Google is a scam, NOT a verb.
Google set to ‘actively interfere’ in the 2020 elections to help defeat POTUS Trump, GOP, researcher says
By Jon Dougherty
(NationalSentinel) A noted researcher and expert on social media influence says that search behemoth Google is poised to interfere in the 2020 election in an effort to defeat POTUS Donald Trump and Republicans.
Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that Google will employ a number of techniques, mostly through “ephemeral experiences,” that are designed to shift votes.
Leaked internal emails from Google last year, for example, showed that employees specifically discussed launching “ephemeral experiences” to counter Trump’s then-travel ban, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Ephemeral experiences are defined as brief online moments were information is instantaneously generated, as in search suggestions. But they aren’t stored anywhere in databases and thus cannot be tracked, giving the company plausible deniability.
In July during congressional testimony, Epstein testified that should all tech giants including Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube come together to support one candidate next year, which seems likely and which isn’t going to be Trump, then they could shift 15 million votes.
“Google will actively interfere in the 2020 elections,” Epstein said. “
They’ll actively interfere in their lobbying efforts, they’ll actively interfere with their political donations, and they’ll actively interfere using the online methods of manipulation that I’ve studied and probably other methods that I haven’t yet discovered,” he told the news agency.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, donated $4.7 million to Democratic congressional candidates in 2018, according to FEC records. By comparison, it donated $754,911 to Republicans.
Epstein has previously noted that Google and the tech giants have worked to interfere in elections.
In March, he released data analyzed from Google searches he said were linked to a trio of highly competitive congressional races in Southern California that were won by Democrats. In doing so, Epstein’s research team discovered that Google’s “clear Democrat bias” likely flipped those seats away from GOP candidates.
The study noted that at least 35,455 undecided voters within those three California districts were probably persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate because of Google’s biased search results.
Breitbart noted further:
Epstein says that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, he was able to preserve “more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.”
Analysis of this data showed a clear pro-Democrat bias in election-related Google search results as compared to competing search engines. Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
Epstein told The Epoch Times he’s mostly concerned about “Google’s power to not only suppress content but also determine the order it appears in—also known as filtering and ordering,” the news outlet reported.
“These two processes put in the hands of a very small number of business executives are extremely dangerous to humanity,” he said. “They are a danger to democracy, they undermine a fair and free election.”
Hacked emails show Eric Schmidt played a crucial role in Team Hillary’s election tech
Senior reporter
“I met with Eric Schmidt tonight,” John Podesta, the longtime Hillary Clinton adviser, told campaign manager-in-waiting Robby Mook in April 2014, more than a year before Clinton announced her candidacy for president.
The e-mail, stolen by Russian hackers and published by Wikileaks, details the billionaire Alphabet chairman’s interest in backing Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential run:
“He’s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn’t pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn’t seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He’s still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it’s worth doing.”
What did the meeting lead to? As of this week, Schmidt hasn’t bothered to donate a cent directly to Clinton’s campaign. Instead, he has leveraged his Silicon Valley acumen to generate a new source of influence.
Start-ups for Hillary
Schmidt donated $5,000 to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and advised it on digital operations; afterward, he invested in several start-ups founded by talented engineers and analysts who worked for the campaign, and had developed new ways to use campaign data to improve advertising and voter-turnout operations.
One of those firms, The Groundwork, is now the Clinton campaign’s top technology vendor, earning more than $600,000 in fees since the campaign began, according to federal campaign finance disclosures. Last year, Quartz reported on the Groundwork’s stealthy role in developing a technology platform that would develop the infrastructure to manage the campaign’s data and tools to engage voters.
Now, with e-mails stolen from Podesta’s e-mail account by Russian hackers available on the internet, we have more clues to how Schmidt contributed to Clinton’s use of election tech.
(Her campaign refused to confirm the accuracy of any of these e-mails or comment for this story; Schmidt did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment.)
Podesta meets Schmidt
Podesta is a longtime Democratic insider. Schmidt is the billionaire technology executive who became Barack Obama’s primary link to Silicon Valley’s boardrooms. Their first 2014 meeting confirms that Schmidt was involved discussions of the campaign’s strategy from the get-go.
