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Reverse Search Warrants: Locating Google’s Sensorvault Subjects via the Technological Illiberal Practice of Surveillance Capitalism

By Renée Ridgway


Abstract

This article sheds light on the technological illiberal practice of ‘geofence warrants,’ where law enforcement can request locative data from mobile phones that is stored in Google’s Sensorvault database, without a warrant specifying the user. Reversing the data-gathering process, ‘1n(tr0)verted data’ collects data on those collecting data on us(ers), combining document and critical discourse analysis with investigative journalism reports in the media, legal rulings and the governmental practice of purchasing data through legislation ‘loopholes.’ The article builds upon Haggarty and Ericson’s ‘surveillant assemblage’ to show how an (innocent) citizen accused of murder was algorithmically constructed as a ‘Sensorvault subject’ or ‘data double.’ Made possible due to Google’s bulk collection of user data, illiberal data dealings, geofence warrants as well as limited juridical oversight, the article advances Laurelle’s and Dall’Agnola’s ‘technological illiberalism,’ Feldstein’s ‘surveillance strategies’ and Kauth and Kings’ ‘disruptive illiberalism.’ By demonstrating how geofence warrants are predicated on a confluence of methods between law enforcement’s dragnet policing practice and Google’s surveillance capitalism, the article contributes to the surveillance studies literature (Murakami Wood, Lyon and Zuboff). Furthermore, the article highlights some consequences of geofence warrants when Big Brother meets Big Other: massive surveillance during public protests and the resulting ‘chilling effects’, along with legislative and corporate (Google) developments regarding data collation and recent geofence warrant rulings.

Renée Ridgway, “Reverse Search Warrants: Locating Google’s Sensorvault Subjects via the Technological Illiberal Practice of Surveillance Capitalism,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 2024): 115-138, https://doi.org/10.53483/XCQY3583.

Keywords: geofence warrants, locative data, Sensorvault, surveillant assemblage, Google


“Surveillance capitalism was born digital.”[1]

In the 21st century, user data has become the world’s most valuable resource, as a so-called raw material exploited for “data colonialism”—the appropriation of human life for profit[2]—and as a commodity that is sold, traded and reused, facilitating new breaches in user privacy as a form of totalitarian surveillance. Over the past decades, the “googlization of everything”[3] has incorporated “Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, along with Drive and Assistant”[4] and been updated to include data from AI applications and former X products. This “logic of accumulation” of data that users contribute to Google’s servers encompasses the “retention of those data, how those data are instrumentalized and monetized” and is an “asymmetrical power relationship,” where the user is kept in the dark about Google’s “extraction practices.”[5] With “ubiquitous googling” as a “habit of automaticity,”[6] there is no escape from what Shoshana Zuboff deems the “automated ubiquitous architecture of Big Other.”[7] Nowadays, services such as Google Maps, on both Android and Apple mobile phones, have added a whole new layer—“embodied data.”[8]

Since around 2009, all “locative data,” including “detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide,” is collated and stored in Sensorvault, part of the larger Google server complex.[9] This massive proprietary database “maps” users’ habits and actions for private use, even while it relies on public infrastructure such as cell towers and GPS satellites. In exchange for access and convenience, users’ data is collected, coordinated and analyzed[10] on everyone possessing a mobile device in the vicinity of a crime, which Google, as well as law enforcement, can access. During the past nine years, there has been an explosion of criminal investigations where US law enforcement has requested that Google release Sensorvault data through so-called “geofence warrants,” also known as “reverse search warrants.” In 2023, globally there were 211,201 requests for user information across more than 450,000 Google accounts,[11] while in the US geofence warrants “make up more than 25% of all data requests the company receives from law enforcement.”[12] 

