Police departments are forcing Google to hand over data on anyone near a crime scene

guest · Feb 19, 2019

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Police departments are using “reverse location search warrants” to force Google to hand over data on anyone near a crime scene
February 19, 2019
https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/reverse-location-search-warrants-google-police.html

Investigators served a search warrant to Google, asking that the company to provide the coordinates of any phones that were in the area between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on the night of the fire.

Police departments across the country have been knocking at Google’s door for at least the last two years with warrants to tap into the company’s extensive stores of cellphone location data. Known as “reverse location search warrants,” these legal mandates allow law enforcement to sweep up the coordinates and movements of every cellphone in a broad area.

The police can then check to see if any of the phones came close to the crime scene. In doing so, however, the police can end up not only fishing for a suspect, but also gathering the location data of potentially hundreds (or thousands) of innocent people. [...] privacy advocates worry that Google’s data will eventually allow more and more departments to conduct indiscriminate searches.
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Minnesota police officers have defended reverse location searches by pointing out that investigators follow a process whereby Google first assigns anonymized ID numbers to each phone when it hands the data over.
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Floyd 57 · Feb 19, 2019

Shouldn't they be asking the mobile network operators? Also, there's no guarantee that all the people at the crime scene's locations were recorded by google, meaning police might and likely will miss at least a few people whose locations was not recorded, skewing the results or at least not being as effective as it could be

Minimalist · Feb 21, 2019

Reverse Location Search Warrants

The police are increasingly getting search warrants for information about all cellphones in a certain location at a certain time:
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https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/reverse_locatio.html

mirimir · Feb 21, 2019

There are several problems with this. Fundamentally, it's very close to mass surveillance. Just being within some range of crime means nothing about involvement. Except maybe in rural areas, or at night.

For the most part, this approach will just ensnare random innocents, who happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Professional criminals, and anyone with good OPSEC, will be aware of this approach, and will carry cellphones turned off, stored in Faraday bags. And indeed, professional criminals could exploit this to create chaff. That is, they could capture IMEIs in the target area for a while, write some SIMs, and carry some cloned phones during the operation. Then they'd destroy all of those SIMs. So the police would be targeting the people whose phones were cloned.

Floyd 57 · Feb 21, 2019

mirimir said: ↑

That is, they could capture IMEIs in the target area for a while, write some SIMs, and carry some cloned phones during the operation. Then they'd destroy all of those SIMs. So the police would be targeting the people whose phones were cloned.
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What?

mirimir · Feb 21, 2019

Floyd 57 said: ↑

What?
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One can snoop IMEIs from phones. Kinda like a Stingray. And with the IMEI, you can write a SIM. So now you have a clone of the phone. When you connect, the cell network sees it as the phone that got cloned. So the victim gets charged for calls, which is the main application. So far, anyway.

Palancar · Feb 23, 2019

Mirimir is correct. This would be child's play. Hopefully the ACTUAL phone's location will provide an ultimate alibi but the cops would waste alot of time going down rabbit holes.

guest · Sep 2, 2019

Feds ordered Google location dragnet to solve Wisconsin bank robbery
Another reverse location search warrant
August 28, 2019
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20836855/reverse-location-search-warrant-dragnet-bank-robbery-fbi

They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself.
In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank’s security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers’ phones.

In November, agents served Google with a search warrant, asking for data that would identify any Google user who had been within 100 feet of the bank during a half-hour block of time around the robbery.
It was an aggressive technique, scooping up every Android phone in the area and trusting police to find the right suspects in the mess of resulting data. But the court found it entirely legal, and it was returned as executed shortly after.
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But the biggest gripe is the simple success rate: in the Wisconsin case, police asked for a dragnet that could produce that sensitive location data for dozens of people — but if the bank robbers weren’t using Google Maps or just left their phones at home, they wouldn’t show up in that search. For civil libertarians, that looks like a whole lot of suspicionless searches and nothing to show for it.
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