At the time Podesta and Schmidt met, Clinton’s core staff were discussing how her online infrastructure could seamlessly move from an exploratory committee to a full-fledged campaign when the time was right.
“The thing he really pressed me hard on was geography,” Podesta wrote of their meeting. ”Very committed to the idea that this be done in a city where young coders would want to be, preferably outer borough NYC. Thought No Cal was priced out of the market and too into itself. Thought DC lacked talent in this arena.”
Schmidt’s strategy memo
Two weeks later, Schmidt sent a memo to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills outlining his ideas for the campaign. “Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers,” he began. “The entire startup ceases operation four days after November 8, 2016.” Much of the memo’s content would have been old hat to other staffers who saw it: Podesta, Mook, and David Plouffe, the veteran Obama operative.
But Schmidt’s outline gave clues to the basic tech challenges he foresaw building on Obama’s 2012 effort. Clinton, he said, would need to push vendors and her staff to move their technology to the cloud so it would scale more easily and to avoid expensive investments in servers. And he saw the need for new tools to integrate the various datasets—voter files, social media profiles, cable box records—into one system.
“Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them,” he wrote. “In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter….[q]uite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities with the actual voter file with high confidence.”
Schmidt also recognized concerns—voiced by others in the campaign, and common in the world of high-dollar political consulting—that vendors would seek to exploit the campaign for financial gain.
“Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there be no special interests in the financing structure,” Schmidt wrote, proposing audits to ensure no one was earning money on the sly. “The rules of the audit should include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from the campaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.)”
Laying the Groundwork
The Groundwork was formed as a Delaware LLC with Schmidt’s backing two months later, in June 2014. As Schmidt advised, its offices were in Brooklyn, blocks from the building that would eventually house Clinton’s campaign headquarters. The company’s leader. Michael Slaby, had been one of Obama’s top digital staffers in 2012. (He did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)
Slaby hired top engineers from companies like Netflix and Google to build the unsexy but critical back-end infrastructure for signing up supporters and collecting donations, with plans to market the platform to corporate clients through the Groundwork’s parent company, Timshel, also backed by Schmidt.
“There are a lot of people who can write big checks,” Slaby told Quartz last year. “Eric recognizes how the technology he’s been building his whole career can be applied to different spaces. The idea of tech as a force multiplier is something he deeply understands.”
Slaby would not be the only talent that Schmidt helped bring to the campaign. The campaign’s influential chief technology officer, Stephanie Hannon, is a veteran Google engineer. Civis, another company founded by former Obama staffers and funded by Schmidt, has provided some media analytics for the campaign.
Sometimes, the recruiting efforts fell flat. Mook wrote to Podesta the same month that the Groundwork was founded, asking him to call Mikey Dickerson, a former Google technologist who worked on Obama’s campaign and then parachuted in to Washington to help rescue healthcare.gov when the website floundered.
“We are desperately trying to get him to oversee the Eric Schmidt project,” Mook wrote.”He’s apparently open to doing it but a little worried about how legit it is and what it means for later on. I was hoping you could call him to tell him how important the project is and how much faith higher ups would have in his ability to deliver a really good product…and how that would inevitably mean a position later.”
Their effort failed; Dickerson is currently employed at the US Digital Service, which bills itself as “a startup at the White House” that works to bring the best technology and practices to government agencies.
Hillary’s AI curiosity
At some point, Schmidt met with Clinton herself to discuss the effort. The candidate had at least some interest in the nuts and bolts of her campaign’s technology, requesting updates on her website ahead of her candidacy’s launch and at one point e-mailing her team to ask about Facebook’s decision to open-source artificial intelligence technology. (The answer, attributed to her campaign digital director Teddy Goff, was that “AI may be more 2020 than 2016.”)
Schmidt also requested a meeting with former president Bill Clinton in February 2015. “[I]t is about the business [Schmidt] proposes to do with the campaign,” Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, wrote. “He says he’s met with HRC.” “Yup,” Podesta replies. “I’ve talked to him too. Robby is in touch with his team.”
