Colorado Court Punts On Reverse Keyword Search Warrants

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Colorado's Supreme Court this week had the opportunity to hand down a historic judgment on the constitutionality of reverse keyword search warrants," a powerful new surveillance technique that grants law enforcement the ability to identify potential criminal suspects based on broad, far-reaching internet search results. Police say the creative warrants have helped them crack otherwise cold cases. Critics, which include more than a dozen rights organizations and major tech companies, argue the tool's immense scope tramples on innocent users' privacy and runs afoul of Fourth Amendment Protections against unreasonable searches by the government.

With eager eyes watching them, Colorado's court ultimately opted to kick the can down the road.

Civil liberties and digital rights experts speaking with Gizmodo described the court's confusing" decision to punt on the constitutionality of reverse keyword search this week as a major missed opportunity and one that could inevitably lead to more cops pursuing the controversial tactics, both in Colorado and beyond. Critics fear these broad warrants, which compel Google and other tech companies to sift through its vast cornucopia of search data to sniff out users who've searched for specific keywords, could be weaponized against abortion seekers, political protestors, or even everyday internet users who inadvertently type a result that could someday be used against them in court.

These are situations where private industry has amalgamated these unbelievably huge databases of an uncountable number of people and the government, without a suspect, is able to go through everybody's information to try to pluck targets out," ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel Jennifer Granick told Gizmodo.

In a 74-page, 5-2 opinion released Monday, Colorado's Supreme Court said Denver police officers were justified and acted in good faith" when they served Google with a reverse keyword search warrant back in 2021 as part of an investigation into a deadly arson that claimed the lives of five Senegalese immigrants. The ruling came in response to a motion to suppress evidence from one of the suspects in the case, who argued the sweeping nature of the keyword search violated his Fourth Amendment protections.

At every step, law enforcement acted reasonably to carry out a novel search in a constitutional manner," the court wrote in its majority opinion. Suppressing the evidence here wouldn't deter police misconduct."

The court validated the police conduct but punted entirely on the constitutionality of the reverse keyword searches in question. Though police have increasingly deployed the technique and other tactics like it in recent years, courts still haven't settled on its actual legality. Despite pressure from the legal community to weigh in, the court threw up its hands and said it neither condoned nor condemned the practice. Future abuses of the warrant that may occur, they said, were a topic for another day.

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