"dragnet" keyword search warrants approved in the USA

[Moonchild]

Are you sure you want to continue using Google as your search engine?

[On 16 October] the Colorado Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the [USA] to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant—a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase. In a weak and ultimately confusing opinion, the court upheld the warrant, finding the police relied on it in good faith. EFF filed two amicus briefs and was heavily involved in the case.

The case is People v. Seymour, which involved a tragic home arson that killed several people. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson.

Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case, queries by one billion Google users. Police generally have no identified suspects; instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the suspect might have searched for something in some way related to the crime.

Keyword warrants rely on the fact that it is virtually impossible to navigate the modern Internet without entering search queries into a search engine like Google's. By some accounts, there are over 1.15 billion websites, and tens of billions of webpages. Google Search processes as many as 100,000 queries every second. Many users have come to rely on search engines to such a degree that they routinely search for the answers to sensitive or unflattering questions that they might never feel comfortable asking a human confidant, even friends, family members, doctors, or clergy. Over the course of months and years, there is little about a user’s life that will not be reflected in their search keywords, from the mundane to the most intimate. The result is a vast record of some of users’ most private and personal thoughts, opinions, and associations.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/c ... ch-warrant

[Pentium4User]

I currently use searx and I like it.
DuckDuckGo is a no-go for me since they started supporting censorship.

[athenian200]

I mean, if the law allows this, then no search provider can refuse to comply with the warrant, right? If the problem is on the level of the law not protecting rights and saying they have to hand over that information to the authorities, then it really doesn't matter what search provider you use, it's not really safe to search for anything because every keyword you enter opens you up to potential legal liability.

The only possibility that might work to protect you is using a non-US based search provider, because any US-based one might well be required to keep this information to provide to law enforcement upon request.

Overall, this just makes me leery of using search engines at all... if there's potential legal liability with every keyword, then I am not so sure I want to search for things, at least not things I wouldn't be comfortable asking a librarian about in person.

[Moonchild]

I mean, if the law allows this, then no search provider can refuse to comply with the warrant, right?

They don't have to if they don't collect this data to begin with. The warrant may be given but if search history isn't saved then there's nothing to search. The issue here is that Google records every search and retains that data, meaning it becomes something that can be searched if ordered.

DuckDuckGo is a no-go for me since they started supporting censorship.

They didn't. If you think they were censoring with the whole Russia thing, they were not -- it was their upstream (Bing) that was censoring the results. I've had a pretty clear conversation with DDG about this and they explained the details to me. DDG does not do any filtering or censoring of the results they get, but their results depend on their sources for search results. I do believe they have since started to use other/additional sources for their search results as well.

[LuftWafflePilot]

Moonchild, are you saying DDG is not actually doing any search on the internet and instead gets the results from some third party? I am not really sure I understand.

[Moonchild]

Moonchild, are you saying DDG is not actually doing any search on the internet and instead gets the results from some third party? I am not really sure I understand.

Like I said I'm not sure exactly which sources they are using -right now- but I do believe most of their search results are still sourced from Bing.
You have to understand that not a single search engine in the world searches "on the internet" in real-time. They search databases which hold meta-data (keywords/URLs/etc.) for matching terms from the search query you put in. These databases are created by crawling the web and indexing pages/keywords/etc. -- there are only a few large databases around that have indexed a large portion of the internet. DDG doesn't (to my knowledge) have a large database of their own they maintain and they get their db results by querying 3rd parties in the background. In the case in question they were censored by Bing as Bing was censoring search results for queries passed to them (irrespective it is was a direct search by you or I, or a partner query from DDG). Since their provided results were censored, it seemed as if DDG was censoring but they assured me they were not and it was their upstream that caused this obvious lack of certain search results.

[moonbat]

DDG and Startpage are examples of meta-search engines. They don't have their own search indices (the databases being alluded to) since those require massive amounts of server space, the kind that only Google and Bing among the big players can afford. So most of these other engines you find simply act as a proxy for the big ones.

[suzyne]

Qwant and Yandex both maintain their own indexes so if you want results that aren't just a full or partial proxy for Bing and Google they are worth try. For some, being beyond the reach of laws in the USA might be a bonus too?

[Moonchild]

Not sure about Qwant, but Yandex is just replacing Google with the equivalent data hoarder (and surveillance) in Russia.

Of course there's Mojeek (included by default in Pale Moon); I know for a fact they have 100% own crawler data, if you want that.

[suzyne]

but Yandex is just replacing Google with the equivalent data hoarder (and surveillance) in Russia.

Agree, but I am fairly confident that my nation won't be sending any search warrants to Yandex.

When it comes to privacy vs government concerns aren't there positives to using services outside the 5, 9, 14 Eyes Alliance countries?

[Moonchild]

my nation won't be sending any search warrants to Yandex.

They won't have to. I don't think Russia offers that kind of protection to its citizens; but feel free to prove me wrong

[suzyne]

I don't think Russia offers that kind of protection to its citizens

My point wasn't about the privacy laws in Russia for their citizens, but how likely is it that Yandex would be sharing data with an Australian body in contrast to say a company in the UK helping out colleagues in Australia with some data? In the current world, the first seems unimaginable, while the second, reasonable and possible.

[andyprough]

I think the key takeaway here is, when you do online searches to help you commit your arsons and your other crimes - don't use Google. Police are smart - why serve a warrant on a search engine with 1% or 2% market share? Just go after the biggest search provider.

[LuftWafflePilot]

Moonchild, are you saying DDG is not actually doing any search on the internet and instead gets the results from some third party? I am not really sure I understand.

Like I said I'm not sure exactly which sources they are using -right now- but I do believe most of their search results are still sourced from Bing.
You have to understand that not a single search engine in the world searches "on the internet" in real-time. They search databases which hold meta-data (keywords/URLs/etc.) for matching terms from the search query you put in. These databases are created by crawling the web and indexing pages/keywords/etc. -- there are only a few large databases around that have indexed a large portion of the internet. DDG doesn't (to my knowledge) have a large database of their own they maintain and they get their db results by querying 3rd parties in the background. In the case in question they were censored by Bing as Bing was censoring search results for queries passed to them (irrespective it is was a direct search by you or I, or a partner query from DDG). Since their provided results were censored, it seemed as if DDG was censoring but they assured me they were not and it was their upstream that caused this obvious lack of certain search results.

Hmm. And noone can tell the very few owners of the real databases what to do with the data, right? So paranoically speaking, it doesn't even matter what search engine we use in the end if the data is censored/adjusted/biased or whatever at the source...

[andyprough]

Hmm. And noone can tell the very few owners of the real databases what to do with the data, right? So paranoically speaking, it doesn't even matter what search engine we use in the end if the data is censored/adjusted/biased or whatever at the source...

They are merely directories, similar to old-style phone books. You don't have to use one at all. There were many years pre-internet where I never opened a phone book at all - I would just go around town and find stuff on my own and keep my own personal phone book. You could just bookmark every useful site you ever find and stop using search engines altogether if you wanted. Probably would be a richer experience in the end.