I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I would bet SCOTUS rules this kind of warrant illegal. Google certainly has the resources to take the case that far.
AFAIK a warrant usually is tied to a specific person or a specific crime. In other words, if an explosion killed Harry McHarryface, then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
Or if the fertilizer used in the bomb was shown to have been purchased on March 10, then maybe a search for "fertilizer" in the weeks before March 10 would be allowed.
Look at it this way, if a car is involved in a drive-by shooting the police can't get a warrant to search every single home that has the same year/make/model of car registered to with that address. For a legal warrant you have to have probable cause that a specific person committed a crime. You can't just search everybody and see what sticks, that's blatantly unconstitutional.
> For a legal warrant you have to have probable cause that a specific person committed a crime. You can't just search everybody and see what sticks, that's blatantly unconstitutional.
Sure, though it’s worth noting that nothing prohibits the police from walking down the street and asking people. Those people don’t have to talk to the police, but…
Google will fight warrants like this. AT&T doesn’t. Other companies have varying policies on this.
Obviously, one can’t assume data is not available to law enforcement merely because the police would need a warrant to get it over a possessor’s objections.
I think something everyone should be aware of as well: there is no legal requirement that Google not hand over this data to police. A warrant is needed to force Google to hand over such data, but they don't need anything at all to ask Google nicely. And if Google decides it's in their best interest to comply without a warrant, they are the legal owner of the data, so ...
> there is no legal requirement that Google not hand over this data to police.
This isn't really true. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits third parties from sharing electronic communications without a warrant. It doesn't matter if they are the legal owner of the data, if it is about a third party that has fourth amendment protections.
IANAL, but the way I understood ECPA it only really protects communication while in transit, and both stored communications and data disclosed to third parties isn't really protected, depending on the context.
Search history, and Google's analytics about you, are a gray area, because you are communicating with Google, not using Google as a transport layer with an expectation of privacy.
Like, if the FBI asked me for my text messages with person X, I can hand them over if I want since they are my communications, but if they want the texts from my phone company they are legally protected. Using search is like texting Google.
Stored communications, data stored electronically is protected as well under the wiretap act. Search history, location history is covered, it requires a warrant.
I wonder if this is true for me as a EU citizen. Per the GDPR, companies can use personal data without consent when there is a legal requirement, but I think they can't just hand it out without consent when they just feel like it.
Maybe that is where the warrant comes in, to make it plausible that it is required?
I guess we'll find out when they arrest the first EU citizen based on this data.
The GDPR states that there is a list of purposes which allows member states law to restrict the scope of the GDPR[0]. One of these purposes is "the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security".
German law uses this to allow "non-public" controllers/processors (aka companies) to give data to German (and EU) law enforcement[1]. The police still needs to specify legal grounds, e.g. the investigation of a concrete alleged crime, and "drag net" investigations are generally not legal. The controller/processor has no obligation to give data to the police if they just ask, but it can if the police request is narrow enough and names the legal grounds. If there is a court order, that's another matter, then the company is obligated to provide the data.
But what about the US law enforcement wanting data about some German citizen within the scope of the GDPR and German law? A service provider is not allowed to give US law enforcement such data[2][3], but in this case the US law enforcement will usually use the mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) between the US and Germany to ask the German police for help, and the German police will then essentially ask for the data and (provided there are legal grounds) the service provider is allowed to pass data to the German police, which passes it back to the US law enforcement.
Legislation in other EU member states is mostly quite similar.
[3] But it really becomes complicated when the service provider is under US jurisdiction (in this example). Then the service provider is caught between competing law of two different jurisdictions and is in the unfortunate position to decide what law to break.
IANAL but the answer appears to be no. Even an actual warrant doesn't count. Legal processing has to be required by the law of an EU member state, US court rulings don't count
That's not to say I know how a Google would react to a US warrant about an EU citizen (especially given the CLOUD act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) but from what I can tell it's not permitted under GDPR
How many keyword-search warrants have they fought? The article seems to suggest google has been providing data to the us government in the past and that this is an on-going collaboration.
On the other hand, if a specific type of nail is used as shrapnel in a homemade bomb, investigators can go around to all hardware stores in the area and get security camera footage of customers who recently bought large quantities of that type of nail.
This isn't a hypothetical situation - according to the LA Times, it's how they ended up cracking the Austin bombing case that involved the Google warrant [1]:
> Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials “went to every hardware store” in the area to find customers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, McCaul said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
> “The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him — because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras — was when he walked into Home Depot,” McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance video of Conditt walking into the store in a wig and walking back out to a vehicle with a license plate connected to his name.
So I think there's a little more nuance here. Certainly matching a list of generic terms seems too broad. But a warrant for specific keywords that was limited to a specific city and time frame might be analogous to going to all the hardware stores in the city and pulling security footage?
That's a good point. The reason they had to get a warrant for Google is that Google refuses to hand over data unless they're compelled to do so (and I'm glad they're willing to take this stand). It's unclear whether there were any warrants for the hardware stores of if the stores simply gave up the data when asked.
A while ago there was someone here on HN that thought that he could evade the authorities for a longer stretch of time if he decided to do so. This works right up to the point where there is a serious reason to find you and then you are as good as without a chance. For the same reason that computer security is hard: you need to make it work every time, and they only need the one break. It's just a matter of resources at that point.
I can imagine a scenario where the warrant is for searches that you would not believe a human would naturally make on their own. I think SCOTUS would allow that.
Scenario:
Hello fellow criminals. Instead of point to point communication, we will make random posts/pages that have our combination of words on them. So if you want to read our communication, do a google search for the exact quote "purple antelope shoe couch can squirrel."
Though some of those bomb searches could easily be made by anyone curious about past bombing incidents. I've certainly had some curiousity-based searches about how the Unibomber did his work.
How do we end up defining naturally? That's a question the court would ask, and want to be able to provide a litmus test for going forward. I'm not sure how we do that here... Statistical probability at some specific threshold? It's a difficult question.
I'm pretty sure I've searched those terms myself, looking up how high and low explosives are used as detonation lenses in atomic bombs.
I also looked up whether PLA can be made conductive and if it shows up normally in x-rays, to determine if I could legally 3D print the lower receiver for a handgun in my state.
...come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if I tripped some queries, and they just realized I'm an insatiably curious but harmless nerd and left me be.
Yes, once the very unique search phrase becomes public and lots of random people are searching it, I suspect the court would be less likely to allow such a warrant.
