Google, Facebook could help US track spread of coronavirus with phone location data

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The companies have reportedly been in talks with the US government over using anonymous and aggregated data.

By Richard Nieva | March 17, 2020 |

Google, Facebook and other tech companies are in discussions with the federal government over how they can help fight the novel coronavirus with location data collected from people’s phones, according to a report Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The data, which would be anonymous and aggregated, could track whether people are keeping enough distance from each other to curb the spread of Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.

The strategy could be helpful in studying transmission trends for the virus. But it also comes at a time when big tech companies are already under intense scrutiny over their privacy policies and the trove of personal information they have on consumers.

Facebook wouldn’t say specifically if it’s working with the US government but pointed to past work it’s done on population density mapping with researchers at Harvard and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

“Disease Prevention Maps have helped organizations respond to health emergencies for nearly a year and we’ve heard from a number of governments that they’re supportive of this work,” Laura McGorman, policy lead for Facebook’s Data for Good initiative, said in a statement. “In the coronavirus context, researchers and nonprofits can use the maps, which are built with aggregated and anonymized data that people opt in to share, to understand and help combat the spread of the virus.”

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment, but told the Washington Post any partnership wouldn’t involve sharing a person’s movement or individual location. “We’re exploring ways that aggregated anonymized location information could help in the fight against COVID-19. One example could be helping health authorities determine the impact of social distancing, similar to the way we show popular restaurant times and traffic patterns in Google Maps,” a spokesman told the Post.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A similar strategy is reportedly being implemented in other parts of the world effected by the virus. Israeli government officials approved a plan to use cell phone data to track the locations of people infected with the coronavirus and those they might have had contact with, multiple news agencies reported Tuesday.

Google has already been working with the government to respond to the coronavirus. On Sunday evening, Google’s sister company Verily, which is focused on health care and life sciences, launched a website to give people information about coronavirus screening, though it is limited for now to two testing sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. The rollout followed a set of confusing announcements last week by Google and President Donald Trump.

Other tech companies said to be in talks with government agencies to use their technology to battle coronavirus include facial-recognition startup Clearview AI and data analytics firm Palantir. Clearview AI, which has come under criticism for selling its facial recognition app to US law enforcement, is in talks with state governments about using its technology to track infected patients, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Palantir, which is rumored to have played a role in locating Osama bin Laden, is working with the CDC on data collection and data integration to track the disease, the Journal reported. Neither Clearview AI nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.

The discussions come as government, business and community leaders have made an increased effort to stop the spread of the virus. Schools have closed down, sports events have been canceled, and most public gatherings have been banned. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where many of the big tech companies are headquartered, a shelter-in-place policy was announced Monday, and will be in effect at least until April 7.

Read original article from CNET.com HERE.

During COVID-19 Pandemic Cellular Experts Offer Support to Law Enforcement

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The COVID-19 outbreak is changing the way the law enforcement community looks at first responders and citizen safety health measures. Every tool they can leverage has become that much more important. Maps are an effective tool to keep public servants aware of any health threats around them as they continue to serve the community during a time of social distancing and potential civil unrest

Read More HERE

South Dakota becomes 26th state to pass the Kelsey Smith Act

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Greg and Missey Smith, the Overland Park parents of Kelsey Smith, were in attendance last week when South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed House Bill 1129, The Kelsey Smith Act. Rep. Dayle Hammock of Spearfish was the primary sponsor of the bill.

The Kelsey Smith Act provides law enforcement with a way to quickly find the location of a wireless telecommunications device if law enforcement has determined a person is at risk of death or serious physical harm due to being kidnapped and/or missing. The Smiths have pushed for this legislation across all United States after the murder of their daughter, Kelsey Smith, who was abducted in broad daylight from an Overland Park department store and murdered on June 2, 2007.

The abduction was captured on the store’s security camera leaving little doubt of the emergency nature of the circumstances. Four days after she disappeared, authorities were able to locate Kelsey’s body after her wireless provider released the “ping” or “call location” information from her cell phone. Providing this information as fast as possible is critical to ensure law enforcement officials can rescue victims in imminent danger of serious harm or death.