These interactions raise many questions: Which actors and entities are involved? How is data shared with partners and sold to law enforcement? What are the consequences of this private/public commingling? This article sheds light on the practice of geofence warrants by reversing the data-gathering process—collecting data on those collecting data on us(ers). 1n(tr0)verted Data is a method that combines investigative journalism in the media, legal rulings, data brokerage, US governmental committee letters to Google and recent developments regarding the practice of purchasing data through “loopholes” in legislation. In the following, I first return to the roots of illiberalism and the transformation of private and public life due to US technology corporations’ control of social media and internet technologies.[13] Next, I apply Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s “surveillant assemblage” from 2000,[14] which builds upon Giles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s rhizome theory to capture the multiplicity of actors engaged in flows of phenomena in a nonlinear networked structure.[15] Focusing on the case of a US citizen in Arizona, I then demonstrate how Google’s (and law enforcement’s) generation of a “Sensorvault subject,” or what Poster termed “data double” of pure virtuality,[16] led to him being wrongly accused of murder.

By way of “surveillant illiberalism,” where locative, embodied data from mobile phones and geofencing facilitates subjectivity algorithmically, this article updates Haggarty and Ericson’s “surveillant assemblage” and how it is now global, distributed and networked.[17] It builds upon methods of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the conspiring between governmental and private (corporate) actors with the method “1n(tr0)verted data.” Made possible due to Google’s bulk collection of user data, illiberal data dealings, geofence warrants and limited juridical oversight, the article advances Marlene Laurelle’s and Jasmin Dall’Agnola’s “technological illiberalism,” Steven Feldstein’s “surveillance strategies” and Jasper Theodor Kauth and Desmond Kings’ “disruptive illiberalism.” By demonstrating how geofence warrants are predicated on a confluence of methods between law enforcement’s dragnet policing practice and Google’s surveillance capitalism, the article contributes to the surveillance studies literature (David Murakami Wood, David Lyon and Shoshana Zuboff). Furthermore, it highlights some consequences of geofence warrants when Big Brother meets Big Other: massive surveillance during public protests and the resulting “chilling effects,” along with legislative and corporate (Google) developments regarding data collation and recent geofence warrant rulings.[18]  

Surveillant Illiberalism

Political scientist Marlene Laruelle characterizes illiberalism as an emerging concept that is “highly polysemic and multicontextual,” proposing three ways it should be considered: First, it is a “(thin) ideology” and not a regime type; second, it is in “permanent situational relation to liberalism”; and third, “illiberalism offers insights that competing notions—such as conservatism, far right, and populism—do not.”[19] Furthermore, in her article, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” Laruelle puts forth a “second script,” which she categorizes as “economic liberalism” that embodies values such as “privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, and austerity measures to reduce state intervention in the economy.”[20] This promotion of the market economy and private property at all costs has enabled the rise of illiberalism and counts as “part a backlash against the neoliberal reforms that have transformed so many countries worldwide.”[21] Laurelle addresses geopolitical liberalism by way of the dominance of North American power as a so-called “new world order,” pointing out that there is not a binary opposition between liberalism and illiberalism because they are “intertwined and there are illiberal trends inside liberalism itself.”[22]

This new world order today includes Silicon Valley tech billionaires and their companies, which affect citizens around the world who use their technologies and which ostensibly have neither geographical boundaries nor jurisdictions. Moreover, citing Cas Mudde (2016), Laruelle cogently points out that illiberal practices and ideas gain momentum and power not only through populist and far-right movements but also by state (infra)structures.[23] One focus is the “war on terror” narrative facilitated by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11 to enact the Patriot Act, which “allowed for extensive infringements of privacy in the name of security.”[24] In addition, in the 1990s before the dotcom bubble burst, personal computers and access to the internet induced a “broader and more structural transformation of the relationship between private and public life as a result of IT and social media.”[25]

Although illiberalism encompasses both practices and ideology, Kauth and King introduce “disruptive illiberalism,” which is oppositional to procedural democratic norms, including the juridical and law-making bodies of governments.[26] They argue that “media reportage did not create illiberal ideology or anti-democratic ambitions” and therefore question whether maximizing user engagement “(that some allege includes a willingness to accept uploads of fake or hate based news stories) fundamentally conflicts with liberal procedures.”[27] However, what is missing from the discourse is the exponential growth of technological surveillance conducted by companies and governments together. This takes disruptive illiberalism and Laruelle’s illiberal practices a step further by advancing the lack of judiciary oversight and the free reign of tech companies, driven by revenue and profit at the expense of liberal democracy.

