Recently, it came to light that US courts are issuing orders to YouTube (Google) to hand over user information – a previously unreported form of dragnet investigation. And now additional details about the practice are emerging.
Forbes broke the story last month after seeing documents that showed a court order covering all YouTube users who watched certain videos over a period of time. Personal data required by law enforcement in these cases was very detailed.
Regarding Google users – that’s information from their Google accounts (name, address, phone number and records, online payments history, IP address, etc…), while everybody else visiting URLs listed in the order had their IP addresses surrendered.
A one-year gag order made sure Google could not make any of this publicly known, and now we’re hearing about it because that time period has expired.
However, the actual documents that the original article was based on were not published at that time; now, reports say they have been made available on the Bluesky platform.
The order covers the first 8 days of 2023, and three apparently obscure and in and of themselves harmless YouTube videos (the target of the investigation was a person suspected of illegal activity, while the video’s URLs were “exchanged” during communication between undercover investigators and their target).
Virgil Abt posted the documents on Bluesky, noting that given that the three videos (about mapping software) didn’t have a wide reach, an estimated 200 people, whose personal details Google was then asked to turn over, clicked on the links – to end up collectively “suspected,” as happens in dragnet-style probes.
The affidavit that’s now public shows the court explaining the process and reasons first for going after the specific YouTube user, “ELM,” for their alleged bitcoin-and-drugs related activities – and then why the court thought it was fine to thoroughly unmask potentially hundreds of uninvolved YouTube users, and keep the whole thing secret for a full year.
“There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators,” reads the affidavit.
The same problems related to other investigative methods based on dragnet surveillance such as geofencing apply here as well, mainly the fact law enforcement could achieve its goals by going down less legally controversial routes.
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