Read original article from the Shawnee Mission Post HERE.

FBI director: Law enforcement needs better access to tech devices

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By Jim Thompson | Feb 5, 2020 |

Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaida’s recent claim of responsibility for the fatal Dec. 6 attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola amplifies the need for law enforcement to have access to content of cellphones used criminally, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said in a Wednesday congressional hearing.

In the meantime, Gaetz’s office is working with local and federal officials to determine the best way to proceed given cellphone manufacturer Apple’s refusal thus far to unlock phones used by Saudi Air Force 2nd Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, the shooter in the Dec. 6 incident.

The attack left three people dead and eight injured before Alshamrani, a foreign flight student at NAS Pensacola, was fatally shot by an Escambia County sheriff’s deputy. In the wake of the shooting, the U.S. military instituted tougher vetting of foreign military students like Alshamrani, who come to the United States to learn about American military equipment.

In questioning FBI Director Christopher Wray in Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing, Gaetz — whose district includes NAS Pensacola — suggested that “given the fact that recently, al-Qaida Yemen has taken responsibility for the terrorist attack in my community, it would seem to elevate our need to have access to those communications devices and tools.”

Wray agreed, and in responding to Gaetz, said that Alshamrani had shot one of his cellphones during the attack, presumably to keep law-enforcement officials from discovering its contents.

″… (W)hile people were coming at him, and he was coming at them, (Alshamrani) took the time to shoot one of his own phones, to destroy it … ,” Wray said.

Wray went on to tell the committee that, despite the damage, FBI technicians were able to reconstruct the phone. While that provided access “from a technical perspective,” Wray said, the agency couldn’t decipher the phone’s content, due to the encryption (encoding applied to keep content private) placed on the phone by its manufacturer, Apple.

″… (W)e don’t have meaningful access to the content of that phone,” Wray said. ”… So whatever it was that he was trying to prevent us all from seeing, we don’t know.”

Wray said the FBI is “currently engaged with Apple, hoping to try to see if we can get better help from them to try and get access to the contents of that phone.”

Neither a phone call nor an email to Apple from the Daily News had received a response as of Wednesday afternoon.

Asked by Gaetz whether there is “meaningful legislation that the Congress should consider” to help law enforcement gain access to cellphones in a way that is workable for technology companies like Apple, Wray simply stressed the need for some type of resolution, although he expressed a preference for legislative action.

“Whether it’s done by legislation, or by the companies doing it voluntarily, I think we have to find a solution,” Wray said. “This problem is real. It’s now. I hear about it from law enforcement from every state in the country all the time.”

The FBI supports encryption, Wray said, but at the same time, he added, “we also believe that law enforcement has to have lawful access … or we’re not going to be able to protect people.”

In effect, Wray said, not taking action will mean that “the hard-working men and women of law enforcement, in Pensacola and everywhere else, are blind.”

In that light, Wray said, ”… I think these are decisions that should be made by the American people through their elected representatives, not through one company making a business decision on behalf of all of us.”

In other developments Wednesday, Wray told Gaetz and the committee that lessons learned in the NAS Pensacola shooting include the importance of ensuring that U.S. military officials “get adequate information from our foreign partners, and that they do the diligence that often they’re in the best position to do on the people before they come our way.”

As Gaetz’s time for questioning Wray ended, the congressman expressed a hope that, as work on vetting and cellphone issues moves forward, “the FBI will work with my office, because my community is deeply vested in these questions now … .”

 

Read the original article HERE.

Have a Search Warrant for Data? Google Wants You to Pay

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The tech giant has begun charging U.S. law enforcement for responses to search warrants and subpoenas.

By Gabriel J.X. Dance and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries | 01/24/2020 |

Facing an increasing number of requests for its users’ information, Google began charging law enforcement and other government agencies this month for legal demands seeking data such as emails, location tracking information and search queries.