Flournoy also mentioned that Google was lending its corporate jet to fly the former president to Africa that summer as part of a Clinton Foundation trip, with the two joking about previous times that it had broken down.
It’s all “gravy”
It’s not clear today how much value the Groundwork’s tools ultimately provided to the campaign; some Democratic sources suggest the internal tools developed by Hannon’s team have solved problems the Groundwork once x`aspired to tackle. For all its success, Obama’s 2012 technology team lacked a cohesive management structure, and returning staffers wanted to avoid siloed teams or campaign officials who felt outranked by better-paid vendors.
“Imagine you’re a mid-level person inside the campaign, or even the campaign manager,” one veteran Democratic operative said last year. “Who’s going to say, ‘Hey, billionaire smartest tech guy on the planet, thanks but no thanks?’”
In October 2014, a draft memo on digital strategy written by Mook for Hillary Clinton discusses “Eric Schmidt’s company Groundwork,” then a ten-person team developing a dynamic sign-up page and donation tool to be deployed by the campaign when it launched more than six months later. It suggests that campaign staff were eager to have control over their own core technology.
“Eric’s team is NOT building a ‘complete website’, which I know he sometimes implies,” Mook wrote. “Speaking candidly, it’s fantastic that Eric has devoted resources to creating these new tools and it’s resource a potential campaign can leverage, but we are in no way depending on him and will consider anything his team delivers as ‘gravy.'”
Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam
BIG UPDATE: YouTube has REMOVED the video from their platform. The video is still available on this website page.
UPDATE 1: Congressman Louie Gohmert issued a statement, saying “Google should not be deciding whether content is important or trivial and they most assuredly should not be meddling in our election process. They need their immunity stripped…”
UPDATE 2: Google executive Jen Gennai RESPONDED to the video, saying, “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.”
Insider: Google “is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”
Google Head of Responsible Innovation Says Elizabeth Warren “misguided” on “breaking up Google”
Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
Insider Says PragerU And Dave Rubin Content Suppressed, Targeted As “Right-Wing”
LEAKED Documents Highlight “Machine Learning Fairness” and Google’s Practices to Make Search Results “fair and equitable”
Documents Appear to Show “Editorial” Policies That Determine How Google Publishes News
Insider: Google Violates “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” on Section 230
(New York City) — Project Veritas has released a new report on Google which includes undercover video of a Senior Google Executive, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider. The report appears to show Google’s plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections and “prevent” the next “Trump situation.”
The report includes undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai saying:
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.”
Said Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe:
“This is the third tech insider who has bravely stepped forward to expose the secrets of Silicon Valley. These new documents, supported by undercover video, raise questions of Google’s neutrality and the role they see themselves fulfilling in the 2020 elections.”
Jen Gennai is the head of “Responsible Innovation” for Google, a sector that monitors and evaluates the responsible implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. In the video, Gennai says Google has been working diligently to “prevent” the results of the 2016 election from repeating in 2020:
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.”
“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
Google: Artificial Intelligence Is For A “fair and equitable” State
According to the insider, Machine Learning Fairness is one of the many tools Google uses to promote a political agenda. Documents leaked by a Google informant elaborate on Machine Learning Fairness and the “algorithmic unfairness” that AI product intervention aims to solve:
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
The insider showed Google search examples that show Machine Learning Fairness in action.
Click to enlarge
“The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it.” – Jen Gennai, Head Of Responsible Innovation, Google
The Google insider explained the impact of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Fairness:
“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda.”
Determining credible news and an editorial agenda. . .
Additional leaked documents detail how Google defines and prioritizes content from different news publishers and how its products feature that content. One document, called the “Fake News-letter” explains Google’s goal to have a “single point of truth” across their products.
Click to enlarge
Another document received by Project Veritas explains the “News Ecosystem” which mentions “editorial guidelines” that appear to be determined and administered internally by Google. These guidelines control how content is distributed and displayed on their site.
Click to enlarge
The leaked documents appear to show that Google makes news decisions about what news they promote and distribute on their site.
