Government Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Searched A Sexual Assault Victims Info

(Title from the article was too long for the thread title and needed truncated)

I don't think it is such a bad thing for the police to scrutinize someone who searches for a rape victims address or phone number. I am, however, a little uneasy about how law enforcement have started using "keyword warrants" and companies like Google seem more than willing to cooperate. It will be far too easy for innocent people to get swept up in a dragnet just for googling something. These warrants are being issued in secret, so there is not going to be any independent oversight. We have no idea to what extent these keyword warrants are being used, what sort of search terms are being requested or how easy it is to get a keyword warrant issued.

I'd say that I am going to boycott Google, but I haven't used their services since before 2010. I don't think these companies are really hurt by us boycotting them anyway. There are far more people who don't care, and will continue using these services, than there are folks like us who do care. I quit drinking Coke because they said to be less white. It doesn't seem to have hurt their stock any.

“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 through the public’s interests, beliefs, opinions, values and friendships, akin to mind reading powered by the Google time machine,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation.”

Governmen t Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Searched A Sexual Assault Victims Name, Address, and Telephone Number

I don't know if this is the appropriate forum for this post or not, but here it goes. I apologize if a mod has to move it.

Good lord, I look up people all the time out of curiosity! Like old friends or boyfriends, if one ends up assaulted or murdered it seems that could put a person as a person of interest. That's not right!

Our government agencies have been weaponized to be used against us. While it might be possible to use something like this to catch the 'bad guy', how many trust the authorities not to use it nefariously against people they want out of the picture?

If these agencies were not corrupt, There would have been an immediate investigation of Joe and Hunter, and they wouldn't of had to spend millions of dollars and years looking for evidence.

Secret police.
Yay.

a reply to: tamusan

Use Tails, Firefox and Duckduckgo.com at least that will give anyone a pretty good level of anonymity on the internet, since you're running through Tor using a browser that's set to not hold cookies. Just don't log into anything or you have defeated all the protection.

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: tamusan

What victim? Do they mean any person that ever found themself in a private setting with an elected official?

This has been the case the from the minute is was possible, Snowd3n showed us how just three degrees of relationships could include 50 million people and all of us have a profile waiting to be looked at. That was a decade ago, imagine what they have now.

The fact that they're publicly disclosing it is the real news. Why would they do this? Chill factor and to keep ratcheting up the government grip. You are now terrorism...the gift that keeps on giving.

a reply to: tamusan

a reply to: tamusan

Wanna Google the person before your first date? Better hooe they weren't a victim of sexual assault!

a reply to: tamusan

Technocracy or good ol fashioned fascism?



I guess it really doesn't matter.

originally posted by: butcherguy more
Secret police.
Yay.

Fixed for ya!

originally posted by: bobs_uruncle
a reply to: tamusan

Use Tails, Firefox and Duckduckgo.com at least that will give anyone a pretty good level of anonymity on the internet, since you're running through Tor using a browser that's set to not hold cookies. Just don't log into anything or you have defeated all the protection.

Cheers - Dave

Wonder how effective this is against hardware fingerprinting...which shouldn't even be a thing IMO.

a reply to: tamusan
Pfft. I've looked up addresses when news was thin on exact area locations near me, so I have a good idea if I should be wary or not if it's a repeat thing. And for me, it does not matter if it's a theft, or a rape, I'm not concerned with the victim at that point, I'm concerned with if the perp is still out there ready to go again, and if it's common for that area. Especially if I live there.


This method was extremely useful in weeding out ghetto/iffy neighborhoods when we were first in-state & looking for a place. Cross-referenced with the crime maps, we managed to figure out a visually niiice house we were looking at renting was smack in the middle of a #hole neighborhood (the bars on the nice homes' windows pinged into the red for me, further research told me Alger Heights ain't worth a damn)

originally posted by: JinMI

originally posted by: butcherguy more
Secret police.
Yay.

Fixed for ya!

That is a good add!

a reply to: Nyiah

Never go to Gary, Indiana. Bars on the windows of churches that have been burnt out. The guy beside me who grew up in Queens said “Nope. Time for us to get out of here.”

originally posted by: Paschar0

originally posted by: bobs_uruncle
a reply to: tamusan

Use Tails, Firefox and Duckduckgo.com at least that will give anyone a pretty good level of anonymity on the internet, since you're running through Tor using a browser that's set to not hold cookies. Just don't log into anything or you have defeated all the protection.

Cheers - Dave

Wonder how effective this is against hardware fingerprinting...which shouldn't even be a thing IMO.

Quite effective actually. Especially if you can modify your mac address. If you use a WIFI router that can accept a SIM and has MAC address cloning, you can seriously screw with them ;-) If it's a laptop, that's the right method. If it's a phone, you have to run the android OS within a virtual machine that's running under Debian, Ubuntu, Qtopia, Linux, etc., that way you can adjust IMEI, Mac and IP addresses on the fly. But you have to root your phone, do the OEM enable, stick on TWRP and boot into the linux based OS of your choice, then boot the android in the VM.

Of course if you just need hidden WiFi you can simply use Tails as a separate boot option on the phone under Grub. I only use TWRP so I can create a complete image of the system for recovery purposes. Once you have a nice OS running on your system, you can clone sims, phones and do all kinds of phun things ;-) Like I said, I only do this kind of work for friends going off grid....

Cheers - Dave