Wed. June 15, 2021 | By Thomas Brewster – Forbes |
In a rare decision to counter U.S. government investigator attempts to force tech giants to furnish them with data, a Kansas judge has denied a government request to use a controversial search warrant for what’s known as a Google geofence.
Also known as a reverse location search, such warrants allow police to take a given crime scene and ask Google for data on all smartphones in that place over a given timeframe, whether that’s information coming from Maps or other Google tools that track location. In one recent case in Tennessee, for instance, a church was vandalized and a geofence ordered around the place of worship, though no information has yet been recovered in that case, according to the court docket. In another recently-unsealed case, they’ve been used to track phones within and around a suspected child abuser’s residence over two days in an attempt to determine where he was on the date of an alleged message he sent to a minor. In others, police have targeted the wrong man, or retrieved data on more than 1,000 phones going through the area, raising concerns about how innocent people can be affected by such warrants.
Last year, judges in Illinois denied the government permission to use Google geofences. And some critics say such warrants should be outlawed entirely. “These broad warrants are indiscriminate, dragnet searches that can implicate countless people who have no connection to the crime,” said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Given the very nature of these warrants, we don’t think they can ever pass constitutional muster.”
In Kansas, the specific investigation wasn’t highlighted, due to an unspecified need to keep case details secret. All that was revealed was that the crime took place at or near “a sizeable business establishment, during a one-hour period on the relevant date,” according to a letter written by the judge.
The judge said that the government hadn’t done enough to prove the suspect would have had a smartphone in the area at the time of the incident. “The affidavit suggests only that the culprit was a lone pedestrian in the early morning hours who was caught on surveillance footage,” he wrote. “The affidavit conspicuously omits any suggestion that the surveillance footage shows that the individual had a cellphone.”
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