According to a new report, the U.S. government is ordering Google and other search engines to use “keyword warrants” and provide the data of anyone who searches certain terms.
The warrant was revealed Tuesday after Forbes obtained “accidentally unsealed” court documents.
It comes from a federal investigation in Wisconsin in 2019 where police were looking for men they believed to be involved in trafficking and sexually abusing a minor. Google was ordered by officials to provide account names, IP addresses and CookieIDs of users that searched the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name and her address.
Forbes reported that the data was provided in mid-2020. The investigation is still ongoing and the warrant is now sealed.
Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said “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 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.
Forbes also reported that only a few keyword warrants have been made public. In 2018, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were ordered to reveal IP and account information for anyone who searched for a range of terms related to bomb making after the Austin, Texas bombing.
Another warrant was issued when the government asked Google to provide the data of anyone who searched the address of an arson victim who was a witness in R. Kelly’s racketeering trial.