The murder investigation has stalled.
Police in Van Buren Township, Michigan had identified a person of interest in the 2017 murder of Egypt Covington, but as of 2020, no arrests had been made. Frustrated, her brother and his current wife began pressuring local authorities to turn the case over to state investigators.
That summer, after protests over the lack of progress and the couple’s relentless defense, Michigan State Police took over and revealed who had broken into Ms. Covington’s home, tied her up with Christmas lights, and fired a single bullet into the pillow she was pressed against. We have begun to solve the terrifying mystery of whether it was actually shot. her head.
In an exclusive interview with “Dateline,” one of the state investigators working on the case pointed to what he pointed to as an overlooked clue that could be key to solving the crime: through an investigative technique known as a geo-fence warrant. He pointed out the mobile phone location data collected.
According to Google, this surveillance tool has become so popular and has sparked so much discussion that law enforcement agencies can use location history turned on (by default, the setting is off) and within a specified time. It is now possible to collect anonymous location data of everyone in a designated area. The area can be one block or several blocks in radius. Investigators use that data to uncover and track potential suspects’ movements in and around a crime scene while a crime is in progress.
In Covington’s case, that data led investigators to three men who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to prison in October.
“This was the first piece of evidence that really broke the case,” James Plummer, one of the investigators, told “Dateline.”
But recent announcements from Google, the primary recipient of most geofencing warrants, leave the future of this tool in doubt and law enforcement agencies looking for their next data source in a post-Google world. In December, the company announced that it would introduce changes that would prevent Google from using your location data and cooperating with law enforcement throughout 2024.
“This is completely new,” said Adam Scott Want, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has trained law enforcement investigators across the country in this technique. “I can say pretty confidently that I haven’t started lecturing or offering solutions yet. But I can also say confidently that we’re all talking about where we go from here.”
Andrew Crocker, director of oversight litigation at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned that what lies ahead could resemble the Wild West.
A reliable source for locating
Wandt wasn’t sure who first asked Google for user location data, but the technology provided details similar to cell phone tower pings. The difference, he said, is that Google’s data, which users agree to provide when agreeing to the company’s terms of service, appears to be much more accurate.
This information was stored in a large internal database known as “Sensorvault” and could be searched and accessed by law enforcement agencies seeking a warrant. And the company’s products that collect such data are ubiquitous, Want said.
“Google is the only resource where you can get Google products, even if you have an iPhone,” he said.
Google said it received its first requests for geofence data in 2016, but by 2020 that number had grown to more than 11,000. Nearly 20% of his requests sent to Google between 2018 and 2020 came from agencies in California.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at American University’s Washington School of Law and author of “The Rise of Big Data,” said Google insisted that authorities obtain a warrant if they needed data, and that the company said it has developed a multi-step process for investigators to follow. Policing: Surveillance, race, and the future of law enforcement. ”
According to court records documenting the warrant process, the process begins with anonymized data and could end with the identity of the suspect.
In Covington’s case, Van Buren Police Department detectives obtained the data from a geofence warrant in 2020, but the department ignored the data because it came from a cell phone that did not belong to the person of interest. said a state investigator.
“They had it, but they were so focused on the wrong person that they never looked into it,” Plummer said.
Van Buren Police Chief Jason Wright said he did not want to comment on the findings of the investigation because state police had not told him anything about the investigation.
“They went and did their thing,” Wright said. “They’ve done a good job. I can’t comment on anything they haven’t shared with me.”
wrong place, wrong time
Because geofencing warrants require a lot of effort and analysis, they are often limited to serious crimes, Want said. He said authorities investigating the Jan. 6 riot used geofencing data, and detectives investigating the 2022 killings of four college students in Idaho used a similar technique.
Wantt said he is not aware of any studies showing how effective the tool is in solving crimes, but said it is a legal and legitimate tactic.
Ferguson described it as “a powerful technological shortcut for finding unknown people based on their location.”
However, as the tool’s popularity grew, so did its critics.
Civil liberties advocates said the warrant is a dangerous and unconstitutional dragnet that unfairly casts everyone within the fence’s boundaries as potential criminals. They point to innocent bystanders who were mistakenly pushed into that line, including a Florida man who was close to a robbery because of an exercise app and a man who was wrongly accused of murder. That includes a man from Arizona.
