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September 2, 2019 07:34 am

Feds Forced Google To Reveal All Google Users Within 100 Feet of a Bank Robbery

Federal investigators asked Google for help finding two men who'd robbed a Wisconsin bank in October of 2018:They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself. In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank's security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers' phones. In November, agents served Google with a search warrant, asking for data that would identify any Google user who had been within 100 feet of the bank during a half-hour block of time around the robbery. They were looking for the two men who had gone into the bank, as well as the driver who dropped off and picked up the crew, and would potentially be caught up in the same dragnet. It was an aggressive technique, scooping up every Android phone in the area and trusting police to find the right suspects in the mess of resulting data. But the court found it entirely legal, and it was returned as executed shortly after. That kind of warrant, known as a reverse location search, has become increasingly common in recent years... In each case, police weren't tracking the location of a specific suspect -- where normal standards of reasonable suspicion would apply -- but instead pulling the names of every individual who had been in the vicinity when a crime took place. For civil liberties groups, it's a dangerous and potentially unconstitutional overreach of police power. But those concerns haven't been enough to keep police from filing reverse location search warrants when a case runs dry, or to convince judges to reject them. The Verge reports that Minnesota over 20 of the same kind of warrants have been served just in the state of Minnesota -- though in the Wisconsin case, it's not even clear that it did any good. "When The Verge reached out to the FBI's Milwaukee division to ask if any charges had been brought, officers said the case was ongoing and they could not provide any additional information as a result. With nearly a year elapsed since the warrant was served, that suggests this particular reverse location search may not have been as fruitful as investigators hoped."

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Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hcKvHBmwrQQ/feds-forced-google-to-reveal-all-google-users-within-100-feet-of-a-bank-robbery

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