A few years ago, in the context of justifying automatic license plate readers, the LAPD told a court that all cars in Los Angeles are under investigation:
Presumably this isn’t some easily-drawn line though, wouldn’t it be a judgment call (literally, made by a judge)? If the car was a specific color and model only 2 of which were registered in the state, would the judge issue a warrant for those 2 addresses?
I'd guess the analogy the government would make is that it's more similar to a DUI checkpoint. They're searching everyone (or a random subset) of everyone coming through an area.
If the car was used multiple shootings, the same phone was in that area and the phone was used to search for the victims name every time then we have everything we need but are unwilling to use it?
We can probably figure out how to extract such data and cross reference it without making any of it available to random government employees.
Say you take pictures of license plates, store the data some place safe and allow a query of 5 recent armed robbery locations. If the result contains multiple cars matching 2 locations no results are returned. The moment a 6th robbery happens and a single car matches 3 out of 5 law enforcement can start looking for it immediately.
Sure, you'd get pretty mad if every time you get robbed the police searches your vehicle but they don't need to break anything and you will get over it.
>Sure, you'd get pretty mad if every time you get robbed the police searches your vehicle but they don't need to break anything and you will get over it.
Or I'll stop calling the police, especially if that first invasive experience doesn't end with my belongings returned.
Well, generally you need to file a police report to file an insurance claim, so whether or not they do you any good (or even harm), you don't have a lot of alternatives (unless you don't have insurance, in which case you also don't have a lot of alternatives, likely).
I've never been wealthy enough to insure my belongings, so my experience with trying to make police reports for theft have not only felt like a waste of time, the officers I've filled with have directly told me I'm wasting my time (and implied I'm wasting theirs) whenever I have made a report.
In the US, it is common to carry renter's insurance. It covers liability you as a renter might have for damages to the landlord's property such as water, fire, or other kinds of damage. It also usually covers your belongings as well. That coverage usually applies to your belongings regardless of where they are and covers things like theft. Bike get stolen from a bike rack? Backpack get stolen from a car? Usually covered, with deductibles, of course.
A lot of people I know who carry renter's insurance were unaware it covered their stuff like that. YMMV on what is and is not covered though.
Right, that seems a whole different problem that should really be addressed. In the Netherlands the police are the politest people one could ever meet. It takes very few complaints about politeness or excess force to lose the job. Ofc on the flip side they are also highly incompetent, have no tools, get to see just about ever crook released, are under paid and are very unprofessional. But polite, woah!
Cute attempt at establishing a completely made up dichotomy but generally the politeness of a police force is correlated with how effective it is, not inversely.
The work involves more than talking with people. They do get the full effect out of being polite but their effectiveness is hurt by a long list of things. For example, we can always spend more money on it. People will always find a way to spend more money. I would scale the budget with how long it takes to do basic things. If those take much to long they either need funding or have to prioritize tasks. Things like interview the witness before GC kicks in. There are crappy security cameras everywhere but the free plan doesn't store the recordings for very long. etc There are countless stupid stories.
>Or I'll stop calling the police, especially if that first invasive experience doesn't end with my belongings returned.
Oh my sweet summer child. Calling the police is never about getting the belongings back. Calling the police is only about striking the perpetrator with violence, hoping that it would equalize the karma levels.
Unfortunately. But the criminal still can't commit crimes while in prison though. Vengeance just also means that solving the problem of any individual criminal is usually only temporary.
Well there can still be rehabilitation with captivity. The US system just doesn’t prioritize that. We prefer punishment, even though outcomes are worse for everyone.
Agreed. There are things like GED and college programs, but they can have long waiting lists. Makes it a bit ironic if you have to commit a crime bad enough to get a multi-year sentence to get into an education program in prison. There more to rehabilitation though, and exclusion from a vast number of jobs after getting out of jail doesn't really help the rehab process.
I'm beginning to see that now. Its just like the aggressive down voting shootin from the hip. People here cant even entertain the technical challenge of it - eventho the problem is [apparently] assumed to be impossible. I knew US police had a bad rep but I never imagined the service to be this worthless.
I often think we need to bring back something like monks who selflessly deliver a service in exchange for an isolated life of study and meditation.
We have way to many shit people who cant be trusted with anything and make poor company.
* A dude who managed solid D grades throughout elementary and middle school despite a good & supportive family life & voluntarily chose to hold himself back a grade (8th grade) to "have a better chance of a football career to get into the NFL"
* A dude who, for as long as I can literally remember, talked about how he was going to be some kickass marine. Talked about it all the time, for years. He was also a solid D (even in shop class) student & football player. Not only did he fail, to my knowledge, in every metric required to be a marine - he managed to fail, which I truly didn't know was possible, every metric required to be an army grunt - except presumably the physical requirements. It wouldn't be hard for me to imagine him failing a cardio requirement tho.
This dude couldn't get in the lowest levels of our fucking army. I really only thought you could be disqualified for things like admitting to drugs or having felonies, but he managed to fuck up some test of intelligence they require.
* & several generations of people who are similar fuckups like these two.
Now, what do people like this on a police force manage to get up to?
Last month, there was a domestic violence call somewhere in the town. By the time the cops got there, dude was out on the curb, in his car, with his kid (wife had said he had a gun and threatened her with it, he did not have a gun)
Police haphazardly blocked him into the curb with their cruisers, and surrounded him with their guns out, in a crossfire with themselves. Proceeded to scream absolutely incoherent shit at the dude, while he's in the turned off & parked car with his hands clearly visible on the wheel - kid in the back seat, for about 10 minutes. Dude finally decides nothing good is going to come out of this & decides to attempt to leave. Turns car on, very slowly tries to turn out of how they'd blocked him in, and very slightly bumps a cruisers bumper (nobody was in the cruiser)
One cop then randomly decides to shoot. Keep in mind, I earlier mentioned the cops put themselves in their own crossfire. I have absolutely no fucking idea how, but one cop shot the other cop in the shoulder. This was the very first bullet fired by anybody, and as stated, the perp didn't even have a gun.
Cop yells out he's hit, and then all cops present go fish in a fucking barrel on the car, with the child in it, to the tune of 67 bullets IIRC.
The local news &, as you can assume, all Facebook groups, report that the man opened fire on police, and that the cops had then killed him. All comment sections swarmed with the local painkiller addicted retirement community saying "good, he should be dead" - and that reporting is now unchallengeable canon in their dementia ridden but still able to vote minds.
