Hi, it's West Kasova. We're taking a break this week for the holidays, so here's an episode you might have missed by now. We all know Google and other tech companies are collecting huge amounts of information about our digital and actual lives, what we search for, what we watch and listen to, and where we are at any given time. In large part that's so advertisers who pay for that
data can pester us to buy things. But Bloomberg's Davy Alba and Julia Love report that this vastrophe of personal information about millions of people is now increasingly also being sought by police departments across the US. They're asking judges for warrants to compel Google to turn over location and other user data.
Google says that it receives more than sixty thousand and search warrants, and this was true in the US last year. That's more than double the number from twenty nineteen.
I think these requests put Google in a difficult spot because these are court orders. They're not just optional.
And later, Mesa, Arizona detective Travis Stobb tells us how police use this information.
It's another tool on our toolkit, and it's a welcome one.
It just gives us another avenue.
To turn to when we're coming up dry on more traditional investigative techniques.
I'm Wescosova today on the Big Take Cops cast a Digital Dragnet. I asked Davy why she and Julia decided to look into how police departments are using all this information that Google collects about us.
I think we've known that Google is collecting an enormous amount of data on each and every one of us. Basically, if you have a Google account, you are handing over data on where you've been, what you've searched, and Google slurps up all this data to use in a lot of cases for advertising. So you have all of this history that you're keeping with Google that's in your account, and it just so happens that cops are also interested in that when they are trying to solve a crime.
So we suspected that there was this match between all the data that we were giving Google and users are giving Google, and the way that the cops try to mind that data to solve these crimes that have taken place, And we wanted to know whether cops were using this for very serious crimes or if they were also interested in this data for petty ones theft, graffiti, vandalism, And what we found was that this practice was incredibly widespread
all over the US. Tiny police departments all over the country are using Google data to try to solve crimes, and the crimes weren't always necessarily serious ones. They did include some of these more minor offenses as well.
And Julia, how'd you find this out?
If cops want to dip into Doodle's data, they have to obtain a search warrant from a judge. The company will not simply open up its files for any law enforcement officer who comes knocking. They have to have a valid court order, and so in order to do this, police officers will write up an affi David that it explains the trime that occurred and why they feel that Goodle might have information that could be helpful in building out the investigation. So we sought to get our hands
on those search warrants. We knew that was the best way that we could see what cops were actually requesting.
Unfortunately, for US, search warrants are public records, so we could actually visit the courthouses and collect them for our reporting purposes.
Julia and a police department gets a warrant for Google to give the information. What exactly are they asking for? What kind of information do they want Google to give?
In the case of location warrants, this is all about where a specific device was at at a particular moment in time. Little is able to pull in information from why Fi hotspots, the phones, GPS, sell tower connections, and that gives them a pretty good ability to estimate where a particular device was at a given time within several feet actually.
And so Davey, it seems like they're casting a pretty wide net here they are.
The way it works is the police will give let's say four coordinates. These are just x y coordinates on a map, and then with these four points, they'll draw a shape around a certain area and we'll say, okay, Google, give me all of the devices that have been in this polygon over a certain amount of time. So some of the warrants we've seen have covered just minutes. So when the police know when a crime has occurred, they can say, okay, within a five minute period, tell us
who was in this area. But we've also seen law enforcement agencies going to Google asking them for how many devices were in this area for up to a week.
Julia, can you give us some examples of times where police departments went to Google and said, we want this information.
In one case, a woman's purse was stolen in the parking lot of a target in Scottsdale, Arizona. In that case, the police sought a warrant for Doodle's location data information for people who were in that parking lot at the
time that the woman's purse was drabbed. In another case that we found out of Raleigh, North Carolina, a detective was warming up his car in the morning and he ran into his apartment to get something, leaving the car running, and when he came back, the vehicle had vanished with some police dear inside, including a police radio. And so the Raleigh Police Department obtained one warrant for Doodle's location data to see who had been in the neighborhood at the time of the trime.
And Julia, what did the Raleigh Police Department say about the case?
The Raleigh Police Department said that they ultimately did not recover that radio that they were seeking to find. They also said they always strive to recover stolen property.
Dave, even though we all have Google accounts. These warrants don't cover you know, tens of millions of people. They only cover whatever devices may have been in a particular area at a particular time around a crime scene. Is that right?