Comments made by Gennai raise similar questions. In a conversation with Veritas journalists, Gennai explains that “conservative sources” and “credible sources” don’t always coincide according to Google’s editorial practices.
“We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources …”
The insider shed additional light on how YouTube demotes content from influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool:
“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”
Internal Google Document: “People Like Us Are Programmed”
An additional document Project Veritas obtained, titled “Fair is Not the Default” says “People (like us) are programmed” after the results of machine learning fairness. The document describes how “unconscious bias” and algorithms interact.
Click to enlarge
Veritas is the “Only Way”
Said the insider:
“The reason why I came to Project Veritas is that you’re the only one I trust to be able to be a real investigative journalist. Investigative journalist is a dead career option, but somehow, you’ve been able to make it work. And because of that I came to Project Veritas because I knew that this was the only way that this story would be able to get out to the public.”
“I mean, this is a behemoth, this is a Goliath, I am but a David trying to say that the emperor has no clothes. And, um, being a small little ant I can be crushed, and I am aware of that. But, this is something that is bigger than me, this is something that needs to be said to the American public.”
Project Veritas intends to continue investigating abuses in big tech companies and encourages more Silicon Valley insiders to share their stories through their Be Brave campaign.
As of publishing, Google did not respond to Project Veritas’ request for comment. Additional leaked Google documents can be viewed HERE.
Other insider investigations can be viewed here:
Do you like this .gif? Share it to get people's heads out of their asses.
Uploaded files:
Report: 90 Percent of Political Donations from Google Go to Democrats
90 percent of political donations from Google, YouTube, and parent company Alphabet go to Democrats, according to a report.
“In 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Alphabet employees donated more than $5.8 million to Democratic candidates and causes, while only $403,042 was contributed to Republicans. Ninety-four percent of Alphabet contributions in that year went to Democrats,” reported the Washington Examiner. “From 2004 to 2017, $15 million donated by employees of Google and its related companies went to Democrats, and just $1.6 million went to Republicans.”
During the 2016 presidential election, Eric Schmidt, who served as the executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet until December 2017, backed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange claimed Google was “directly engaged” in the Clinton campaign.
In August, it was revealed that over 1,000 Silicon Valley executives and employees, including Google senior executives Urs Holzle, Vinton Cerf, and Jennifer Fitzpatrick, had donated to a pro-Democrat super PAC since 2015.
A major left-wing fundraising event for “progressive” political candidates was also set to be held at Google’s offices in Washington, D.C., before it was moved, while in 2015, Google held a fundraising campaign for “refugees.”
Last month, President Trump accused Google of being biased against conservatives, citing Google Search’s almost exclusive use of left-wing news sources, with CNN being the most featured.
“I think what Google and what others are doing – if you look at what is going on with Twitter and if you look at what’s going on in Facebook, they better be careful because you can’t do that to people,” President Trump declared. “You can’t do it.”
Earlier this year, searches on the site for the California GOP listed “Nazism” as the party’s ideology, which the search giant blamed on Wikipedia. Breitbart News also reported in July that image searches for “idiot” primarily resulted in pictures of President Trump.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.
source: breitbart.com
Google’s Bias Undeniable as Its Fact-Check Feature Almost Exclusively Targets Conservative Sites
Looking up various news and opinion sites on Google will open up a window on the right-hand side that features various bits of info about the site, as well as the topics they write about. On many sites, it will also include a “Reviewed Claims” section that will fact-check many of the articles the site puts up…that is, if you’re a conservative site.
The issue was first brought to the public’s attention by the Daily Caller, who noted that its own site had its articles reviewed for facts. The trouble is that the fact-checkers were sources with repeatedly proven biases toward the left like Snopes, or Climate Feedback.
The Daily Caller noted with examples that the fact-checking done by these sites is hardly reliable, as demonstrated by the fact checkers saying TheDC made a claim it didn’t, and reported that what they claimed was false:
Ostensibly trying to sum up the crux of the post, the third-party “fact-checking” organization says the “claim” in a DC article that special Counsel Robert Mueller is hiring people that “are all Hillary Clinton supporters” is misleading, if not false.
