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.
