Reverse Warrants Show Feds Sought Data On Thousands Of Police Brutality Protesters In Kenosha, Wisconsin

Is there anything law enforcement won't use geofence warrants for? The answer appears to be "no."

A recent Google transparency report shows exponential growth in the geofence (a.k.a. "reverse") warrant market, one that Google has inadvertently cornered by collecting more GPS info than any of its competitors. These aren't traditional warrants. Traditional warrants use probable cause to justify searches of places, people, and objects (like vehicles).

"Reverse" warrants are just that: a dragnet cast by cops to find a suspect in a pool of possibilities, most of whom are not criminals. Working backwards from a long list of GPS data points and cellphone information, investigators try to find the most likely suspect and then move forward again, this time using some actual probable cause. They're not always correct. And they seem largely unconcerned that demanding location data on hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people perverts the process.

A recent report by Russell Brandom for The Verge shows the trend towards bulk collection continues. And, as reported previously, it involves federal agents who want to convert state charges to federal charges (using imaginative readings of the phrase "interstate commerce" to do so) to generate as much pain as possible for people who participated in protests against police violence, whether lawfully or not.

Protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the shooting of a black man by police quickly turned violent. Not only were businesses burned and destroyed, a 17-year-old interloper named Kyle Rittenhouse convinced his mom to drive him to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Illinois. Once there, the armed Rittenhouse engaged in his vigilante fantasies, shooting three protesters, killing two of them.

The ATF was more interested in the arson, though. And it thought the best way to generate investigative leads was to gather information on thousands of protesters, almost every one of which did not start any fires.

A series of six newly unsealed warrants (1 2 3 4 5 6), some previously reported by Forbes, show a persistent effort to use Google’s location services to identify Android users in the vicinity of arson incidents.

Issued in quick succession on September 3rd, the warrants came from a team of 50 arson investigators from the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, deployed to Kenosha to prosecute property damage cases connected to the protests. Using the warrants, The agents targeted seven different geographical zones, asking to identify anyone located within that area during a span that could stretch as long as two hours. The result was a kind of location dragnet, spread over some of the busiest times and locations in the first days of the protest.

The government wants haystacks. It firmly believes it can find needles. And it thinks it can do that often enough and with enough certainty no innocent hay will be treated like a criminal needle. That's insanely arrogant. The more data points you have, the more chances you have of picking the wrong one.

But maybe it really doesn't matter in these cases. After all, the DOJ and