Feds order Google to track people searching certain names or details

Wasn't there a history of political violence and rabble rousing in Rome for a century or two before Rome? I thought the Imperium cleaned up a lot of the problems that Rome had for a while, at the cost of the democracy (which was really a plutocracy, until populism become more effective).

I could be wrong, since it's been some years.

While folks are right to point out this should be expected since Snowden, I think it's worth acknowledging that the cozy relationship between government and tech companies dates a bit further back. Enabling this kind of trakcing was the stated goal behind research grants from the same three-letter-agencies during Google's foundational years.

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

The police in my hometown consist of:

* A dude who managed solid D grades throughout elementary and middle school despite a good & supportive family life & voluntarily chose to hold himself back a grade (8th grade) to "have a better chance of a football career to get into the NFL"

* A dude who, for as long as I can literally remember, talked about how he was going to be some kickass marine. Talked about it all the time, for years. He was also a solid D (even in shop class) student & football player. Not only did he fail, to my knowledge, in every metric required to be a marine - he managed to fail, which I truly didn't know was possible, every metric required to be an army grunt - except presumably the physical requirements. It wouldn't be hard for me to imagine him failing a cardio requirement tho.

This dude couldn't get in the lowest levels of our fucking army. I really only thought you could be disqualified for things like admitting to drugs or having felonies, but he managed to fuck up some test of intelligence they require.

* & several generations of people who are similar fuckups like these two.

Now, what do people like this on a police force manage to get up to?

Last month, there was a domestic violence call somewhere in the town. By the time the cops got there, dude was out on the curb, in his car, with his kid (wife had said he had a gun and threatened her with it, he did not have a gun)

Police haphazardly blocked him into the curb with their cruisers, and surrounded him with their guns out, in a crossfire with themselves. Proceeded to scream absolutely incoherent shit at the dude, while he's in the turned off & parked car with his hands clearly visible on the wheel - kid in the back seat, for about 10 minutes. Dude finally decides nothing good is going to come out of this & decides to attempt to leave. Turns car on, very slowly tries to turn out of how they'd blocked him in, and very slightly bumps a cruisers bumper (nobody was in the cruiser)

One cop then randomly decides to shoot. Keep in mind, I earlier mentioned the cops put themselves in their own crossfire. I have absolutely no fucking idea how, but one cop shot the other cop in the shoulder. This was the very first bullet fired by anybody, and as stated, the perp didn't even have a gun.

Cop yells out he's hit, and then all cops present go fish in a fucking barrel on the car, with the child in it, to the tune of 67 bullets IIRC.

The local news &, as you can assume, all Facebook groups, report that the man opened fire on police, and that the cops had then killed him. All comment sections swarmed with the local painkiller addicted retirement community saying "good, he should be dead" - and that reporting is now unchallengeable canon in their dementia ridden but still able to vote minds.

There's still an ongoing investigation by the state as to how the chucklefuck cop managed to go full retard enough to blast his buddy, but having gone on so long I'm sure it's going to end up as another "we've investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing"

The service isn't "worthless"

It's downright fucking dangerous to anything and everything around it, like the person legally in the crosswalk, who was hit at 120mph+ by a cop SUV and turned into mostly red mist, no significant body parts to be found, by one of the squadrons of cops responding to the aforementioned call.

I know all about dark pools and naked shorts and I have no idea what you're talking about. Be specific. Give details.

On the other hand, if a specific type of nail is used as shrapnel in a homemade bomb, investigators can go around to all hardware stores in the area and get security camera footage of customers who recently bought large quantities of that type of nail.

This isn't a hypothetical situation - according to the LA Times, it's how they ended up cracking the Austin bombing case that involved the Google warrant [1]:

> Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials “went to every hardware store” in the area to find customers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, McCaul said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

> “The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him — because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras — was when he walked into Home Depot,” McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance video of Conditt walking into the store in a wig and walking back out to a vehicle with a license plate connected to his name.

So I think there's a little more nuance here. Certainly matching a list of generic terms seems too broad. But a warrant for specific keywords that was limited to a specific city and time frame might be analogous to going to all the hardware stores in the city and pulling security footage?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-austin-bombings-suspect...