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In a recurring feature in this newsletter, I'm publishing court documents that you won't have seen anywhere else, ones that paint a picture of what police surveillance looks like in the real world. I call it The Wire IRL.
This week's edition looks at an order on Google for location data on anyone inside or near a two Arizonian gun stores and one range that were targeted by robbers earlier this year.
It's known as a reverse location search, in which the feds ask Google to provide information on all phones within a given geographic area during a specified period of time. The police then decide which of those devices are pertinent for the investigation and ask Google for more detailed personal information of the phone owner, such as their name, contact information and previous locations.
This February, in Tucson, Arizona, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was investigating robberies or attempted robberies at three different federal firearms licensees. The robbers, who stole not just guns but safes and paintball masks too, managed to avoid being caught in the act. Security camera footage wasn't able to identify them, though it did indicate one white male was present at two of the hits.
To try to learn more about who may have been responsible, the investigator went to Google to get information on any devices in areas inside and surrounding those gun shops during the times which the robberies were believed to have taken place. For one of the victims, the Marksman Pistol Institute, that was a period of six hours during the night. For another, The Hub Tucson, it was just half an hour in the evening.
Such warrants have proven controversial, especially in Arizona, where one man was wrongfully arrested and kept locked up for a week because his device was caught up in a Google dragnet covering an area near a murder. As the author, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, wrote then, the investigative technique has much promise in helping solve crimes, but "it can also snare innocent people." Showing how broad such orders can be, I previously reported on a case in 2019 where Google returned information on 1,500 devices in response to a request from the ATF regarding some arsons in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Given these new Google reverse location searches are in Arizona, and cover areas surrounding three gun stores over nearly ten hours, the risk of innocents being unwittingly caught up in a criminal investigation could be significant. The DOJ declined to comment as the investigation was ongoing.
You can read the search warrant in full for yourself here.
If you have any tips on government surveillance or cybercrime, drop me an email on tbrewster@forbes.com or message me on Signal at +447837496820.
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