Jennifer Lynch and Andrew Crocker:
Today, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant—a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase. In a weak and ultimately confusing opinion, the court upheld the warrant, finding the police relied on it in good faith. EFF filed two amicus briefs and was heavily involved in the case.
The case is People v. Seymour, which involved a tragic home arson that killed several people. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson.
Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case, queries by one billion Google users. Police generally have no identified suspects; instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the suspect might have searched for something in some way related to the crime.