There's still an ongoing investigation by the state as to how the chucklefuck cop managed to go full retard enough to blast his buddy, but having gone on so long I'm sure it's going to end up as another "we've investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing"
The service isn't "worthless"
It's downright fucking dangerous to anything and everything around it, like the person legally in the crosswalk, who was hit at 120mph+ by a cop SUV and turned into mostly red mist, no significant body parts to be found, by one of the squadrons of cops responding to the aforementioned call.
Can you please make your substantive points without fulminating and name-calling? That's in the site guidelines. I realize you're talking about an important life-and-death issue/incident and that this material is highly activating. But internet snark and putdowns don't help—they just degrade things further and evoke worse from others.
We could especially do without "the local painkiller addicted retirement community" saying and "their dementia ridden but still able to vote minds". That's a slur, and those are not welcome here, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
I could send it to you personally, but that 100% doxx's myself, something I'm not particularly trying to do.
The article itself doesn't mention the speed anywhere - though this is my first time actually reading it. The reason I'm otherwise aware of the speed is because a family member is on the city council and also the head of our emergency department.
The officer driving died (at the aforementioned emergency room), first time I'm seeing of that. I was aware he was badly injured, but didn't think it was death. The front of the SUV looks just about like what you'd presume 100mph+ does.
> A cop going 120mph in response do a domestic incident doesn’t sound normal.
This is part of the point I'm trying to make. It's a common feature amongst small towns, especially in the MidWest, of cops being complete and utter menaces to society. He hit two other cars as well, fortunately no passengers were injured. None of which had to happen, all of which happened because of a cop wanting to go hero mode and break laws for a measly domestic call he wasn't even needed at. Responding to shots fired they say, not telling him it was his own men's shots...
Hilariously, not a singular article of many states anything about the fact it was entirely his fault. Box truck he slammed into was crossing the intersection with a green light, unaware of the cop barreling down the street without even turning his sirens on until he'd nearly hit him. Small town reporting for you I guess. Incident "still under investigation" by the highway patrol...
I'm not sure that putting the data into a metaphorical locked-box is sufficient. Someone with an interest in seeing the data will always have the keys. What you describe is not completely different from the purpose that FISA courts are supposed to serve, and I don't think those are a great success in protecting freedom and privacy according to the Constitution.
There's a big problem insofar as you need to have legal standing in order to bring the malfeasance to court (implying you must be able to demonstrate this has been used)
This is so difficult, more or less impossible. Prosecutors and LE will likely not bring forward a criminal case based on this sort of unlawful search, as the discovery would detonate the case if brought before a mildly competent defense. The defense would have a really great speaking season following the court proceedings if they were to catch such a windfall.
I speculate that these sort of illegal searches are conducted regularly, and serve to fuel parallel construction.
In the OP article, it says that LE "did not need to use these search warrants to find the bomber" whose picture is inline, instead they correlated his "unique pink construction gloves" to some home depot footage of his purchase, linking his identity to the purchase with video evidence.
I think it is very possible for parallel construction to provide the required leads to locate this video footage. The search warrants can be as illegal as the day is long, but their effect may remain invisible so long as it generates a lead which is not obviously poisoned fruit.
Starting replying then saw your comment. Just wanted to note you are spot on in my opinion. It will be hard to showcase parallel construction and I am not sure how some ngo of some sort can pursue this at court.
Honestly, my feeling is the moment judges and congress felt OK with actions even pondering such acts we had a fundamental democratic problem in our hands.
As they say if you put a cop car on someone's tail they are going to get a ticket.
Neither am I a constitutional scholar, but I'm less optimistic about this being ruled illegal.
But it's for a somewhat meta-reason: there have been numerous cases where something strikes me as blatantly unconstitutional, but the SCOTUS has allowed it anyway.
You'd think so. But for 20 years plus justices at all levels have been very happy signing off secret warrants, ultra wide warrants, back dates warrants and other bs. It seems the judiciary don't (want to) understand computers well enough. They just accept government claims of necessity.
It's sadly more nuanced than that because the answer to the question Can police do X? Is not effectively answered til binding precedent is created in the Courts, which requires someone to fight it all the way up. Remember, judges are signing these blatantly overbroad warrants in the first place. So there's a judiciary crisis already at play
> then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
I don't think putting people that want to inform themselves under suspicion is feasible and it probably should not be legal. This isn't conductive to solving crimes and has severe chilling effects.
For something like catching a bomber or people that just kidnapped a girl even if this warrant is deemed illegal the cops are probably making a bet that they'll be swimming in better evidence once they nail on a suspect and do regular surveillance.
"probable" has a very specific meaning. If the police can construct a query that returns 1-2 results and on average one of those results is the killer than its "probable" otherwise its not.
The President is basically the head of law enforcement in the federal government. Police organizations in the USA have a long history of pushing the limits of what is Constitutional. After all, they just want to get their job done and leave it up to the judiciary to decide what is Constitutional.
> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.
In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
Is doing something that the Supreme Court may later overturn--and bear in mind it was a close decision--actually "illegal"?
I could certainly see the argument that it's ill-advised, and indeed, it was struck down a few weeks later. However, I don't think concurring opinions are binding and you could imagine certain fact patterns that might have changed Kavanaugh's mind: Congress agrees on a similar extension, but there's a short gap before it comes into effect, the situation worsens dramatically, the extension is much more narrowly tailored, etc.
> Is doing something that the Supreme Court may later overturn--and bear in mind it was a close decision--actually "illegal"?
It's not illegal at all. Making it illegal would never work in practice.
It is however supposed to be politically embarrassing and should in theory hurt your party.
However right now, in practice, due to the polarized two-party shit show that is US politics at the top level, it doesn't matter. The constituents haven proven to lack both will and tools to hold their elected representatives accountable, who in turn have learned they can get away with pretty much anything.
What could they have done to avoid a president who would behave that way? Elect Trump? Hah.
So in your own words the court did not issue a ruling, yet your original comment explicitly mentions a ruling without further elaboration. That seems disingenuous because without knowing what actually happened a reader could be easily mislead to believe that a ruling was actually issued, which is the only thing that matters with respect to the legal authority of the POTUS/SCOTUS.
I think that's a grey area. Some members indicated they might have ruled against the administration if the deadline didn't moot the issue. Which the Court did, when the issue was no longer moot.
