In 2021, I gave a presentation on the future of police tech that I called “Casings, Cameras, and Crumbs.”
It was at the French Embassy (which was super cool!) and hosted by the Government Business Executive Forum (GBEF). I was introduced by my good friend Adam S. Lee.
The point of the “crumbs” in that presentation was that you really can’t move through your life these days without leaving behind digital evidence. That is true whether you are only doing legal things, or if you are committing crimes.
If it’s the latter, those crumbs can be useful to investigators. If they already know who you are and the crime you committed, the crumbs can be used as evidence to prove charges against you in court.
But if they are trying to solve a whodunnit, the crumbs might help identify the perpetrator(s). That’s what this story by The Associated Press is about. The specific crumbs in question are queries made in the Google search engine.
Google, of course, records every search it is asked to make. If the crime being investigated has something unique about it, it might be easy to ask Google whether anyone has searched for something relevant at a particular time. That might be, for instance, an address or a person’s name.
Indeed, such “reverse keyword” searches have helped solve some serious crimes. But like “geofence” warrants, they raise novel constitutional questions.
I’ve written before about how you tell Google your deepest secrets.
And I’ve written about geofence warrants.
The two investigative techniques, while distinct, raise similar issues. Should the government be searching through the questions billions of people ask Google to find the few asked by a handful of criminals? Should it be searching everyone’s location to find the few who were near a crime scene? Does it risk making suspects out of innocent people who coincidentally searched something similar to what the government speculated a criminal might have searched? Or who were simply nearby when a crime occurred?
I am simultaneously impressed by the investigators who use these techniques to solve crimes (which we expect the government to do) and concerned with limiting overreach (which we should not want the government to do).
I think these specific techniques both pose fascinating and important questions about privacy rights and how the Constitution fits into our increasingly technologically advanced world. It’s why I’ve been following them for years. Just wanted to share that.
Read the AP story here: “Police are finding suspects based on their online searches as courts weigh privacy concerns.”