In his chapter “Surveillance in the Illiberal State,” Feldstein identifies four “surveillance strategies” that are employed by governmental entities: “surveillance laws and directives; passive surveillance; targeted surveillance; and artificial intelligence (AI) and big data approaches.”[28] The first of these, “surveillance laws and directives,” connects to Kauth and King above, where diverse legislation enables governmental authorities to carry out “blanket” metadata collection and interception of citizens’ communication with mobile devices.[29] Important to note is that these surveillance laws are justified in the name of security. By “mandating that cloud servers or social media platforms store data locally (thus expediting law enforcement requests)”—through legal means— law enforcement agencies worldwide are able to access this information, often without a search warrant.[30] This demonstrates that “both democracies and authoritarian states have widely adopted mass surveillance strategies to respond to current threats and to deter future attacks.”[31]

Since the inception of the “war on terror” and its implications following 9/11, the Snowden revelations have shown the increase of surveillance on citizens, ranging from the US Patriot Act and EU directives on intelligence sharing to the instantiation of organizations such as Five Eyes for spying operations. These types of collaborations reflect relationships between state security and industry surveillance practices in the private sector that incorporate software “backdoors” and “revolving doors.”[32] Although Snowden’s revelations have opened users’ eyes to Five Eyes and state surveillance of citizens, Google’s proprietary IP black box remains closed, and the massive collection of (meta)data is constant and undertaken without specific permission, subsequently shared by corporations with governments worldwide.[33] With these in place, Feldstein’s second strategy addresses the 24/7 passive

surveillance instruments that collect, monitor, and intercept data that has been relayed or generated over communications networks to recipients by external parties. Representative technologies include internet monitoring, mobile phone tapping, location monitoring services, and network interception.[34]

Incorporating the above four representative technologies in Feldstein’s second strategy, it is the illiberal comingling of corporate and governmental actors that is part and parcel of a larger “surveillant assemblage,” which is inherent to the “expansion of surveillance in relation to societal organizations and capitalist accumulation.”[35] 

A Global Surveillant Assemblage

Around a century ago, Walter Benjamin’s flâneur[36] was able to walk the streets of a city unnoticed as a form of “urban detective work,” possessing a “sovereignty based in anonymity and observation.”[37] Benjamin pointed out how technologies developed by society such as photography aided in “undermin[ing] the anonymity which was central to the flâneur by giving each face a single name and hence a single meaning.”[38] Whereas he noted the individual perspective on signifiers of the city, in the 20th century it was the population that was “transformed into signifiers for a multitude of organized surveillance systems.”[39] As Orwell’s 1984 elucidated, not all citizens were intensely monitored, only the middle and upper classes, while the “proles” were left to their own devices.[40] Today, however, users from all classes allow themselves to be tracked through their devices, such as computers, laptops, tablets and especially smartphones. Unfortunately, Orwell’s prediction was proven wrong.

Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory to capture the multiplicity of actors engaged in flows of phenomena in a nonlinear networked structure, in 2000 Haggerty and Ericson put forth the “surveillant assemblage.” Surveillance is about power and encompasses the means and methods of “monitoring for purposes of intervening in the world.”[41]Assemblages containa “multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items function together, that they ‘work’ together as a functional entity.”[42] The surveillant assemblage then constitutes flows of phenomena that could include but are not limited to “people, signs, chemicals, knowledge and institutions.”[43] Therefore, a “surveillant assemblage” is without fixed boundaries or “responsible governmental departments”; rather, it exists as a “potentiality, one that resides at the intersections of various media that can be connected for diverse purposes.”[44] The systems of surveillance merge into unified frameworks, which combine a range of practices, institutions, technologies and, to use Actor-Network Theory terminology, “actors”that are integrated in a larger whole and operate “across both state and extra-state institutions.”[45]