If I were placing blame here, I'd put at least part of it on the SC for not giving a real ruling on it in the first place. There was speculation about an extension in the air already at the time, and they could have cut that short.
> SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
SCOTUS said the moratorium exceeded the CDC's legal authority, but declined to strike it down given it was soon expiring [1]. (They also strongly suggested that if POTUS tried renewing, they would strike it down.) POTUS tried renewing. SCOTUS struck it down.
None of this is properly construed as POTUS ignoring SCOTUS. When SCOTUS struck down the law, POTUS obliged.
This kind of thing happens all the time though. The most salient instances being when states enact abortion restrictions that are known to be unconstitutional and were historically subject to injunctions and ruled against.
There isn't a mechanism to stop unconstitutional laws from being passed or left on the books.
notionally, the rule was (il)legal since its enactment. rulings merely affirm the legal status of rules, and give the Court the opportunity to order remedies.
for example, if the Court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act were unconstitutional, the government would be forced to free prisoners convicted of violating it, since the law was illegitimate the whole time. but if Congress repealed the act, they'd have no such obligation, since it was still a crime when the felony was committed.
What are you talking about? The court ruled in favor of the administration in the first case, and against it in the second one. The administration complied after the second decision. This is how checks and balances work.
No this is Kavanaugh trying to have his cake and eat it by saying one thing and doing another. He ducked out of making a ruling and Biden forced him to do so.
The court doesn’t get to make law by threatening to make law. They have to actually do it.
You're about 850 years too late on that front. Common Law has been a thing since Henry the Second and we just ggyG'd the whole UK legal system and edited from there.
You can't really avoid this either without throwing out judicial precedent because "knowing how the court will rule on subsequent cases" is basically the same as law.
> You can't really avoid this either without throwing out judicial precedent because "knowing how the court will rule on subsequent cases" is basically the same as law.
But that's not law. That's consistent interpretation of law. Very different.
SCOTUS also said the eviction ban needed to be an act of congress. Congress debated it since then and couldn't come up with something they agreed on, so nothing was passed. So then, on the 2nd go around, Biden is using the CDC to come up with it, again, bypassing the congress which SCOTUS said was the only legal path forward. Congress could grant the CDC the authority to do so, but it hasn't. I think bypassing SCOTUS can only be argued to be intentional on the 2nd round.
> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.
In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
Seems like a good political move though, now the courts actually have to make the administration stop and get all the negative heat from putting people on the street. I mean the supreme law of the land let an order they believed was unconstitutional stand because of their personal moral imperatives and empathy toward renters. Is it really that crazy to shoot your shot and see if they do it again? Like the whole situation is nuts — “I think this is unconstitutional but I’m not going to say so because the law is gonna expire soon.” If that’s really the case then you could rule the other way with a clear conscience since it’s only a few days. Taking a bet that it was a bluff with little downsides if your wrong seems like a no brainer.
And the administration gets to say they did all they could and it’s up to congress now.
Nobody alleged anything was unconstitutional. The question was whether the CDC exceeded the authority Congress gave it. The Court declined to answer that question when it was first raised. It answered it, definitively, the second time, striking down the moratorium extension.
Right, my only point was that it essentially cost the administration nothing to extend it on the chance that they would decline again or vote differently when it actually mattered.
The Court originally declined to vacate the stay in a 5-4 decision. The fifth vote was from Kavanaugh, who wrote that he thought the stay should be vacated, but wasn't voting to do so because the moratorium was about to expire anyway. That concurrence is certainly informative, but doesn't override his actual vote to maintain the stay.
The second moratorium was quickly overturned, with Kavanaugh voting this time in accordance with his opinion. In any case, the administration did actually follow that ruling.
I don't really understand what Trump did differently, he just was more direct with implementing bad ideas. But surveillance steadily increased under previous presidencies. Government doesn't understand that this mistrust is mirrored by the populous at some point. In a democracy surveillance should be directed towards officials, not the populous. I think it pretty stupid to blame Trump. Yes, he was funny (as a non-American) but certainly not the reason for the structural issues and the split in political camps. A symptom perhaps and a predictable one I believe.
Because he thought that a bunch of rednecks could get it done, and if they didn't, well he had (and has) plausible deniability. He will not make that mistake again if he wins the election in 2024. I think he believed 100% that he could get the Republicans to throw out the electoral college vote and get enough states to declare their elections were fraudulent and get enough electoral votes to win. People can down vote me if they like, but the truth will come out with the Congressional Committee. I don't think it will happen soon enough to keep him off the ballot though.
He thought a few thousand randos with (very generously) a hundred guns and no apparent willingness to use them or kill anybody would be able to overthrow the US Government. And now his plan is to spearhead an actual coup at in 2028, when he's 83. Which is he supposed to be, a totalitarian mastermind or a total buffoon? Dumb enough to attempt a coup with a piddling army, smart enough to avoid any charges for 9 months with the intended victim and his party in power?
And what was his plan if they did violently take over DC? The largest army in the world would just take it back. Don't tell me they would follow his orders, they didn't like him before he started killing US civilians, politicians, and cops.
I guess we'll see what the committee discovers. Apparently, it's your belief that they'll discover nothing of significance in the next three years, but maybe we'll see after.
The only objection I have to this post that I have is the notion that there was a democracy there to begin with. Before Julius Caesar attempted (unsuccessfully) to monopolise power in the Old Republic, there was already a ever widening chasm between the farmers that made up the bulk of Roman citizenry and the people in the Senate.
All Caesar had to do was harness this growing discontent of the masses through his fake populism and having undying loyalty in much of the army helped as well.
It took just one generation after Ceasars assassination for the establishment of the Imperium and the dissolution of the Republic.
Trump might or might not be reinstated but the beginning of the end of the American experiment has already been set in motion.
The only way to save it is through a radical reorganisation of power to counter the one to come but the establishment want to keep returning to the supposed Utopia that was in place before Trump - missing the obvious fact that it was their "utopia" that lead to Trump in the first place.
> The only objection I have to this post that I have is the notion that there was a democracy there to begin with.
Sure, it's probably pointless to try to argue that there was some specific point where it changed from "is a democracy" to "isn't a democracy," or to try to argue that it's "55% a democracy now." The actual point is whether there are important institutions that have weakened or failed, whether there is indication that this will continue, and what the consequences will be.
Wasn't there a history of political violence and rabble rousing in Rome for a century or two before Rome? I thought the Imperium cleaned up a lot of the problems that Rome had for a while, at the cost of the democracy (which was really a plutocracy, until populism become more effective).
