Court documents unsealed Tuesday reveal the breadth of technical information federal investigators were permitted to collect on President Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen.
While the issue has never come before the Supreme Court, tech civil liberties experts warn that a warrant can compel a suspect to use their face or fingerprint to give up access to an otherwise locked device.
“I hear all the time now how location data is sought by police in a broad, sweeping way,” said John Bergmayer, the senior counsel at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit that focuses on technology and legal issues. “I think any of the electronic debris that people leave online on these services is all potentially subject to being used against you”
One warrant requested not simply access to three of Cohen’s Gmail accounts, as well as other email accounts, but also some of the wide array of information Google keeps for its users by default, including search history, web cookies associated with an account, device information, and a host of other metadata categories.
