Free Hawk Education Tracks

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Our Subject Matter Experts have compiled hours of free education resources designed to expand community knowledge regarding call detail records, their analysis, and cellular theory. We have built a library of 20+ hours of webinars, blog posts, white papers, and instructional videos – it can be hard to know where to start! Knowing this, our Subject Matter Experts have developed suggested education tracks based on experience level with call detail records.

To Access the Hawk Education Track Handout please click 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.

For first time, state’s highest court extends right to privacy to cellphone location data

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By John R. Ellement and Danny McDonald,  April 23, 2019.

The state’s highest court for the first time on Tuesday extended the right to privacy to encompass cellphone location data, but preserved the right of law enforcement to “ping” cellphones in emergencies, such as a search for an armed murder suspect.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Judicial Court held that state constitutional protections against unwarranted and excessive government intrusion into personal lives must keep pace with technological innovations.

Cellphones are “almost a feature of human anatomy,” with tracking technology that police can “ping” to learn a person’s current location without their knowledge, Justice Scott L. Kafker wrote for the court. “This extraordinarily powerful surveillance tool finds no analog in the traditional surveillance methods of law enforcement and therefore grants police unfettered access ‘to a category of information otherwise unknowable.’ ”

The ruling prohibits police from unilaterally demanding that phone companies turn over cell tower location information. In most circumstances, police will now need a search warrant to obtain the information, the court ruled.

“The power of such unauthorized surveillance . . . is too susceptible to being exercised arbitrarily by law enforcement — precisely the type of governmental conduct against which the framers sought to guard,’’ Kafker wrote.

Matthew R. Segal, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Massachusetts, hailed the ruling as a “truly important decision.”

“It reaches new territory because it’s holding that a single ping of a cellphone is a search that would normally require a warrant,” he said.

The practices of law enforcement agencies in the state, Segal said, “are a bit opaque.”

“Only they know how often they have been warrantlessly manipulating electronic devices to learn information,” he said.

The warrant requirement, Segal said, can be “satisfied by good police work.” He did not think the decision would be onerous for law enforcement.

In its decision, the SJC ruled law enforcement can still require cellphone companies to ping phones without a warrant if there are “exigent circumstances,” such as danger to the public or a threat that the suspect will flee or destroy evidence.

Karen Pita Loor, a Boston University law professor, also applauded the ruling, saying it “places limits on a police officer’s ability essentially to obtain data without probable cause.”

She said the ruling was “an expansion” of a Supreme Court decision from last year that found that the government generally needs a warrant to collect troves of location data about the customers of cellphone companies. The Fourth Amendment, she said, offers protections from government intrusion…

Continue reading at BostonGlobe.com HERE

Colorado Supreme Court supports police in cellphone scavenging case

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By: Tom Ramstack, Apr 9, 2019.

DENVER • Aurora police didn’t violate a murder suspect’s constitutional rights by searching the contents of his cellphone, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The ruling reaches beyond the murder case of Shaun R. Davis into the challenges courts face in handling new technologies.

Davis gave police his pass code so they could call his girlfriend after he was arrested and get her to retrieve his car. Once they had the code, police got a search warrant to forage through the cellphone. They used the code to unlock the phone’s contents for evidence.

Davis argued that the search violated his Fourth Amendment privacy rights. He said the search went too far beyond his permission.

The Colorado Supreme Court disagreed.

“Once an individual discloses the digits of his passcode to law enforcement, we conclude that it is unreasonable to expect those digits to be private from the very party to whom he disclosed them, regardless of any limitations he might be said to have implicitly placed upon the disclosure,” the court wrote in its ruling. “Because Davis had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the digits of his passcode after providing them to [the officer], law enforcement’s use of that passcode was not a search protected by the Fourth Amendment.”

Continue reading at The Gazette HERE.

Report Says Charter Plans June 30 Launch for Spectrum Mobile

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Charter is planning to debut its Spectrum Mobile wireless service on June 30, according to DSLReports.

The report, which cited an unnamed source familiar with the operator’s plan, also indicated that Charter’s wireless service will “largely mirror” Comcast’s pricing for its Xfinity Mobile service. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge hinted at that possibility on a company earnings call in early February, when he said Comcast “did a really nice job” with its pricing model for its mobile service, which launched early last year.

Like Comcast, Charter will offer broadband customers unlimited data for $45 per month, or users can pay $12 per gigabyte, DSLReports reported.

Charter has not commented about the report, but officials previously said the company was planning a mid-year launch of Spectrum Mobile.

It’s also not surprising Charter plans to emulate the pricing of Xfinity Mobile, which finished the first quarter with 577,000 customer lines. Both wireless services are based on similar MVNO deals with Verizon, and Charter and Comcast previously struck a partnership for wireless research. Last month, they announced a joint venture to develop and design unified backend systems for their respective mobile services.

Read More from Wireless Week Here