Yes there was and sure, in the short term the Imperium seemed a good deal - until the wrong person takes the position of emperor which inevitable lead to mass terror and destruction. Something which had happened a number of times in Rome's history.
Yes as well as the republic itself. It's a garbage system designed to keep power out of the grasp of the commons, which only has merit in relation to even worse systems like monarchies or fascism.
This is a rewriting of how terrible the senate was at the time. Caesar took the existing tyranny of the senate and substituted it for tyranny of an emperor.
This is the key that people often miss in this regard. The staggering ROman Republic was hardly a great country.
The exact same thing could be said for the American Republic. There are millions of people living below the poverty line, a stratified society in both financial and political terms, and widespread racism and sexism.
Also, common to Rome is the notion that they are a special people who deserve dominion over the rest of the world. It might be shrouded in more egalatarian language (cue the exporting "freedom" talk) but barely so.
I actually think the American experiment needs to end. What we have was never democracy nor was it meant to be. America was simply a playground for European nobles to send their second and third sons off to either make a fortune or die; then those surviving second and third sons decided to form a government that their families couldn’t claim as their own.
We need a new American experiment that is actually government by the people. One that doesn’t take ownership of other people as a founding principle (but you know, it’s cool because we took it back).
Slavery existing at the time this country was founded does not make it a founding principle. The only constitutional component of slavery was intended to reduce the power of slave states, and most of the country abolished slavery by 1804.
The entire structure of the senate is designed to give maximum power to the slave-holding states, and every political decision in the country before the civil war was made with the aim of preserving their power in mind (this counts for the electoral college too).
This is the reason votes in rural areas count so much more than urban votes. Because rural areas in the south were heavily populated by enslaved people and the slavers (meaning not just the title holding slave owners; many people who did not own slaves were still fundamental players in the system of slavery) held a lot of influence.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. The constitution was an agreement between states, and the senate was a compromise to ensure signers would retain power even if their population was dwarfed by other states. It is highly unlikely that it was intended to empower slave states; when it was created, only Massachusetts wasn't a slave state. Same goes for the electoral college.
Also, in 1790 the US was much less urbanized. 5% of people lived in cities (vs 80+% today), and the economy was primarily agricultural. It was not a world in which the rural-urban divide was particularly significant. All states were rural states.
If every political decision in the US before the Civil War was made with the aim of preserving slave state power, why is it the South that left the Union? Couldn't they have just used their power?
I'd like to correct my previous comment. I said that the three-fifths compromise was the only consitutional component of slavery; in fact there were two others. The fugitive slave clause, and a clause forbidding the federal government from restricting the slave trade. I apologize for these errors.
> If every political decision in the US before the Civil War was made with the aim of preserving slave state power, why is it the South that left the Union? Couldn't they have just used their power?
They left because they were worried about losing their power — the northern population grew much faster than the south, and as the country expanded west most of the settlers were from free states, bringing attitudes about slavery with them. Things had reached a point where even deep compromises couldn’t tip the scales in the slavers’ favor, so the slavers decided to withdraw to attempt to preserve their power.
There were a significant number of northerners who were active abolitionists and not involved in politics. John Brown is an American hero in my mind. Slavery was doomed regardless of the political order, but the political order tried to protect it nonetheless.
"Accidental leak reveals US government has secretly hit Google with 'keyword warrants' to identify ANYONE searching certain names, addresses, and phone numbers"
This is historical - it is disclosure.
Talk about the constitution all you like, but was anyone in any doubt that they were already doing this? That they suck up all the data from media companies to have a mega-graph? That they are running accurate simulations of us (Sentient World Simulation), in order to better manage us?
And don't expect anything to change - Google et al could change this is a minute - they have the lobbyists to get whatever they want. They don't want. This is good for the government and the corporations. In fact, what's the difference? We are living in technocratic fascism.
Maybe the correct response to unconstitutional, secret warrants is to refuse to comply, maybe even refuse to respond?
It's not clear to me what would happen next but I can't imagine Pichai would be arrested. Maybe a datacenter would be raided (could FBI even guess where this data might be physically located?) but at least then some public action would have to happen and break the secrecy.
I would love for this to be viable. But I can't help but think there are all sorts of ways for our intelligence agencies to ruin a person's life for not complying. I'm not even suggesting some kind of spy-novel intrigue, you can just tell them to comply or they'll drag you and your company through the mud until they get what they want. Imagine taking a principled stand and then suddenly having your life examined under a microscope by the FBI or the IRS. It would be a totally unrelated audit, just how some people tend to be subject to random additional screening at airports.
It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.
> It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers
Read the charge sheet [1]. Is it possible that the NSA walked over to the SEC and asked them to prioritise this? Sure, why not. Is it also pretty clear cut that he insider traded? Yes.
I still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers.
This is problematic not just because of the violations of those customers' rights, but also because it creates perverse incentives for the government to encourage the success of dirty tech companies as means to circumvent constitutional protections.
Thus while I don't doubt Nacchio's guilt, I absolutely think that he should have atleast been allowed to use that argument as a defense in his court case so that the Government is somewhat discouraged from using such tactics by the knowledge that it can come to light in court.
> still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers
Any evidence regarding that was suppressed by the judge due to the possible revealing of classified information. This sort of suppression is precisely my objection as it effectively allows the government to operate with impunity.
I don't claim to know if the claims were true, I just think they should have been assessed in court.
It's difficult to win in an SEC governed market that is corrupt by design. You'd need a competitive advantage large enough to bridge the SECs designed corruption in the market.
What does this even mean? That it’s difficult to make your stock go up because the SEC has rigged the market?
Read through Tesla’s history with the SEC, specifically Musk being immature and committing securities fraud on Twitter. They’ve fined him and the company, and there is no love lost between the two, but TSLA is still going up.
Spend even just a couple hours researching dark pools and naked shorts and it becomes blindingly obvious the SEC exists to do anything but protect consumers.
The twitter outrage over elon's comments are nothing more than a woefully uninformed public hoping to remove the tip without addressing the iceburg underneath.
If every one of your competition doesn't have to play by the rules, you'll find it hard to beat them playing honestly and you'll find that over time the only winners left are the cheaters.
The market design is unfavorable to retail investors and traders partly due the regulations and laws in the US.
- flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads
- dark pools which is liquidity only available to institutions, therefore removing liquidity from venues that retail trades on
- market fragmentation which harms retail investors who don't have the execution sophistication of HFT or execution algos
- short sale restriction which harms retail traders who incur excess slippage
- allowing market makers to naked short sell but not retail investors which harms retail investors because they have to pay rents to access it
- trading halts which benefit institutions (over retail) who have the execution sophistication to handle unhalts and who can price warrants etc better while the product is halted
One could argue that's the problem: They got a slap on the wrist instead of crippling punishment for illegal behavior, and there are companies that may be farther in the electric vehicle game than they are today, because they didn't employ a grandiose, law-flouting CEO to prop up their stock.
This is what I fear is going to happen once surveillance-type robots start appearing in the streets. The narrative is that we'd somehow destroy them on sight but the truth is that that would be criminally persecuted.
Both things will happen. In some locations they will be destroyed despite the potential consequences, in other locations the population will rationalize their presence as being a good thing. It'll vary by affluence, culture. Poor people will tolerate them a lot less than rich people (rich people will believe that they make the area safer and will accept the trade-off).
The recent documents made public have shown that google doesn't give a shit about moral integrity. What makes you think that they would put themselves at risk for some kind of non-monetary public good?
According to Forbes (who published the unsealed the docs), nothing is known about whether or not Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are even complying with the requests, or to what extent if they are.
I know a guy that was working for a defense contractor in the 2000s that searched his military ranked boss's name on Google and told me he was told the next day not to do that anymore.
I mean yea, everything you do at work in a defense contractor is keylogged. They don't need to ask Google, they know what you're doing on their network.
I'm assuming he landed somewhere after the search that his bosses had logs for, like maybe a bio page on some .mil domain. Back in the 2000's, you still got a referrer header that included not just "google.com", but also the search query parameters.
It's not made up. They monitor key sites including social media and those peddling in sensitive information. EO12333 makes warrantless searches legal for anyone with a clearance. It's also a convenient cover for why they need this extra-judicial domestic surveillance apparatus.
I'm not disputing the idea that he was told this but that's a weird thing to be told just for googling someones name. Maybe he was just curious about his background and wanted to read his wikipedia page.
Without backing up your assertion, we're just talking past one another. Google the entity relies upon USG's system of laws for what it can and cannot do. Without Google (et al), USG would have a much harder time gathering information on citizens. That's symbiosis.
There is real downside to Google if it decided to go against USG's de facto interests, even if it technically has the de jure ability to do so. What is the upside? The only large company that has made an attempt to rebuke the general desires of USG is Apple, which has since backpedaled with its on device spyware.
Could this relationship be reformed through the little bit of leverage that US citizens have over USG? Perhaps. If you've got another concrete proposal aimed at doing do, then bring it up. But unless we're discussing a specific proposal, it's prudent for individual citizens to model the two as cooperating attackers rather than getting distracted with hopeful dichotomies such as "government" vs "private company".
> Google the entity relies upon USG's system of laws for what it can and cannot do
You've defined symbiosis in a way that incorporates every person, company--and hell protected species--that touches American law. That makes the term useless for purposes of discussion.
Eh, kind of. I agree I could have done a better job. I was trying to quickly summarize this distinction -
A corporation literally cannot exist without a government charter.
Google is able to collect all this surveillance data with impunity due to the state. Google is able to wash its hands of responsibility for the results of its actions due to the state. Google is able to force its workers to be loyal (eg not embezzle for themselves or competitors) due to the state. Google wouldn't have such outsized financial resources without the state printing reams of fiat money.
Heading off the common retort that a private person can do whatever a corporation can do - the relevant issue is scale. It's simply impractical for an individual or a simple group of individuals to scale up to the level of a large corporation.
And yes, this definition does end up catching any corporation as an intrinsic organ of the state. While jarring (because in the US power flows both ways), this is still a fundamental truth. For example if you attempt to set up an LLC or corporation that operates at odds with government policy (eg selling drugs), you'll find out how quickly a corporate veil will be discarded. Actions that are at odds with government policy are defined criminally, and thus all corporate activity is inherently government chartered.
Of course all of this is only useful as a lemma to reach another conclusion. But that's what I was doing - why would Google ever choose to rock the boat? It's not impossible (cf Apple), it's just that there would need to be some explicit incentive for Google beyond mere citizens' hope.
Honestly this forced choice (either google is in bed with government or Raytheon et Al are) is just needless politicization.
Why don't we just condemn both? I mean... Google is going down the same path as the defense contractors and instead of stopping it from evolving into something like them, you're essentially arguing to look the other way
In principle, by the letter and spirit of the law (bad as it is in this case), sure. In practice, I very much doubt anyone would dare arrest someone with Sundar Pichai's money and social standing for anything less than murder or insider trading basically.
If Sundar decided to fight this (I'm not saying he would), then Google would probably file for an injunction to quash the request. No arrests, no raids.
The judge that issued the warrant would order Google into court and administer hefty fines for a few days. if they still refused the court could order arrest warrants for executives of the company until they comply.
Federal agents raided the home of John Doe this morning, accused of searching for terms such a “PipeBombJS” and “IED components for React”. The suspect was making pour over coffee when he was apprehended.
Correction: the police forces that intervened reported how the suspect was holding an object resembling an improvised explosive device when he was fatally shot.
This bullet killed Vicki Weaver, who was standing behind the door in the cabin where Harris entered.[108] Vicki was holding the Weavers' 10-month-old baby Elisheba.
Nah, can't say they were fatally shot by the police. Instead, you gotta word is as "They died from their injuries after being in a shooting involving police".
Real case: the default installer for GNUradio is called "pybombs". Last time I searched for it, google tried to auto-correct to one of those bad terms:
> Glock 26 - a ceramic handgun that can't be detected by airport scanners (a reader informs us that the Glock 26 is only partly ceramic, the bullets are metal and is can be detected at airports - so we should really shift this one into the X-file list)
They pulled this directly from "Die Hard", the Glock 26 is just a cut-down Glock 19, with a big fat metal slide being integral to the gun's functionality.
heh, Crypto AG is on that list. prescient. though so is "speedbump" and "meta" so meh. such a weird list, extremely specific keywords like listening post codenames but then extremely common ones too.
Saying the word "privacy" triggers the global warrantless surveillance system? That's pretty amusing. They must have quite the dossier on a lot of people here, including me.