The problem is that TheDC’s article makes no such claim. Their cited language doesn’t even appear in the article. Worse yet, there was no language trying to make it seem that the investigation into the Trump administration and Russia is entirely comprised of Clinton donors. The story simply contained the news: Mueller hired a Hillary Clinton donor to aid the investigation into President Donald Trump.
Still, the Washington Post gave the claim, which came from Trump himself, its official “Three Pinocchios” rating. The method applies to several other checks. Claims concocted or adulterated by someone outside the TheDC are attributed to TheDC, in what appears to be a feature that only applies to conservative sites.
And to The Daily Caller’s point of it only being applied to conservative sites, that sadly rings very true.
I personally searched through many left wing sites on Google, and not one of them — be it Vox, Media Matters, Salon, Newsweek, etc — have the same fact-checking function attached to them. The only one who seems to have it is Occupy Democrats, a radical leftist site.
Google’s bias against conservatives is nothing new. Recently they labeled YouTube interviewer Dave Rubin’s Q&A with Ben Shapiro as unfriendly to advertisers and demonetized it. What was unfriendly to advertisers is still unknown, but as YouTube has stated in the past, it doesn’t need a clear reason to demonetize videos. If the content seems to fall outside levels of what its flagging partners believe to be right, the video is demonetized and hidden.
Trump is right: More than Facebook & Twitter, Google threatens democracy, online freedom
Google, YouTube and other tech giants filter, suppress and even directly attack conservatives. This must stop to protect our free and open society.
Americans must be wary of powerful institutions that seek to control what we see and hear.
As the internet has become an increasingly central part of modern life, Big Tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have increasingly sought to become the gatekeepers of the internet and political discourse. Without any sort of democratic mandate, these companies have appointed themselves the arbiters of acceptable thought, discussion and searches online.
These companies’ pervasive command of the internet — and blatant desire to control how we interact with it — is a direct threat to a free society. And arguably the worst offender is Google.
Google claims to value free expression and a free and open internet, but there is overwhelming evidence that the Big Tech giant wants the internet to be free and open only to political and social ideas of which it approves.
“Google & others are suppressing voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” President Trump tweeted last month.
Google has directly targeted Republicans
The president is absolutely right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Google was accused of manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Also, research at Harvard University found that Google’s search rankings are not objective, and in 2017, the company was fined billions of dollars by the European Union for manipulating search results.
Google also maintains at least nine shadowy blacklists that affect what the public sees when using its search engine.
When it’s not manipulating the internet to prevent users from viewing right-wing content, Google is directly attacking that content. A report by The Daily Caller News Foundation revealed that Google’s fact-checking service “fact-checked” only conservative news websites, and that in many cases, these fact-checks were outright wrong. What does it say about the fact-checker when its fact-checking is biased and incorrect?
Sometimes, the tech giant just attacks conservatives directly. In one infamous example, a Google search result listed “Nazism” as an official ideology of the California GOP. North Carolina Sen. Trudy Wade, a Republican, was shocked to discover that the top search result for her name returned a photo labeling her as a bigot.
More:Take the 'Trump news' Google challenge. Whatever the results, presidents can't change them.
Social media companies are the real 'enemies of the people'
Don't regulate social media companies — even if they let Holocaust deniers speak
If something vaguely conservative and intellectually stimulating manages to get past Google’s content gatekeepers, they just remove it. YouTube, which is owned by Google, routinely demonetizes, restricts and censors conservative content. One target of YouTube was Dennis Prager’s PragerU, which had 40 of its videos restricted. Prager sued the social media video giant this year following these unfounded restrictions. YouTube has also been known for banning pro-life videos.
Google’s eager adoption of the role of censor should come as little surprise. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., has a demonstrated track record of combining the role of Democrat activist with his job.
Google and YouTube shape our online reality
WikiLeaks emails revealed that Schmidt worked directly with the Clinton campaign in 2016 and was instrumental in forming “The Groundwork,” an online startup company created to help Clinton win the election. He was also seen wearing a “staff” badge at the Clinton election night party.
