WRAL has several stories up about geofencing warrants. One major article is here. It describes a search warrant obtained by the Raleigh Police Department in a murder case. The warrant ordered “Google [to] hand over the locations of every [mobile] device within the confines of [a defined geographic area] during a specified time period.” In a nutshell, the police were trying to figure out who was near the scene of the crime when the murder took place and asked Google to comb its data banks to find out. This post is intended to start a conversation about warrants of this kind. How geofencing works. As it pertains to law enforcement, geofencing begins with officers defining an area of interest and a time period. The size of the area may vary. This Gizmodo story states that it ranges “from tiny spaces to larger areas covering multiple blocks,” while the warrant in WRAL’s recent story encompassed “nearly 50 acres.” The amount of time covered by such warrants is also not uniform. The warrant in WRAL’s story was for less than an hour, but Minnesota Public Radio reported here on a similar warrant that encompassed “every cellphone in [a] dense, urban area[] . . . over a 33-hour window.” Officers then seek a warrant requiring Google to provide information about any devices in the specified location during the specified time. Google has a database called SensorVault that contains enormous amounts of user location information, which it collects in a variety of ways. WRAL explains [...]
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