“Basically what this does is it’s a tool that turns everyone in the area into a suspect in a crime based on someone’s location recorded on their cell phone or other device. simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Chad Marlowe, senior policy advisor at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Marlowe added that if a potential suspect is not white, remaining under the “criminal suspicion umbrella” is especially dangerous.
A Google spokesperson said the company has been committed to protecting user privacy “while supporting the important work of law enforcement.”
“We consider each request for legal validity as case law evolves, and we do not fully approve some requests for user data for overbroad or inappropriate requests. “We regularly push back against this,” the spokesperson said.
Still, lawyers and civil rights groups challenged the approach in courts and state legislatures. Bills to ban the practice have stalled in California and New York, Marlow said, but there are other criminal cases in which geofencing data has been used to arrest suspects (one each in California and Virginia). ), an appeals court and a federal judge found this practice to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In a 2023 ruling, the California Court of Appeals ruled that the warrant obtained in the case, which sought all location data for an apartment building, three gas stations, a shopping mall, and a bank, did not meet the constitutionally required “special requirements.” lacks “sexuality” and is “unacceptably overbroad.”
It is unclear whether attorneys for the men who pleaded guilty to Covington’s murder opposed the use of geofence warrants. Lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
Google changes
In December, Google announced an overhaul of its Location History policy, which moves users’ data from Sensorvault to their phones. Under the new rules, if users want to save their location history to the cloud, “backed-up data will be automatically encrypted so no one, including Google, can read it,” the announcement said.
In the announcement, the company did not say what prompted the change, but the change is expected to be in place until 2024. A Google spokesperson said the December announcement was part of a broader effort to keep users informed, citing privacy tools such as Incognito and auto-delete. You have more control over your data.
Experts said the overhaul would effectively end Google’s ability to respond to requests for location history data. This comes as the Electronic Frontier Foundation supports legal and legal challenges to the technology, calling it “excellent” news.
Mr Ferguson said the review was good for privacy but bad for police, saying the measure would “eliminate the ability to search for unknown suspects across digital signal datasets. ” he said. “Police can corroborate charges if they have access to the device, but they cannot find the device or its owner with the same ease.”
Ferguson pointed out that many smartphone apps not owned by Google also collect user location data. But Crocker, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it’s unclear whether more popular companies like Facebook and X store that data in searchable internal databases the way Google does. (Neither Facebook’s parent company Meta nor X responded to requests for comment.)
This means law enforcement could rely on data brokers and companies that buy and sell personal information, including location information, from app companies, freedom groups and law enforcement technology experts say. Stated.
Want said he is already fielding requests from law enforcement officials to find out how this data was obtained. And some agencies are already eyeing this model.
A 2022 investigation by The Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that a company was buying location information from data brokers and selling it through subscriptions to contracted law enforcement agencies. The company tracks phones through anonymous advertising IDs that authorities can potentially use to identify people’s homes and workplaces, the Associated Press reported.
The company told The Associated Press it hoped to “fill gaps in underfunded and understaffed departments,” although it declined to say how many law enforcement agencies it is working with.
Experts warned that despite Congress’ efforts to regulate data brokers, there are no rules for this model.
“In an investigation, where law enforcement wants to see location data for a large number of users in a particular location, they can go to one of the data brokers and say, “Search our database to see all the records that we’ve purchased from various third parties.” “And then tell us who was there, and they might do it without a warrant at all,” Crocker said, referring to anonymized data. did. He said, “It seems like you’re making a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
Want said it is not illegal for the government to use such services. “But the data broker model certainly requires federal regulation.”
Ferguson said Google’s warrant request is a corporate policy, not a legal mandate, and that one of the consequences of the company’s December announcement is that “unthinking actors” can rely on law enforcement’s location data. He pointed out that it could be the source.
“There’s nothing stopping location-tracking companies from selling all our data directly to law enforcement,” he said, adding that “privacy is more dependent on companies’ technology policies than courts or Congress.” That’s sad,” he added.
explanation (March 22, 2024, 11:00 PM ET): This article explains how to turn on Google user location history, which is off by default, to make the data available to law enforcement. Updated to clarify what is required.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com