Moreover, the surveillant assemblage combines “multiple connections across myriad technologies” and practices that cannot be “dismantled by prohibiting a particularly unpalatable technology.”[46]Haggerty and Ericson cite instances of technological implementations at the turn of the 21st century, like electric monitoring of offenders, or how heterogenous components were used by regional police in Central Scotland:

Phone conversations, reports, tip-offs, hunches, consumer and social security databases, crime data, phone bugging, audio, video and pictures, and data communications are inputted into a seamless GIS [geographic information system], allowing a relational simulation of the time-space choreography of the area to be used in investigation and monitoring by the whole force.[47]

These observations are written before the birth of the smartphone and refer to technology such as telephone and utility company files that mapped a person’s “lifestyle and physical location,” even “computerized data matching,” which the police had at their disposal, and the commercial databases of the FBI.[48]

A surveillant assemblage then facilitates the merger of manifold sources of data from institutions, private actors (such as companies) and law enforcement—even marketing firms. Back then, consumer profiling was already prominent, with data points consisting of a “person’s habits, preferences, and lifestyle from the trails of information” collected as “the detritus of contemporary life.”[49] However, it is the surveillant assemblage that generates an interface of “technology and corporeality,” where the human body and its movements through physical space can be monitored and recorded, “between life forms and webs of information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems (e.g., keyboards, screens).”[50] Notably, over the past decades, police organizations worldwide have discovered even more “potentially useful sources” and have “recognized the surveillance and investigative potential of corporate databases.”[51]

Nowadays, these practices of law enforcement comingle with capitalist society (Big Tech in particular) and further advance the surveillant assemblage to incorporate a new logic of accumulation of user data that is “deeply intentional and highly consequential” for surveillance capitalism.[52] As viewed by Murakami Wood, this confluence of the free market and surveillance in a society of control is a “global surveillant assemblage,” which is “distributed and carried out by public agencies,” yet it is also “networked,” going beyond public bodies and private companies of the economic exchange to encompass “formal and informal settings.”[53] This also applies to the illiberal practice of geofencing and its consequences.The next sections first describe the methods used before elucidating the diverse actors involved in a geofenced surveillant assemblage.  

1n(tr0)verted Data

Traditionally the collation and publication of sensitive information was carried out by investigative journalists, paid by their respective media outlets as salaried employees. However, with the onslaught of internet connectivity, platformed labor and the dissemination of information through search engines and social media, OSINT has enabled troves of reportages, documents and records online to be made public. This type of digital infrastructure has democratized access to information,[54] including government databases, satellite imagery and archives. In an era of digital privacy erosion and surveillance, not only do investigative and OSINT journalists make use of open data, but whistleblowing has been crucial to getting “secret” documents released, along with addressing leaks, legislation and freedom of speech issues.[55] Snowden’s revelations exposed how mass surveillance is conducted by (illiberal) democracies and authoritarian states,[56] and his disclosure of the infamous “Treasure Map” regarding the collaboration between governmental agencies (Five Eyes) demonstrated how they obtain user data from Big Tech (see Figure 1).[57]

Increasingly, individuals and civic organizations are playing the role of “watchdog,” often in regard to governmental policing and as a pushback to its surveillance of social movements.[58] The term “sousveillance” reverses the hierarchy of those looking down from above; instead, it is those acting from below, on the ground, such as “citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers, and taxicab passengers photographing cab drivers.”[59] Additionally, there are strategies of “countersurveillance,” where citizens employ the same tactics as the state authorities to “watch back.”[60] Since the advent of the smartphone in 2008, devices with high-speed connections are in citizens’ hands, and apps enable the sharing of content and data “in an open and accessible manner with the rest of the world.”[61] This resonates with the concept of “watching the watchers,” where citizens engage in protest movements and citizen investigations take place.[62]

Ridgway Figure 1

Figure 1: Treasure Map (Picture leaked by
whistleblower Edward Snowden and brought to public domain by DER SPIEGEL 2014)

Reverse Search Warrants’ Surveillant Assemblage

In the same spirit, I employ the method “1n(tr0)verted data,” which cognately collects data on those collecting data on us(ers). It makes use of some of the above methods, combined with document and critical discourse analysis to detail the actors that comprise a “surveillant assemblage for geofencing” in the era of surveillance capitalism.