Yes, that is correct. But the pool of people that the cops in Google are drawing this data from is a huge pool, and that can be, you know, incredibly invasive. Your stuff can get ensnared in these warrants, Julia.
So Google gets all of these warrants telling them they have to give up information. How does the company deal with this? What's their position about all of these requestsing you have to give up the user data of your customers.
I think these requests put Goodle in a difficult spot because, on the one hand, these are court orders. They're not just optional, as a former Doodle leadal director told us. But at the same time, the company really values safeguarding its users privacy, and so it has to watch this line between helping law enforcement with their investigations and also not letting any detective rifle through any user's data.
Google gets a warrant to hand over some information, what do they do?
Goodle receives thousands of requests from law enforcement in the United States each year, and so they've come up with some formulas to respond to the common requests to give their legal specialists a roadmap to follow. Law enforcement will request information about devices that were present near the time of the crime, and Goodle will simply provide a list of anonymous device ideas that do not reveal which person
was tied to that device. Law enforcement will carefully go over this list and they'll identify a subset of devices that they would like expanded information about to see where the device was before and a after the time of the trime to help them decide who they really want to focus on. And Google will provide account information that's usually the name that the account was registered under and an email address for that final batch of users.
Davy Julius said earlier that Google gets thousands of these requests for information a year. Just how many do they get?
So Google says that it receives more than sixty thousand search warrants and this was true in the US last year. That's more than double the number from twenty nineteen. And their company provides at least some information in about eighty percent of cases.
You said, there's this group of people at Google whose job it is to do this? Who are they?
It's a team known as the Legal Investigation Support Team or LIS. Their whole job is through view search warrants and subpoenas, and they try to push back on as many as they can using what they have at their disposal. So let's say someone misspelled a Gmail account and it's
gamil dot com instead of Gmail dot com. Once these warrants are served to Google, Google does have an obligation to respond, a legal obligation, And so when they go through these warrants and try to sort through them and scrutinize them, they are trying to make sure they're doing it just as precisely as possible, you know, to the letter of the law, to make sure that they can only give up people's information when it is absolutely necessary.
And I would say also the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this request.
So Google is only one of many services are tracking us and gathering up our information. What about Apple and Apple Maps, which also helps you get around and tracks your location. Do they also give up this kind of information in response to warrants?
Law enforcement experts have told us that Google is the only company that can provide this detailed list of which devices were present at a diven time, and Apple in its transparency reports discloses that it does receive some geofence warrants, as these location warrants are known, but they say that they are not capable of complying with those warrants.
But it doesn't actually matter because a lot of people who have iPhones have Google apps on them. So if you think about I have to get to a friend's birthday party and how do I get there, I'll fire up Google Maps and see the best subway route, and that information is something that Google can see and does have.
Google sent Bloomberg a statement in response to questions about these warrants about user data. They said with all law enforcement demands, including reverse warrants, they have a rigorous process designed to protect the privacy of their users while supporting
the important work of law enforcement. They said they examine each demand for legal validity consistent with developing case law, and they routinely push back against overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands for user data, including objecting to some demands entirely.
They said for years they've supported legislative reform to government practices around access to user data, including proposing substantive guardrails on access to data and limits on the overuse of GAG orders, which they say contribute to a lack of transparency. I'll talk more with Julia and Davy a little later. After the break, A detective tells us how police use the data Google hands over. Now, let's get a look at how law enforcement uses this information in real life.
Detective Travis Stobb is an officer with the Mesa, Arizona Police Department, which has sought search warrants for Google data. Travis, can you tell me what it's like to be a detective working a case, especially when you're running out of avenues to pursue and you just can't quite find the person who committed the crime.
Well, every case is different, obviously, and there comes with it a certain frustration when you're not able to get a break in the case, and you feel a lot of pressure both externally and internally, especially in these instances where you have someone who continues to engage in an armed robbery after armed robbery and you want to get them caught before someone gets hurt, or just stop them from doing what they're doing. And so the ability to leverage this Google data was a.
Welcome addition to our toolkit for sure.
So tell me about a case where you use this warrant and what happened me personally.
