it is much clearer how they operate. A “geofence warrant” requests digital indicators from a technology provider like Google or some application that tracks a user’s location. The warrant will specifically describe a certain radius around a crime scene, as well as specific time periods. Any user- within that distance and time period of the crime scene may be caught up in the digital dragnet requested by the warrant. A Harvard Law Review notes a good example of this: a gentleman named Zachary McCoy received notice to appear in court from Google after his running application tracked him riding his bicycle in a Gainesville, Florida neighborhood.
These digital dragnets are troubling given that there is not enough insight into their scope and the level of cooperation from third-party data companies. Prior to Forbes’ reporting on the 2019 federal investigation in Wisconsin, there were only two “publicly known” keyboard warrants. After Forbes initial report, three additional keyboard warrants for the investigation into the 2018 Austin bombings became public knowledge. The New York Post reports that “the warrants appear to be very broad, ordering Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search engines to provide information on users who searched various addresses and terms related to bombs.” As more information about this type of warrant becomes publicly available, it will be important for elected officials and legal scholars to consider the balance between individual privacy and government investigations.
As a privacy advocate, the major concern is the lack of transparency from federal investigators. The American Civil Liberties Union has been a key privacy advocate in the effort to combat overreaching government investigations. Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union says, “trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past. This is a virtual dragnet.” In the Wisconsin case, federal investigators were also requesting that Google provide “CookieIDs” for any users caught up in the investigative dragnet. In short, CookieIDs are “identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period.”
While today’s controversial warrant covers keyboard searches, tomorrow’s controversial warrant may expand to include specific behavioral profiles within proximity to a crime scene.
Third parties have long cooperated with government investigations to ensure that malicious actors are handed justice. Google is no different in its intention to cooperate with federal and state government investigators; however, Google’s products are without historical parallel. Google amasses data on billions of its users and their individual searches. Research has shown that Google and other major technology firms can use the data they collect to create behavioral profiles on users and market specifically to that unique user’s preference. While today’s controversial warrant covers keyboard searches, tomorrow’s controversial warrant may expand to include specific behavioral profiles within proximity to a crime scene. In the beginning, few could have predicted that basic queries on a search engine would be subject to a federal investigator’s warrant. Time has proven that our technological tools can be used to “involve the very sort of ‘general, exploratory rummaging’ that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit,” writes the Harvard Law Review. Given Forbes’ recent reporting, it is time for the Supreme Court to expand on Carpenter v. United States and to consider the constitutionality of both “keyboard warrants” and “geofence warrants.”
