Yesterday at 1430 Hours, officers responded to the area of Voss and Beinhorn after being alerted of an ALPR hit on a vehicle stolen during an armed robbery. Officers located the stolen vehicle traveling southbound on Voss at Memorial and initiated a traffic stop taking 2 suspects into custody. The vehicle was confirmed stolen out of Houston. HPD was contacted and responded to take over the investigation of the robbery suspects. Officers also recovered the gun used in the Robbery.

Hey, it’s Ryan on the Bloomberg Tech cybersecurity team. With coronavirus dominating the news recently, a lot of other interesting developments have slipped under the radar. One of them was buried in 1,700 pages of court documents, released late last month by the U.S. Justice Department, which revealed a little-known FBI data-grabbing tactic that has alarmed civil liberties advocates.

The trove of documents was from the FBI’s investigation of Roger Stone, the veteran Republican operative and one-time adviser to President Donald Trump. During former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Stone was in the bureau’s crosshairs. Last year he was convicted on seven felony charges, including lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering.

In its investigation of Stone, the bureau’s special agents used many of the normal methods you would expect in a serious criminal case: They obtained search warrants to raid Stone’s home in South Florida, and they interviewed people close to him. They also obtained copies of his emails, Twitter messages and iCloud data.

But one thing the FBI did was unusual. According to an affidavit from Special Agent Andrew Mitchell, the bureau asked Google to turn over records on anyone who had searched for particular terms associated with the Russian hackers—"dcleaks," "guccifer" and ''guccifer june.” The records allowed investigators to determine that Stone, from a computer in Florida, appeared to have searched for some of these phrases prior to the publication of the leaked emails from Guccifer and DCLeaks, indicating he had prior knowledge of their disclosure.

Patrick Toomey, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has never seen the FBI publicly admit to using this method before. For him, the disclosure raised some important questions: Is the FBI now routinely identifying criminal suspects on the basis of search terms they have entered into Google? And is that constitutional under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures?

The tactic raises “serious constitutional concerns,” Toomey said, because its use amounts to “digital fishing expeditions, potentially sweeping up the private Google searches of many innocent people and subjecting them to FBI scrutiny.” Warrants to obtain private data are supposed to be narrowly drawn and based on probable cause, he said, “but it's unclear from the public record how the FBI met either of those requirements here."

The FBI declined to comment, and Google wouldn’t provide any information on the number of times it has received similar requests to turn over search records. A company spokesperson said that Google “requires federal warrants to be signed by a judge, and we push back regularly on overly broad demands.”

The controversial nature of the tactic may be one reason why the FBI hasn't trumpeted it. But the practice does not appear to be restricted to federal agencies. In 2017, police in Edina, a town outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, obtained a court order requiring Google to hand over information on people who searched for the name of a particular financial fraud victim. On that occasion, the search giant said that it fought against the request and “significantly narrowed its scope.” It’s unclear if Google managed to do the same in the Stone investigation, or in other investigations like it.

Catherine Crump, assistant clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that obtaining records showing searches for particular words or phrases could be an ingenious way to identify people who have special, insider knowledge. When it involves a “very unique search,” judges may be inclined to sign off on warrants to give law enforcement agencies the data, she added. “In general, though, government requests for data designed to reveal people who searched for certain terms is alarming,” Crump said. “People type things into Google that they wouldn’t tell their doctors and spouses." — Ryan Gallagher

This week we had some great police work that resulted in the apprehension and identification of some area auto thieves. As you may recall, recently I have been talking about the thefts of some high-end SUV vehicles from the area. We had identified a vehicle of interest that was a White pick-up truck with dual rear wheels. Area residents had provided us with some video surveillance footage of vehicles that matched the same description that had been in the area at the time of some the thefts. Some of these videos were of a very good quality and provided unique vehicle characteristics. On Tuesday night, one of our evening officers noticed a vehicle matching this description driving in XXX near midnight and initiated a traffic stop. The officer had a suspicion that something just was not right with the subjects inside of the truck and called Commander YYY who was home asleep.

By chance after reading last week’s V-LINC another resident had sent some photos of our suspect vehicle that he had seen posted on another neighborhood social media web site. The commander had seen these pictures and knew even more about our suspect vehicle due to reviewing those photos Saturday morning. The commander was able to determine upon talking with the unit at the scene of the traffic stop, that this was indeed our suspect vehicle due to some very unique and specific characteristics. This was enough to effect an arrest. A search of the suspect vehicle subsequent to the arrest, located multiple sets of master key fobs and several vehicle “brain blockers” that are plugged into stolen vehicles to block GPS and other vehicle anti-theft software and technologies from working.

A call to HPD auto theft detectives also excited them as they too have been looking for this crew of thieves. The crew of 4 will be facing a litany of charges as several area agencies are putting together charges for this active group of criminals and their criminal enterprise. Great work by our officers by staying observant, by our residents for being engaged and for sharing their videos and photos, specifically by one resident for sharing information and pictures from another social media web site

While it was no secret that cameras were documenting the attack, another type of technology was also keeping a close watch — and making a detailed record — of the people who walked from the National Mall, where the president gave his speech, to the halls of the Capitol building. This location data, consisting of millions of pings — a record of the location of a given smartphone at a given time — was being dutifully collected by companies that specialize in such things.

The data is supposed to be anonymous. But, as past reporting from Times Opinion has demonstrated, it’s ludicrous to describe it this way. The movement history of each smartphone is as unique as a fingerprint. In the case of the riot, the smartphones they carried could be traced from the Capitol back to the owner’s home in many instances. That’s why it was so easy for my colleagues Charlie Warzel and Stuart Thompson to match smartphones with their owners, after a source shared a leaked data set containing millions of pings from Jan. 6.

The availability of this data raises its own set of questions. The source was outraged by the attack on the Capitol but also outraged that the tracking technology is now as pervasive as it is unregulated. What today could be used to identify insurrectionists could just as easily be turned against peaceful demonstrators and other innocent Americans.