Google will fight the wide-scope warrant

Mar 20, 2017 23:54 GMT  ·  By

A court issued a warrant for what can only be described as a sweeping dragnet looking for anyone who has googled for one man's name. 

The case is, of course, much more complicated. Back in January, a man identified himself as a customer of a bank in Minnesota. He called and asked for a wire transfer from a line of credit to another bank; $28,500 in total. The bank asked for his name, date of birth, taxpayer ID; all of which he gladly provided. Instead of the ID of the victim, the fraudster faxed a copy of what looked like an original passport, but the picture wasn't of the victim, but of someone of similar age.

The image had been faxed with a spoofed phone number masquerading as the victim's phone number. In short, a very complicated and complex scheme.

Police are trying to find out who this man is, but they can't. The only chance they see is by trying to figure out who may have been interested in the victim and they're trying to force Google to help. Why Google? Because when they searched for the fake photo on the Internet, it popped no results with Bing or Yahoo, but it did with Google. They're working on the hypothesis that the individual must have also used Google to search for information on the victim.

Excessively broad 

The warrant that was issued, however, has a massive scope, seeking to find any and all users or subscribers related to searches on the victim's name for five weeks.

What information do they want? Specific times and dates for the searches, names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, payment information, account information, IP addresses, and MAC addresses. That's massive.

It was all discovered by Tony Webster, a web engineer who compared it to getting a warrant for everyone who bought a pressure cooker on Amazon a month before the Boston bombing. It would all be circumstantial data unless corroborated with more information.

Google had been subpoenaed on the topic but refused to comply. Now that there's an actual judge-signed-warrant, Google plans to fight against it as it considers it to be excessively broad.