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Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#131

Post by Johnny555 »

Daneel_ wrote: post #68
keanzu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing a letter was delivered by USPS doesn't yield the contents. The state would have to subpoena each individual recipient - and they may have destroyed or lost the letter. It would only be equivalent if every letter was opened and recorded so that all the contents would later be available because this subpoena covers not just emails but also drafted and deleted messages; any files in their Google Drive cloud stor…

Sometimes the contents almost don't matter. For example, if you saw multiple letters from an oncology department to a household, followed by letters from government departments and a funeral home, it wouldn't be hard to figure out what was going on. It's the exact same problem with phone metadata. The connections can be made to tell the story, and are even easier to manipulate into whatever narrative the prosecution…

Just the same, I would feel a lot less violated if the government had header information for every email I received in the past year, than if they had the full email.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#132

Post by ip26 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #90
drevil-v2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute. This is a necessary "evil". We give up some freedoms so that we have a civilisation and an orderly society. And this isn't setting up any precedent that is egregious. This is on the front page of Chicago Tribune newspaper and on the front page of H…

> Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments That creates an almost arbitrary, "this fits my worldview so I'll support rights this time" thought process. Like, "Well, this guy's a Nazi so we should trample his rights. But this woman's an abortion activist, so we should be sure to protect hers." How do you propose we prevent ideological blindness in the protection of rights? Sh…

There's a big difference between dragnet surveillance & executing a warrant. This was the latter.

This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#134

Post by russler23 »

brigandish wrote: post #126
russler23 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ignite racial tensions”? There was no chance of that happening. Smollett was a laughingstock the day the story hit the news. Foxx declined to prosecute because she correctly saw it as a ridiculous and embarrassing stunt. Another thing to keep in mind: “igniting racial tensions” as an investigatory justification was how MLK got labeled the gravest domestic security threat to the United States. You’re advocating a cat…

> There was no chance of that happening Mens rea is the guilty mind required for something to be a crime. Intent matters as much as outcome or chance of outcome in the judgement of whether a crime has occurred, and explains the use of "sought" in the comment you replied to.

Well, it hadn’t even entered my mind that increasing racial tensions could be a crime, so that didn’t make it through my legal framework. Why did it occur to you?

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#135

Post by ip26 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #123
zadokshi wrote: post #21

Is this different in any practical sense to an old fashioned request for physical paper documents? The only difference I can think of is traditionally documents are destroyed after they are no longer needed. Now they can see “deleted” documents and document change history. i.e. emails stored locally on a personal or company server can be permanently destroyed. Traditional email systems won’t have a change history of…

> Is this different in any practical sense to an old fashioned request for physical paper documents? Just that the measure of recorded data is perhaps several orders of magnitude larger that it was merely ~20-30 years ago. I think back to my life in the 90s, and what information was recorded about me as I went about my day-to-day life, and it was minuscule compared to today. You could track who I called, but not what…

Of course, all that stuff could still have been recorded with a warrant 20-30 years ago. Though it's true it would have required foresight & more effort.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#136

Post by Johnny555 »

Suddenly the inconvenience of moving to an encrypted email provider like ProtonMail doesn't sound too bad. I don't particularly have anything to hide, but I'm sure a prosecutor could find something suspicious in my emails if he looked hard enough.

It wouldn't make my email completely inaccessible to the government (they could subpoena the sender), but would make it a lot less convenient to go on a fishing expedition.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#137

Post by Mauricio_ »

crocodiletears wrote: post #36
0xADADA wrote: post #3

I (and we should all) act as if this could happen to anyone. Essentially that the state can deputize any company to snitch on the digital ephemera that constitutes our daily lives, but especially those that we are deeply engaged: Google, Facebook, Lyft, Amazon. As such, we should not self-censor, but instead disengage from these proxy-cops and move to more distributed spaces.

I disagree on your last point. Whether it's Google, Microsoft, your ISP, a databroker, a webscraper, an unscrupulous app developer, or even your TV, I think it's safe to assume that one day or the next, every piece of content you produce, or topic you discuss will leak its way onto a major adcorp's servers. I can hardly think of anyone I know that can't attest to the experience of discussing something as a non-sequit…

>I can hardly think of anyone I know that can't attest to the experience of discussing something as a non-sequitur, only to receive ads about it shortly thereafter.

No way in hell that's true. Things are bad enough, you don't need to make stuff up.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#138

Post by lonelappde »

nwallin wrote: post #89
abbadadda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Queue the Google alternative posts. This is some terrifying stuff. > not just emails but also drafted and deleted messages; any files in their Google Drive cloud storage services; any Google Voice texts, calls and contacts; search and web browsing history; and location data.

What's the difference between this and a normal warrant, where they take every scrap of paper and electronic equipment in your house? If your objection is that it's weird Google has kept that data, sure. I get it, I use DuckDuckGo, Firefox, and I host my own email server on a VPN. I'm struggling to understand why this particular aspect is weird though. It seems totally normal that the government would seek this infor…

The difference is that this absurd amount of data exists, with no useful distretention policy.

Remember that the govt seizes this info about you to prosecute you, but you don't get this info about them for all their suspected crimes.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#139

Post by lonelappde »

Spooky23 wrote: post #40
abbadadda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Queue the Google alternative posts. This is some terrifying stuff. > not just emails but also drafted and deleted messages; any files in their Google Drive cloud storage services; any Google Voice texts, calls and contacts; search and web browsing history; and location data.

It should be queue the reduce use of electronic communications posts. This isn’t a phenomenon unique to Google. Google just attracts attention because of the broad scope of what they do.

Everyone, it's cue, not queue.

Re: Judge orders Google to turn over a full year of actor’s data

#140

Post by lmkg »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #81
Mirioron wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[…

I wrote this comment elsewhere below but it still applies The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute. How is this any different?

The State has not always been able to do that. The idea that a search can be executed merely for the purpose of collecting evidence is a relatively recent development. Records, papers, etc. used to be protected under the Fourth Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_evidence_rule

In broad strokes: Originally, the Fourth Amendment only allowed for the seizure of stolen and counterfeit goods, the "fruits of a crime." This was slowly expanded to include the "instrumentalities" of a crime, i.e. the things used in the commission of a crime. The difference between the instrumentalities and mere evidence was always shaky, and eventually crumbled.

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