FBI Dragnet for Google Data Pertaining to Jan. 6 Should Concern Us All
By Nick Arama | 7:00 PM on November 28, 2022
We saw an unprecedented effort by the government to go after those who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, with the FBI investigating hundreds of people and employing all kinds of tactics to arrest them. Not only did the FBI have informants who were involved, but they also employed some unusual methods.
Among the tactics in their huge investigatory effort was the “biggest-ever haul of phones from controversial geofence warrants, court records show.”
According to a filing in one of the Jan. 6 cases, Google gave up information to the FBI on 5,723 devices that had been in or near the Capitol during the riot. Geofence warrants allowed them to get anyone in the area using digital services. There weren’t that many people who were inside the Capitol. About 900 have been charged. So those warrants were grabbing people who had not been inside the building — they were potentially grabbing information on dissenters and/or random people who were just in the neighborhood.
“We have a rigorous process for geofence warrants that is designed to protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” [Google] said. “When Google receives legal demands, we examine them closely for legal validity and constitutional concerns, including overbreadth, consistent with developing case law. If a request asks for too much information, we work to narrow it. We routinely push back on overbroad demands, including overbroad geofence demands, and in some cases, we object to producing any information at all.”
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https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/11/28/fbi-dragnet-for-google-data-pertaining-to-jan-6-should-concern-us-all-n665470