Google Maps, Smartphones, Googles Ads/SDKs

In 2005, Google launched its Maps website, free to use and accessible to anyone with a mobile phone or a Web browser.[63] At that time, it was aggregating “basemaps from a multiplicity of public and private sources (e.g., TIGER data from the US Census Bureau and mapping companies such as Teleatlas and Navteq),” and in 2007, Street View began collecting data in the US with cars before expanding worldwide.[64] In 2008, Google began to employ image-processing algorithms that were able to read street and traffic signs from Street View, which “claims every place as just another object among objects in an infinite grid of GPS coordinates and camera angles.”[65] Maps from authoritative public sources were also added, and Google updated its Maps databases and MapMaker, which encouraged users to update the maps themselves.[66] The launch of reCAPTCHA in 2009 facilitated “optical character recognition” by crowdsourcing users to transcribe and interact with images for verification. In 2013, Google acquired Waze, “a participatory GPS service accessing and displaying real-time information from users about traffic,” followed in 2014 by Skybox Imaging, which gave it control of “Earth observation satellite imagery.”[67]

In 2007, another actor appeared on the scene: the smartphone that has since become ubiquitous in society, like computing[68] and googling.[69] Currently, there are more than six billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, of which 97% are for some kind of cell phone and 85% could be considered “smart.”[70] The usage of smartphones varies, with the traditional communication function (telephony) still present and text messaging on the rise. However, what makes the smartphone unique is location data. In contrast to text messaging and telephone calls, where participation is “voluntary,” location tracking makes possible “information flows passively and continuously.”[71] Yet the smartphone is also a technological artifact where the “closed environment of the mobile is a feature not a bug: everything is embedded, allowing any given app to cultivate a much more intimate relationship with end users.”[72] Google Maps became the go-to app for walking, driving and biking to help the user to “find her way,” as the smartphone enables connectivity to public infrastructures.

By incorporating technologies like GPS, local Wi-Fi and cell tower networks, Bluetooth, in-built accelerometers, and gyroscopes, smartphones allow for precise pinpointing of where a device (and therefore usually its owner) is in geographical space.[73]

With iPhones that have Google apps installed, such as Maps, and “location history” turned on, the amount of data collected by Google multiplies exponentially. In regard to surveillance, “location tracking” captures the flows of data between individuals, third-party applications and the data brokerage industry that deals in location data. Along with the traditional Google Ads served to users as they walk down the street based on their locative data with Google Maps activated, not so long after the introduction of the iPhone, the software development kit (SDK) became a “crucial agent of datafication.”[74]

This software kit was comprised of actors and connected apps in a distributed way, consisting of third parties and platforms, which, unlike cookies, was not about remembering.[75] Although first designed for interoperability on the Web, there was pushback from developers who wanted the apps to be on users’ phones. Then, in March 2008, Apple launched the SDK in its App Store, which in turn produced a rush of 500 apps from third-party developers—now, there are more than 1.6 million (2022); Android followed suit and opened later that same year its own Google Play store, with around 3.5 million apps.[76]Google’s SDKs are found in more than 93% of mobile apps (2023) and are revelatory about the “expansionary logic of data-powered capitalism in mobile applications,” as they generate new pipelines for third parties and platforms to gather personal data.[77] To understand why Pybus and Coté deem Google a “Super SDK,” consider that the definition focuses not only on its ecosystem, infrastructure and interoperability; Google is a Super SDK because it functions as a “primary hub, conscribing connectivity” between its vast collection of user data from its own services, and augmented by intimate mobile data, it also generates value “by offering the monetization services on which developers have become dependent.”[78] More succinctly, SDKs have become a major player in the “profitable revenue stream for geolocation technology companies” by facilitating the sale of user data. [79]