It's still under investigation, but it was a late night gun store burglary where a device is inside of a business that's empty, that's right next to the gun store, and so that produces a very viable lead for us to follow up on. And I've assisted other agencies as well with analyzing the results from their Google warrants, in particular some road rage type shootings where some aspect of the crime is captured on video, and you can compare the video surveillance with the data you get from Google
to potentially identify the suspect. Unfortunately, my own personal experience hasn't been as successful as others.
I strike out far more often than I succeed.
You walk us through the process of what it's like to try to get this information from Google.
The current process right now begins with a search warrant to obtain device IDs that are within a set geographical area. So when we request this data from Google, we're asking them to search within a geo fence, and that is a geographical area defined by latitude and longitude, typically four points. It's a square around a given area. We explain the circumstances of the crime and what we're hoping to obtain from Google and how it will assist our investigation.
How easy is it to get a warrant like that from a judge.
Here in Maricopa County. We have to really work it.
There's been some recent court rulings in case law that shine a spotlight on these kind of warrants some privacy concerns, and so we work with those commissioners at our initial appearance court at the Search Warrant Center to really make sure that we're keeping our scope narrow, that we're not being overly broad, that we are doing everything we can to ensure that we're not infringing upon the privacy of those persons who are not involved.
In the crime but are simply in the area.
So we work really hard to make sure that we tailor the geo fence in such a manner that it zeros in on the area where the crime was committed.
Has a judge ever turned you down when you ask for one of these warrants or asked you to refine the information.
Yes, probably about half of the Google geofence warrants that I've written have undergone a refinement process after being submitted the first time round. And again it's just trying to zero in strictly on the information that we want to obtain and keep out that extraneous information.
All right, So you get your warrant from the judge and you take it to Google. What are you asking Google for in a typical case, like how do you say, hey, I want information?
So Google retains all this data on any device that has an Android platform or a Google app on it, such as the Gmail app or Google Maps. And what we're essentially asking from Google is to provide us the data that they keep stored within their servers that provides locational data for devices that are running some sort of
Google platform or app. And their locational data is based off of a variety of different things, whether it's the GPS on the phone, or it's connecting to Wi Fi, it's connecting to a cell phone tower, and it comes with varying degrees of accuracy. But ultimately what we want from them is any device that is within this pre defined geographical boundary, and that is the geofence.
If we have a.
Murder that's committed inside of a residence, I typically four point the corners of that residence, the property itself, and if we have, say a getaway path, we know that the suspect fled down the street in a certain direction, then I'll four point the sidewalk in the street where he fled. And we're narrowing those geographical boundaries the geo fence so as not to overlap houses of people who are uninvolved. We're looking just for that area where the suspect was.
So you go to Google with this information within this geo fence, where does it go from there?
When they returned the information to us, they identified the devices through an anonymized alphanumeric code. It's very long and it contains absolutely zero identifying information about the account hold. And this is to protect the privacy of those devices
that will inevitably capture that are uninvolved. So it's upon us as detectives to study all the devices that have been provided and determine which ones are most likely connected to the crime that we're investigating, while filtering out those
that we believe are uninvolved. At that point, we write a second search warrant for further locational data on those devices that we believe are most likely involved, and that information, when it's returned to us from Google, will show locational data for those devices an hour prior to and an hour after the timeframe set within an original warrant, and it will give.
Us locational data that falls outside of.
The geo fence, and we can use this to maybe determine where people go and see if these devices are in fact involved in the manner that we originally thought. It's further clarifying and information, but at that point we still have no account information, no identifying information on who the actual owner is of that device. It's not until we get the data back from that second search warrant and we can further narrow down the scope.
Of what we're looking for.
And then we write a third search warrant, and that search warrant is the one where we get actual account information, account data, we identify the person who is associated to that phone.
So has access to this kind of information. Changed the way your investigations into crimes work.
Not really, it's for me in particular, As I said before, I haven't.
Had a ton of luck with it.
It's another tool on our toolkit, and it's a welcome one, but it doesn't change the fundamentals really of how we proceed with our investigations. It just gives us another avenue to turn to when we're coming up dry on more traditional investigative techniques. We want to use its kind of a measure of last resort. There's other quicker avenues of investigation that can be taken at the beginning, and we
want to go through and exhaust those first. We're not necessarily wanting to jump onto the geofense warrant right away when we could produce a suspect through other methods a lot quicker because there is a time delay in obtaining this information from Google, processing it, submitting the second warrant, waiting it takes a little bit.