Google’s fees range from $45 for a subpoena and $60 for a wiretap to $245 for a search warrant, according to a notice sent to law enforcement officials and reviewed by The New York Times. The notice also included fees for other legal requests.

A spokesman for Google said the fees were intended in part to help offset the costs of complying with warrants and subpoenas.

Federal law allows companies to charge the government reimbursement fees of this type, but Google’s decision is a major change in how it deals with legal requests.

Some Silicon Valley companies have for years forgone such charges, which can be difficult to enforce at a large scale and could give the impression that a company aims to profit from legal searches. But privacy experts support such fees as a deterrent to overbroad surveillance.

Google has tremendous amounts of information on billions of users, and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world routinely submit legal requests seeking that data. In the first half of 2019, the company received more than 75,000 requests for data on nearly 165,000 accounts worldwide; one in three of those requests came from the United States.

Google has previously charged for legal requests. A record from 2008 showed that the company sought reimbursement for a legal request for user data. But a spokesman said that for many years now, the tech firm had not systematically charged for standard legal processes.

The money brought in from the new fees would be inconsequential for Google. Just last week, the valuation of its parent company, Alphabet, topped $1 trillion for the first time. Alphabet is scheduled to report its latest financial results on Feb. 3.

The new fees could help recover some of the costs required to fill such a large volume of legal requests, said Al Gidari, a lawyer who for years represented Google and other technology and telecommunications companies. The requests have also grown more complicated as tech companies have acquired more data and law enforcement has become more technologically sophisticated.

“None of the services were designed with exfiltrating data for law enforcement in mind,” said Mr. Gidari, who is now the consulting privacy director at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.

Mr. Gidari also said it was good that the fees might result in fewer legal requests to the company. “The actual costs of doing wiretaps and responding to search warrants is high, and when you pass those costs on to the government, it deters from excessive surveillance,” he said.

In April, The Times reported that Google had been inundated with a new type of search warrant request, known as geofence searches. Drawing on an enormous Google database called Sensorvault, they provide law enforcement with the opportunity to find suspects and witnesses using location data gleaned from user devices. Those warrants often result in information on dozens or hundreds of devices, and require more extensive legal review than other requests.

A Google spokesman said that there was no specific reason the fees were announced this month and that they had been under consideration for some time. Reports put out by the company show a rise of just over 50 percent in the number of search warrants received in the first half of 2019 compared with a year earlier. The volume of subpoenas increased about 15 percent. From last January through June, the company received nearly 13,000 subpoenas and over 10,000 search warrants from American law enforcement.

Google will not ask for reimbursement in some cases, including child safety investigations and life-threatening emergencies, the spokesman said.

Law enforcement officials said it was too early to know the impact of the fees, which Google’s notice said would go into effect in mid-January.

Gary Ernsdorff, a senior prosecutor in Washington State, said he was concerned that the charges for search warrants would set a precedent that led more companies to charge for similar requests. That could hamper smaller law enforcement agencies, he said.

“Officers would have to make decisions when to issue warrants based on their budgets,” he said.

Mr. Ernsdorff said there was a potential silver lining, noting that the time it takes for Google to respond to warrants has significantly increased in the past year. Other law enforcement officers also said the time they had to wait for Google to fulfill legal requests had grown.

“If they are getting revenue from it, maybe this will improve their performance,” Mr. Ernsdorff said.

Other law enforcement officials said the effects of the reimbursement fees would be minimal.

“I don’t see it impacting us too much,” said Mark Bruley, a deputy police chief in Minnesota. “We are only using these warrants on major crimes, and their fees seem reasonable.”

Telecommunication companies such as Cox and Verizon have charged fees for similar services for years. At least one of Google’s biggest peers, Facebook, does not charge for such requests. Microsoft and Twitter said they were legally allowed to request reimbursement for costs but declined to explicitly address whether they charged law enforcement for such requests.

Read the original article at NYTimes.com HERE.