Police from the Minnesota city of Edina have obtained a wide-ranging court order that grants them access to data from anyone in the city who performed certain searches.
People expect a certain degree of privacy online, but records of your movement across the internet are stored in various repositories. Police from the Minnesota city of Edina have obtained a wide-ranging court order that grants them access to a lot of it. The warrant — amazingly, approved by a judge in Hennepin county — instructs Google to make data belonging to anyone in the well-to-do suburb available to police.
Police in Edina, a city of 50,000 on the outskirts of Minneapolis, have been looking into a wire fraud case. The suspect was attempting to swipe $28,500 from a branch of Spire Credit Union using a fake passport, and investigators think they know how to narrow their list of suspects. They need to know who in Edina might have searched Google for “Douglas.” There are four names (first and last) included in the order, but the last names are redacted.
According to the warrant granted on February 1st, a Google search for “Douglas [last name]” surfaces a photo that was used on the fraudulent passport. The police reason that the suspect conducted this search in order to find the photo (they didn’t find the photo on Yahoo or Bing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there).
