Is the water getting warm in here or is it just me?
-Mr Frog
The police are not your friend. In pursuit of the $28k, which I'd hate to have stolen from me, they will callously and casually wreck the lives of anybody this search turns up, especially for any poor, or "immigrant looking" people.
Recovering drug addict who's just gotten their life back on track after coming out of prison who's managed to get a stable job, who happened to Google the name of some guy a passenger told him a story about while driving for Uber (in the evenings to make some money on the side)?
This sounds like a very targeted request for information. Sure, police attention is not something anyone should seek out but I don't see how this is different than any other established investigative technique.
You have constructed an entirely fictional example to make your point but you have not cited an actual example of the police overstepping their bounds with this type of search. Sorry, that's not compelling to me.
I don't completely disagree with you but this doesn't make a convincing case against this type of request to me.
> This sounds like a very targeted request for information.
To me it sounds like the exact opposite. A targeted request would look like this:
We'd like the search history for ip address 212.55.12.23 between Sept. 16 2016 1 am and Sept. 21 2016 9 am related to 'name'.
That's a specific request. The present one is a fishing expedition where the police is not confirming something they already know but are looking for someone they theorize might exist.
What I mean is that this is much more targeted than the headline makes it sound. At first glance the police department wants access to the entire search history of everyone in some town. In reality they are asking for something much more specific than that.
I wasn't responding to the headline, but to the article. The headline is inaccurate, but that is not something that should surprise any of us.
The 'much more specific' is that they theorize that such a search query must exist. If they had a suspect they would have raided that persons computer, if the computer was encrypted or erased they they could have used google's search data + the IP address they already had to confirm (not discover) that such a search had indeed been made which would serve as corroborating evidence absent the search history on the computer.
Essentially the police is looking for something that they hope exists and will implicate someone who is currently not on their radar and who could very well be innocent.
This case is one of the ones I have studied in a bit more detail:
The police are not your friend. In pursuit of the $28k, which I'd hate to have stolen from me, they will callously and casually wreck the lives of anybody this search turns up, especially for any poor, or "immigrant looking" people.
Recovering drug addict who's just gotten their life back on track after coming out of prison who's managed to get a stable job, who happened to Google the name of some guy a passenger told him a story about while driving for Uber (in the evenings to make some money on the side)?
Yeah he's fucked, despite doing literally nothing wrong here.
Call me "jumpy" all you want, that's not at all far fetched.