Are there any kind of crimes where you just don't use this to afore.
We've been cautious in how we apply this, making sure that we use it for serious crimes only. We would not want to be using this for misdemeanor crimes, lower level offenses. You know, we're looking at felony crimes. We're looking at Part one crimes, which are going to be burglaries, arsons, sex assaults, armed robberies, murders, the serious crimes. That's when we're going to use an investigative technique like this.
You talked a lot about how Google takes all these measures to annimize the data. But as someone who's used this and seen it used, do you have privacy concerns about this to a certain extent?
I do you know my personal beliefs, Hue towards a certain amount of privacy of the individual is very important to me. I take it very seriously, and so when the courts have privacy concerns, I take those seriously. It's reassuring to me that the information that comes back to us from Google, it's anonymized and it doesn't contain any personal information whatsoever about the person whose device it is
that we've captured in this geofence. Even more to the point, the anonymized ideas that they assign to these devices, it's only good for ninety days and then it's deleted and
there's no record of it. The pace at which technology advances, the courts can't keep up with it, and so it sits upon us to make sure that we're doing all that we can to minimize those issues and I think in this regard the search warrants and the way Google disseminates that data, I think it's done a really good job of protecting the privacy of individuals in regards to this investigative technique.
Detective, appreciate your time, Thanks for giving us this inside view.
Thank you very much for having me on.
When we come back, Bloomberg's Julia Love and Davey Alba tell us about the pushback in some places against the use of these warrants. Julia, do we have any idea about whether this works. Does all this information in this very complicated system lead to crimes being solved at higher rate?
We have certainly heard success stories, but we also found many cases where this information did not pan out for law enforcement. With the taste of that stolen purse in Scottsdale, Arizona, the detective told me that he decided not to proceed because he didn't think that this tool was going to pan out for him.
We've talked to a police officer who said that they were able to identify two suspects in a murder at a local park.
We spoked with one detective in Arizona who told us about a victory that his colleague had with these geofence warrants, and it was a case of catalytic converter theft in a parking structure, and using a geofence warrant, they were able to find a device that was present near the power box at the exact moment that the power was shut off in the parking structure.
Davy, we talked earlier about how a lot of people's data can wind up in one of these warrants and these requests for information. Have they ever led to people being wrongfully arrested?
Yes, we do know of at least one crime from twenty eighteen where a man in Arizona was wrongly arrested for murder based on the location of his phone. What actually happened in that case was the man had left his phone in a vehicle that a friend took and then the fact that the phone was in the car sort of pinpointed him as a possible suspect. But he actually was not present in that case, and he was wrongly accused and arrested.
And what happened in that case.
Police ultimately arrested another.
Suspect and he was ultimately cleared of charges. Yes, Davy is anyone pushing back against these kinds of warrants, saying that Google shouldn't have the handover users' data if the police asked for it.
Yeah, we have spoken to law professors and privacy advocates who say that this practice is incredibly invasive and that Google should not have this data in the first place.
There's an important legal battle happening in Colorado. A group of teenagers were charged with murder for an arson case that happened there a few years ago. The police found them through Doodle's search data for people who searched the address of the house around the time of the fire. But one of the defendant's lawyers are arguing that this was an illegal search, and so that is posing the first known challenge to the validity of this technique in the country.
Davey, as you continue to report this story, what are you looking for? Where do you think it goes from here?
I think that we will see more scrutiny on these practices, and we may see more public outcry from folks who are concerned that they could get ensnared in these warrants. You know, there is that question of how the public will react to the increased practice of using warrants to locate suspects. I think there's a question about how the law will evolve to include the fact that this is
now possible. So, for instance, in the case of wiretapping, that is a police technique that can only be used for very serious cases like kidnapping, murder, drug trafficking, and the like. But there's still no federal law that exists for regulating this kind of technique where cops can go to Google for location and search data, So it'll be interesting to see how that evolves.
Davey Julia, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having us. It was a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to us Here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot Nex. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. This episode was produced by Sam Gabauer and Christine Driscoll. Rafiel mcli
Is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Westkesova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.