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Tipsheet

Be Careful What You Search: How Government and Big Tech are Covertly Spying on You

Be Careful What You Search: How Government and Big Tech are Covertly Spying on You
AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Big brother is watching. Granted, there are multiple ways government can track us. It’s no secret. Besides a super-secret FISA court that’s granted spy warrants on innocent Americans in recent years, you might want to be careful what you search for on Google. The search engine is working secretly with the government on “keyword warrants.”  It’s essentially spying. The Feds have ordered them to track and disclose data on persons who search certain terms. The New York Post has more:

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In recent years, only two such warrants have been made public, but accidentally unsealed court documents obtained by Forbes show the government has been making these requests far more frequently. 

The unsealed warrant stemmed from a 2019 federal investigation in Wisconsin, where investigators were searching for men they believed had taken part in trafficking and sexually abusing a minor. 

In an effort to track them down, officials ordered Google to provide any information on users, including account names, IP addresses and CookieIDs, that searched the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name and her address over 16 days throughout the year. 

Google provided the data in mid-2020, Forbes reported, though the document did not say how many people had their information sent to federal investigators. 

The warrant was supposed to be secret and the Justice Department only became aware of the leak after the outlet reached out for comment. The investigation is still ongoing and the warrant has since been sealed. 

Only two keyword warrants were made public before the Wisconsin case.

One from 2017 shows a Minnesota judge signed off on an order asking Google to provide data on any user within the city of Edina who searched a fraud victim’s name. 

The second, revealed in 2020, requested information on anyone who searched for the address of an arson victim who was also a witness in the government’s racketeering case against R. Kelly. 

Forbes identified a third unreported warrant filed in the Northern District of California in December of last year. The warrant is currently under seal and has only publicly been noted in a court docket. The information requested could be extremely broad as the warrant is titled, “Application by the United States for a Search Warrant for Google Accounts Associated with Six Search Terms and Four Search Dates.”

Following the initial report, three more keyword warrants came to light that were used in the investigation into the 2018 Austin bombings. 

The warrants appear to be very broad, ordering Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search engines to provide information on users who searched various addresses and terms related to bombs, including “low explosives” and “pipe bomb.”

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BIG TECH

All roads to hell are paved with good intentions. I get how there’s going to be very little blowback concerning a sex trafficking case and R. Kelly, but you know the government is going to abuse this. It’s in its nature to overreach and trample on the rights of its citizens. It must do this. There’s no other way around it. Given how the government peddled a manufactured lie about Trump-Russia collusion for years which was aided and abetted by the establishment press, this secret keyword warrant scheme has bad news written all over. They’re testing ways to find us. They might have a system that can locate folks the government has deemed problematic for merely having a contrary opinion. Have you seen the DOJ lately? They’ve basically declared war on parents who are against Critical Race Theory and have organized protests at local school board meetings. These civic activities have been reclassified pretty much as acts of domestic terrorism by the Biden FBI. Need I say more. 

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