While President Barack Obama was in office, Google kept a cozy relationship with the White House. Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week during the first seven years of Obama’s presidency, and almost 250 individuals left government service to work for Google or vice versa while Obama was in office. The Obama administration may also have squashed an antitrust investigation into the company.
Of course, the problem with Google extends well beyond Eric Schmidt. As the saga of James Damore showed, the political bias at Google is institutional.
Google’s nefarious activities should concern not just conservatives and Republicans, but every American who values free speech and a truly free and open internet.
Google’s broad and pervasive role in the lives of almost every American today cannot be overstated. More than 90 percent of all online searches are conducted through Google or YouTube. The media giant’s video-sharing site has 1 billion active users a month, many of whom go there to learn and share conservative ideas only to find their quest for knowledge subverted by faceless ideologues.
Google is clearly manipulating and controlling the political narrative in favor of Democrats and the left, and silencing conservatives and Republicans. A company with such power and influence cannot simply be allowed to play the biased gatekeeper of political discourse.
Americans who believe in a truly open society and internet won’t stand for it any longer.
Brad Parscale is the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President. Follow him on Twitter: @parscale
#googleisaSCAM #googleisNOTaVERB
Uploaded files:
If You're Close To The Scene Of A Crime, Police Can Demand Google Hand Over Your Data
Authored by Aaron Kesel via TheMindUnleashed.com,
The Gainesville Police Department suspected an innocent man was involved in a burglary so naturally they requested that Google give them all of his location data.
Google’s legal investigations support team wrote to Zachary McCoy telling him that local police were demanding information related to his Google account. Google replied and said it would release the data unless McCoy went to court and tried to block the request, NBC reported.
The man then searched his case number on the Gainesville Police Department website where he found a one-page report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home ten months earlier on March 29, 2009. Unfortunately for McCoy, the crime occurred less than a mile from the home that he shared with his two roommates.
Caleb Kenyon, McCoy’s lawyer, said he was subject of a “geofence warrant.” A geofence warrant is essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who is near a crime scene.
From this blanket of surveillance law enforcement then try to figure out which phones may be tied to suspects or possible witnesses. According to journalist Tony Webster, “Law enforcement officials say it’s a promising new technique.”
“A reverse location search warrant differs from a traditional search warrant in that it doesn’t identify a suspect and establish probable cause to ask for evidence of a suspect’s crimes. Instead, it asks for information about everyone in an area at a certain time, working backwards to identify a suspect.”
McCoy used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone’s location services, that were then fed to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the burglary and saw that he had passed the victim’s house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood.
“It was a nightmare scenario,” McCoy recalled.
“I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.”
McCoy ended up fighting back and winning, resulting in the police dropping their warrant request with the help of his lawyer.
But this isn’t the first time a blanket surveillance warrant has been used, last year in New York law enforcement used a “geofence warrant” against the Proud Boys, a group of pro-Trump rightwing extremists after they allegedly beat up four leftist protesters, believed to be associated with Antifa, outside an Upper East Side event. The four protesters refused to cooperate with police, and authorities were unable to identify them.
As part of their attempt to find their identities, prosecutors sent Google a warrant for phone records near the conflict. However, they ended up collecting multiple innocent people around the area under their dragnet as well, even though they had nothing to do with the crime. Exactly like what happened with McCoy.
And in just one year, 22 Google reverse location search warrants were issued in the state of Minnesota alone.
This type of warrant has privacy and civil liberties advocates concerned. They’re noting that the search has constitutional issues due to protections from unreasonable searches. However, police argue the information alone is not enough to justify charging someone with a crime. But in another case in Arizona, a man was mistakenly arrested and jailed for a murder he didn’t commit, which was largely based on Google data received from a geofence warrant.
“Normally we think of the judiciary as being the overseer, but as the technology has gotten more complex, courts have had a harder and harder time playing that role,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union about another case of using geofence surveillance. “We’re depending on companies to be the intermediary between people and the government.”