Law Enforcement, Google’s Sensorvault Database, Supreme Court Rulings

Via cellular data or a Wi-Fi connection, mobile phones are constantly “pinging” and transmitting data to telephone companies when they come into the vicinity of a new cell tower, which in turn provides an approximation of a device’s location. However, geofence virtual parameters are determined by IP addresses and coordinates from the Global Positioning System (GPS), which is a satellite-based radio navigation system owned by the US government and operated by the US Space Force. From 2007, with the introduction of smart phones running Android, Google’s operating system, tracking location is already built in.

Location data are far more sensitive than cell tower data; Google can pinpoint locations within 20 meters and sometimes even square feet, while cell towers can only specify within a few thousand meters.[80]

Even if a user has turned off location services, does not use an app or insert a SIM card, Android phones collect “location information by triangulating the nearest cell towers.”[81]

With the increased ability to capture user geolocative data, in 2015 law enforcement started applying geofence warrants (“reverse search warrants”) as an investigative tool for criminal activities (see Figure 2).[82] Authorities can request access to the digital trails and data patterns from individuals in a certain space, within the boundaries of an enclosure, or “geofenced area”—typically the 100-200 meters around a crime scene—and within a certain time frame.

Ridgway Figure 2

Figure 2: Example of a geofenced area. Kenosha case (2020)

“Geofencing” is effectively a tower dump that requires no cell tower; that is, a geofence provides a record of every device confined within a specific date/time range and location (DTL). In this process, law enforcement provides the DTL to Google, who subsequently identifies devices that were present in the DTL.[83]

In a legal document titled “In the Matter of the Search of: Information Stored at Premises Controlled by Google,” Magistrate Judge Gabriel A. Fuentes states that “there is an evolution of the search protocol,”[84] which also has a variety of applications for surveillance. The three-step protocol begins with a geofence warrant request for the premises, in this case a geographical area.

Google responds to a single warrant with “GPS coordinates, the time stamps of when they were in the area, and an anonymized identifier, known as a reverse location obfuscation identifier, or RLOI” (Fussell 2021). Police then comb through the data, searching for devices that appear relevant to the crime, and can compel Google to “provide additional contextual location coordinates beyond the time and geographic scope of the original request.”[85] Only when “devices of interest such as a known suspect’s phone” surface does Google provide more intimate details on a few suspects such as “name, email address, when they signed up to Google services and which ones they used.”[86]

Ridgway Figure 3

Figure 3: Syllabus Carpenter v. United States (2018)

However, it is not the physical location that is searched but Google LLC’s Sensorvault, a massive Google database containing users’ geolocation data history collated from Android smartphones and iPhones using Google Apps. As with many other Google properties, very little is known about how the data Sensorvault is organized. Nonetheless, since March 2018, the “new policing system” described above has facilitated law enforcement access to Google’s Sensorvault data regarding people who were in the neighborhood (geofenced area) and provided “location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.”[87] Google (and other private companies) “act like agents” of the government in that they are legally obliged to respond to law enforcement that cannot obtain the data unless Google searches its entire Sensorvault database,[88] which ostensibly contains “400 million Americans who contributed location data.”[89] Moreover, it also contains locative data from other citizens from many countries that can be requested from law enforcement agencies worldwide. In other words, Sensorvault stores “information on anyone who has opted in.”[90] Although most requests are honored within 48 hours, sometimes there is latency, as it might take up to six months for Google to respond, “due to its size.”[91] In addition, judges can order that the requests are “sealed”—thereby not informing affected users, shrouding documents in secrecy for longer periods of time.