I started during Fallen Empires and quit shortly after Planeshift, though I never played competitively. My group of friends had just a few house rules for deck building: Minimum 60 cards, no more than 4 of any card that wasn't a basic land, and no Circles of Protection. Proxy cards were allowed, but only if you could prove you had an original.
In all the years I played, I never really learned what "Type 1" and "Type 2" deck building rules were. I basically only played during lunch in high school.
I'm not really sure it's a idea that's usable, I mean the results of the framework would end up below results on actual explosions, so it'd be a PITA to search for information... I remember one tool called Beaver that was part of a deployement, really annoying to track down the documentation and existing issues
There was a free to play FPS game called "Dirty Bomb" (made by Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory's Splash Damage). Always felt a little weird googling that name.
Various leaks over the years have showed us how when programs doing icky stuff are revealed, they are "shut down" only to be recycled as new secret programs with "new" mandates doing exactly the same thing.
After Snowden, it'd be naive to assume that the US government isn't still vacuuming up every possible source of data that it can.
It is also naive to assume that the various data brokers doing the same thing for commercial purposes aren't also open books to the various 3-letter agencies.
I think that's the point. It gives the government an easy in to collect more data on any and all of these users, regardless of whether it is pertinent to a specific case.
Exactly. Gotta start collecting danger on every teenager who downloads the anarchist cookbook on the off chance they become a far right truck bomber in the next 20yr.
Yet every time something happens it seems like the suspect was on law enforcement's radar and they did nothing. Odd. Oh well, I'm sure a bigger data haystack to find needles in will solve that. /s
Or more likely, any teenager who grows up to be an inconvenient political figure that the establishment at the time (which might or might not be ideologically different than the current establishment) wants to get rid of.
You can look up terrorism incidents in the US [1].
Far right extremism is far more likely the reason for terrorism in the US vs far left extremism. In recent years, 115 far right attacks vs 19 far left (from 2008 -> 2016). And that's with adding another category for Islamic terrorism (63) (which, in and of itself would be far right terrorism.)
well I mean generally far right terrorism isn't described or charged as terrorism is it? So it seems unlikely that they would track a white kid in case they turned in to a far right terrorist, because the narrative is that's not a problem.
Incompatible narratives should be resolved in one direction or another.
Well, this kind of completely ignores the constant right wing attacks against black people, often backed up by local police. That isn’t a comparison of left vs, right. That is just a book about left attacks. The civil rights era was a violent time on all sides. To try and paint it as a time of violence just for the left is just blatantly incorrect.
>> It gives the government an easy in to collect more data on any and all of these users, regardless of whether it is pertinent to a specific case.
That seems a little tinfoil hat to me. Like there are government people with lots of time on their hands to chase leads on things that are not related to a case. OTOH there seems to be a lot of pre-emptive searching going on, particularly in the area of terrorism related activity. On the other other hand, in that case I think we want them to foil plots before they are enacted right? It seems to be a hard set of concerns to balance. We could opt for the most privacy oriented approach, but I don't think there's much public data on what the consequences of that would be in terms of bad things happening.
Right - the warrant indicates they're only interested in people from Texas searching for those terms in a two month period immediately before the active bombings. Feels a lot like a warrant to a hardware store for people buying a specific component they've found at crime scenes.
Of course Daily Mail stripped that context.
> The information requested in this Application is being sought by the FBI, in part, to establish who searched for the Google Search Terms between January 1, 2018 to March 2, 2018.
> While I believe that a pool of individuals searching for these bomb components or methods during the time frame prior to the explosions at the victim addresses will be limited, the pool of individuals will be minimal if limited to searches originating from Texas. By identifying the users of the Google accounts or IP addresses of the devices that searched Google for these terms and cross-referencing that data with other investigatory steps such as cellular telephone records, a suspect(s) or witness(es) may be identified.
I was aware of that as I clicked into the actual documents, and it does seem reasonable to me if left just there.
My concern is moreso with the courts at this point. Nothing stops the fbi from fabricating a crime or having an agent go undercover and post something potentially harmful which could could be used to obtain a warrant on these broad keywords.
Basically: wide keyword searches periodically with overlapping time frames gets you continuous data while making it seem just like a standard home depot purchase and video review warrant. I'll admit it's tin foil, but my default assumption these days is that the gov is already sniffing any and all data; their challenge comes in generating legal pretense for having it when they want to take action or get caught with it.
If the image is accurate I think "motion led" would also be in scope for initial collection. There is a filtering process after the search term net that determines whether it is in scope for the warrant. Given the dubious framing of these search terms and past examples like the NSA watching every Linux Journal visitor I'm disinclined to trust such a process. RIP to work schedule of the poor intern who has to weed out all the results for suburban parents setting up Halloween decorations with glowing eyes.
I made the switch from DDG to Startpage.com the day when Bing/DDG censored "tank man" results on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, haven't looked back.
I do miss the !bangs, so I have a browser shortcut to access those when I need them.
Google is also censoring a large list of search terms when used in combination with reddit. For example, you'll get zero results for "site:reddit.com underage".
I was trying to find information about a recent scandal and was surprised that I couldn't find any discussion on reddit. Restricting the results to reddit.com made it clear what was going on. These search terms are not censored on Yandex.
It seems that they've recently removed some search terms from the blacklist. If I remember correctly, the terms I had searched originally were "qanon" and "pizzagate" , but those are no longer censored. "pedo" and "jailbait" still trigger the censor though.
I find it interesting that to this day, a search for the phrase “Bing/DDG censored 'tank man' results on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square“ returns very few results in DDG, but several pages in Google.
I would not cite this as an example of why to use one search engine over another. It's a good example of why to use more than one search engine.
He risked death to protest the oppression of Chinese people by the Communist government, brutal oppression the Communist government has spent decades trying to cover up. The brutal actions at Tiananmen Square and the surrounding areas--and the consequent coverup--are something we all disapprove of and abhor.
He may have survived, but many others did not. You can find the photos of their corpses online if you're outside the Communist regime's censored, dishonest, pseudo-internet.
Only commenting so younger people don't think your comment has any merit or honesty.
> On June 19, Beijing Party Secretary Li Ximing reported to the Politburo that the government's confirmed death toll was 241, including 218 civilians (of which 36 were students), 10 PLA soldiers, and 13 People's Armed Police, along with 7,000 wounded.
But the actual number of deaths is likely much higher.
I'm not up to date with the current official narrative, but I can only assume it's that there was a large picnic that day and someone accidentally spilled a giant jar of raspberry jam.
