US Police Scandal over Citizen Confidentiality due to Arbitrariness

California’s Court of Appeal has ruled that the order to receive information on the location of all devices in the Los Angeles areas violates the US legislation.

This is the first time that the Court of Appeal in the United States examined the case of using the warrant on the geozone.

A geozone warrant differs from typical orders to receive digital data, because it does not contain the name of the suspect and does not even aim at specific persons or accounts.

Instead, the warrant on the geozone requires that the provider – almost always Google – search throughout its users location in order to identify all users or devices that are in determination of the geographical field during the period of time established by law enforcement agencies.

The trial was based on in fact in which the Los Police -Andjeles investigated the murder and had a video, suggesting that the suspects followed the victim from one place to another before committing a crime.

In order to identify unknown suspects, the officers requested the order according to which Google should transmit identification information for each device with the Google account located in any of the six districts within 5 hours. In total, the police requested data on a geographical area equivalent to approximately 24 football fields.

The order on the geozone is a three -stage process:

  • Google provides anonymous identifiers for each device within the geozone;
  • The police identify the subset of these devices and requests additional information on where these devices moved over a certain period of time;
  • The police identify another subgroup of anonymous devices and asks Google to reveal them and provide detailed information about accounts for the owners of these devices.

The judge is involved only in the issuance of the original order, and the police have practically no instructions from the court on how they should narrow the circle of devices that they ask Google to identify. This can allow the police to arbitrarily change the process or try to identify thousands of devices.

The court ruled that the warrant violates the fourth amendment, since it does not limit law enforcement officers in any way in relation to which accounts are subject to study or deanonymization.

The court also ruled that the order is too wide, since it “allows you to identify any person in six large areas of search without any specific reason for each person or its location.”

/Reports, release notes, official announcements.