Another juridical actor is that of past Supreme Court rulings, such as the now-landmark 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, which reasoned that cell site location information (CSLI) is private and applied only to one person’s device, yet justices left open “the question of police access to location data for every phone in the area during a certain period” (see Figure 3).[92] Also applied to rulings on geofence warrants was another precedent, Ybarra v. Illinois from 1979, which held that instead of “unlimited discretion,” not everyone who was in the bar in question could be included in the search warrant for the bar and bartender (see Figure 4). Furthermore, Judge Fuentes cites another case, Riley v. US (2014), which states that the

Supreme Court recognized that as the use of mobile electronic devices becomes more and more ubiquitous, the privacy interests of the general public using these devices, including the privacy interest in a person’s physical location at a particular point in time, warrants protection (see Figure 5).[93]

Ridgway Figure 4

Figure 4: Ybarra v. Illinois (1979)

Fuentes adds that the court does not “intend to suggest that geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional,” yet it should not permit intrusion because “[n]owhere in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has the end been held to justify unconstitutional means.”[94] Although Carpenter v. United States “found that advancements in wireless technology had effectively outpaced people’s ability to reasonably appreciate the extent to which their private lives are exposed,”[95] reverse search warrants for criminal investigations by law enforcement worldwide have increasingly compelled Google to release Sensorvault data.

Ridgway Figure 5

Figure 5: Syllabus Riley v. United States (2014)

Data Subjects, Sensorvault Subjects

One specific case involving reverse search warrants occurred in Arizona. In December 2018, Phoenix authorities investigated the murder of a warehouse worker, Joseph Knight, and suspected Jorge Molina, judging by a surveillance video of his car following the victim. Moreover, his “Google history showed a search about local shootings the day after the attack.”[96] Months later, with Sensorvault data in hand, officers arrested Molina at his place of work. With the help of a geofence warrant, Sensorvault data from four devices, including a mobile phone, linked Molina’s Gmail account to the scene of the crime and to a cell tower in the area. Once arrested, Molina informed law enforcement that his mother’s ex-boyfriend, Marcos Cruz Gaeta, often borrowed his car without permission, along with Molina’s old mobile phones, and therefore could have been logged into his email and social media accounts.

Although Molina is a data subject, a corporal or human subject, Google’s tracking and services generate profiles, thereby reconfiguring and debordering sovereign spaces algorithmically. Emanating from not only coordinates (GPS) of (digital) “locative media,”[97] these user profiles created from data are in constant flux, shifting temporalities and degrees of correlation that define the unseen organized life. Derived from geolocation data, IP address and other identifying factors (signed-into Google accounts), it is the real-time collation of this data by Google services that generates “Sensorvault Subjects.” These subjectivities are produced and distributed through software that “takes the digital subject apart” while also “bringing it back together, linking it to one unit, or, in other words, the beginning point is ‘me’ [Gaeta] at the generation of data and the end point is an aggregation [Molina].”[98] According to the called-up data from Sensorvault, at a certain moment Molina was located by one device as Gaeta, while simultaneously physically present in another place.

It turned out that one could use another individual’s phone number to log into their app; on that fateful day, Molina did that with Gaeta’s app, making the Sensorvault record Molina’s cell location at the shooting scene when he was not there.[99]

It is the global surveillant assemblage that facilitates the standardization of capturing information flows of the human body, which does not “approach the body in the first instance as a single entity to be molded, punished, or controlled”; rather, it breaks down the body into “discrete signifying flows.”[100] These breaks or gaps originate from an engendered “space of comparison,” able to convert the body “into pure information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable.”[101] What Haggerty and Ericson depict is the becoming of a new form of body that goes beyond “human corporeality and reduces flesh to pure information,” which in turn can then be marked and calculated as a resource that circulates, “often unknown to its referent.”[102] Culled from the tentacles of the surveillant assemblage, this novel body is therefore a “data double,” one that involves “the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self.”[103] However, these “data doubles” are often erroneous descriptions that eclipse a “purely representational idiom,” as they are “increasingly the objects toward which governmental and marketing practices are directed.”[104]

Illiberal Data Dealings

The global surveillant assemblage that encompasses reverse search warrants raises questions about governmental practices of surveillance, in particular, how they relate to Fourth Amendment demands—“probable cause” for a warrant, which must detail the place that is to be searched. Previously, these were defined physical “jurisdictions” on US soil. New technologies introduce new concerns, yet unlike obtaining search warrants for wiretapping based on “probable cause,” as seen in the past decades, “reverse location warrants” are (still) without detailed oversight.

