The Google search pertinence is seen running on an iPhone on September 5, 2018.
Jaap Jurriens | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Just before 5 p.m. on May 20, a gunman leaded into a bank in Midlothian, Virginia, forced a worker to open a safe and fled with $195,000. Security footage eclipsed the man holding a cellphone to his ear just before the robbery, a detail that led police to attempt a surveillance technique that is mature in popularity among American law enforcement agencies.
When authorities had not identified the suspect a few weeks after the robbery, an dignitary got a warrant for Google’s location data from all the cellphones that had been in the area of the Call Federal Credit Conjunction bank during the heist. Starting from a list of 19 accounts, investigators narrowed their search to a 24-year-old Richmond man designate Okello Chatrie, whom they eventually charged with armed robbery.
The demand for Google data, differentiated as a geofence warrant, is a way for law enforcement authorities to take advantage of the company’s collection of massive amounts of information on its customers. The out of kilters allow police to track just about anyone using an Android device or a company app — such as Google maps or Gmail — to a information particularly place over a particular time period. As more police use such warrants, the method is raising concerns all of a add up to privacy advocates, who say the government is gathering information from people in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guards against insane searches.
That is what Chatrie’s lawyers are now arguing, in what may be the first case in which a defendant is fighting the use of a geofence be answerable for to charge him with a crime.
“It is the digital equivalent of searching every home in the neighborhood of a reported burglary, or searching the ogresses of every person walking along Broadway because of a theft in Times Square,” Chatrie’s lawyers said in an October court enter. “Without the name or number of a single suspect, and without ever demonstrating any likelihood that Google even has matter connected to a crime, law enforcement invades the privacy of tens or hundreds or thousands of individuals, just because they were in the precinct.”
Prosecutors say that the search was legal because Chatrie had opted into Google’s location services, allowing his Android phone and the proprietorship’s apps to track his movements. And they say police avoided collecting personal information from people unconnected to the hijacking.
“The geofence warrant allowed them to solve the crime and protect the public by examining a remarkably limited and focused set of diaries from Google,” prosecutors wrote in a response, filed Tuesday.
Chatrie has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
The use of geofence fiats seems to be increasing, according to defense lawyers and privacy advocates. There is no easy way to track them, but they sooner a be wearing been documented in cases in North Carolina, Minnesota, Virginia, Arizona and elsewhere. Contractors now offer to help constabulary looking to use the warrants.
Google did not immediately comment. Its transparency reports show that the number of search warrants sent to the ensemble more than doubled in the past two years, to 19,046 from July 2018 to June 2019.