But it was an otherwise pleasant day with exactly zero humans crushed by tanks or otherwise killed.
So, anybody curious about bombs and explosions gets on the list at the FBI? I searched that on a number of occasions. Mostly when I was younger and had more spare time. Out of pure curiosity and intention to know everything, also be prepared for postapocalypse (which I, unlike crazy prepper guys, don't consider highly probable yet don't consider impossible either). Never ever meant to use such knowledge during peace time and hoped to never need to use that ever. Just curious. And I believe there are many such curious people and curiosity is not a crime.
I was quite surprised it was covered in the Daily Mail as they are usually in favour of trampling on privacy & civil liberties in the name of law & order. They're classic "nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" types, especially when the aim is to catch terrorists.
While folks are right to point out this should be expected since Snowden, I think it's worth acknowledging that the cozy relationship between government and tech companies dates a bit further back. Enabling this kind of trakcing was the stated goal behind research grants from the same three-letter-agencies during Google's foundational years.
I'm confused how anyone would think a keyword warrant was constitutionally ok. Curious what the argument looks like. I don't see how it passes tests for "unreasonable" or "broad".
The article does say "specific addresses and phone numbers." So if a legal warrant can be issued for police to stake out a specific address, or wiretap a specific phone number, why would it be worse to have another legal warrant for asking Google for information about searches for that same address or phone number?
I suppose because searches sometimes feel partially like thoughts and partially like actions. They also mentioned "names" and not just phone numbers. In any case, names/phone numbers/addresses are often ambiguous, so it's trawling in things that don't feel like probable cause.
There's also a screenshot of one warranted search in the article that had no names/addresses/phone numbers. They wanted everyone that searched for combinations of "cardboard", "bomb", etc: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/10/06/15/48837793-10063665...
That's very "thought crime" to me.
Pre-internet, it feels like a warrant for anyone that ran their finger down page xyz of the phone book.
Sure, but it is still possible. Libraries are historically very well organized. It would be completely feasible to have libraries send over the names of people who checked out certain books on some regular cadence. The Dewey Decimal system already classifies every book by topic, so it would be practical to document every person that checked out a book under, for example, 662 Explosives, Fuels.
It's sort of like the license plate readers some communities have installed at the entryways to their community. Not only does it track people who aren't part of the community, it tracks all the comings and goings of the members, too. Oops.
I remember downloading anarchists_cookbook.zip off of an AOL BBS in ~1995 at the ripe old age of Late Elementary/Middle School. Trying to imagine how my life would have worked out after being wrung through the Future Crimes division of juvenile detention.
just make a google search link go viral "you won't believe what the government doesn't want you to know!!" and every boomer and their mother is now a person of interest
Same with video rental information after Robert Bork's rental history was leaked and all of Congress realized the same thing could happen to any of them, regardless of party. If the Patriot Act didn't kill it off, the wording of the law along with the switch to streaming likely has rendered it mostly ineffective.
Last time I was translating Final Fantasy 7 dialogues into easy Japanese using Google Translate. At some point it occured to me that using Google Translate to translate 'bombing mission' was very dumb. I made sure to add 'Final Fantasy 7' and 'Mako reactor' to my translations...
This is an example of the chilling effects if when think you are watched.
Of course it is not stupid to search for 'bombing mission' as there are thousands of benign contexts to do so. It is a crime to put people under suspicion like that.
It is wrong that you need to justify yourself before authorities. It is the other way around actually. In democracies at least.
It would suck if you were interested in the Polish efforts to decrypt enigma and you searched for 'bombe' but you get redirected via the spelling correction feature into government surveillance. How likely would a spelling correction get you swept up in this?
They asked Microsoft also. So does anybody know whether Windows would be logging searches at the OS level? ik about the windows search menu being logged, but interesting whether they actually intercept web searches.
That's not just something from the movies though. Part of the patriot act compels libraries to provide information about who is checking out what books. SF public library has a page dedicated to how they will comply to those demands but also cannot inform people who's records they provide:
There are so many projects that I think would show up in these searches. Things like “package bomb” when searching for the YouTuber who made glitter and fart bombs into cardboard packages, set them on his porch, and waited for thieves to steal and open them.
I'm not as criminal lawyer but are these properly considered warrants or even a search and seizure of the suspect? This is more like a subpoena against a third party not the suspect.Even if the data is considered the suspect's, does a person have reasonable expectation of privacy when he knowingly and voluntarily uses search engines that are built specifically to profile users so that data can be sold or used for ads ?If he was using a VPN may be different story but particularly Google users should by now have no reasonable explanation of privacy.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js There are hundreds of settings that can be configured to harden Firefox. A lot were upstreamed from the Tor Browser via the Tor Uplift project. The afforementioned user.js is well documented and the most well maintained that I'm aware of.
This is one of the leading reasons why I think Firefox is a better browser than competitors because they don't allow this level of customization without hacking on the source code, like say Brave does. However not even Brave or Ungoogled Chromium is hardened as much as Firefox is with this user.js.
Is this verified though? I ask because Brave is known for some shady things, like pushing their alt coin or sneaking affiliate links into internet browsing.
Of course they do, I'm more interested in why all other nation states are okay with having the US spy on their citizens. Does that make Google noncompliant with EU law or is there a convenient privacy policy exception for the 'good guys'?
The golden age of the centralized Search Engine is over. We need something like a decentralized, Search-Engine-As-A-Service that holds data, allows customizable algorithms/censorship/etc.
I guess this means they are already doing this in secret. I wonder if private browsing even works at this point. Make sense to move out of google for those searches.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm kind of fine with that. I mean, Google tracks everybody anyway, but there is no benefit to the society at large. But if in this way you can somehow help preventing mass murder, at least for once this tracking is put to good use. I imagine they must have a lot of false positives so probably concentrate on the worst offenders. If someone is searching for a lot of sick stuff on ways to kill people, maybe a friendly visit with a psychologist could help prevent a tragedy.
I don't understand what you mean. Searching for problematic material is not a crime. Heck, it can be even done for legitimate reason such as research. I have a friend who loves watching decapitation videos but is otherwise a pretty amiable person and I hope he never kills someone. Persecuting someone on the basis of what they like to watch or what they search for is out of the question in any Western democracy[0]. When you add "social score" to it, it becomes an abominable dystopia nobody would like to live in.
[0] Well, until you actually find CP - it will be placed in your browser cache then, so technically it's on your hard drive now, not a pleasant situation from a legal point of view.