While geofencing is an impeccable tool to law enforcement, it presents concerns about violating a user’s protection under the Fourth Amendment. Geofence warrants have survived constitutional muster, but Courts routinely avoid ruling on the application of the third-party doctrine to limited amounts of digital data.[105]

Additionally, there is “no substantial litigation over their constitutionality or use,” because the law on which geofence warrants is based, the 1986 Stored Communication Act, has of yet to be properly updated. Instead, Google and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the (DOJ) “quietly came up with their own framework.”[106]

These “loopholes” have privacy implications for users. Algorithmic or computational agency subverts human agency—producing knowledge about an individual without their knowledge—contingent on whether they granted access to their data.[107] With reverse search warrants, people are targeted, and these “have been challenged as they infringe upon civil rights protections and breach the Fourth Amendment.”[108] Returning to data subject Jorge Molina, who was signed into his Google accounts and even logged into an app with someone else’s phone number (Gaeta), it was his “data double” or “Sensorvault subject” at the scene of the crime. Eventually, Marcos Cruz Gaeta was charged with the murder of Joseph Knight, yet during the process Molina lost his car, which was impounded, his job at the Macy’s warehouse and his public image. Molina’s arrest was highly publicized, and afterward he could not find employment because of his damaged reputation—any Google search would show that he had previously been accused of murder. Outdated legislation had enabled law enforcement to obtain Sensorvault data within the geofence area but without individual warrants for each user.

In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the US Supreme Court found that traditional Fourth Amendment protections do not apply to telephone routing information (like telephone numbers) because a caller lacks a reasonable “expectation of privacy” in those numbers and because this information does not constitute content.[109] People willingly hand over their telephone numbers to a telephone company—the information is voluntarily given to a “third party”—therefore there is no legitimate expectation of privacy.[110] This can then be applied to users willingly using Google Maps or Android phones. As relayed above, law enforcement needs to have the specific names of suspects, along with other identifying evidence, to be granted a warrant for CSLI. In this way, CSLI merely corroborates this evidence. The landmark ruling Carpenter v. United States “requires specificity in a warrant request for cell site location information because the recorded logs of this information are inescapable; it is a business record.”[111] However, the data captured by Google is not viewed legally as inescapable; instead, it is viewed as an opt-in service for enhancing customized user experiences.[112]

To return to the objectification of users (data doubles), because of marketing practices involved with smartphone usage, location data is automatically extracted through “geotags” that have identity and location already embedded in photos and videos. This follows the development of “pattern life analysis,” where a panoply of actors, “satellites, vehicles, and sensors” gather location and other data from smartphones.[113] Although law enforcement agencies obtain access to Google’s treasure trove of surveillance data through geofence warrants, the “original intent of Google’s Sensorvault technology [geofencing] was to sell location-based advertising more effectively.”[114]With “geofencing,” commercial retailers are able to send alerts to users’ smartphones—this “mobile advertising, the ultimate form of geo-targeting, is the holy grail of advertising.”[115]Even if a user turns off the GPS locator in her smartphone, the amount of times location data was accessed in a three-week period is astronomical—“all for the sake of advertisers, insurers, retailers, marketing firms, mortgage companies and anyone else who pays to play in those behavioral markets.”[116]

These geofenced “data enclosures” enable the creation of a unique “data double,” or a multiplicity of profiles that expose users’ identifiable information, such as location and intimate behaviors.[117] Google’s own marketing of Sensorvault allows advertisers to target people based on its stored location data and lets them track the effectiveness of online ads.[118] Although personal data is a “special category” and should be a protected attribute, there is a lack of transparency regarding the “building of profiles, audience segments, targeting techniques or inferences from combining data with other third-party data sources.”[119] As chronicled above, this tracking in the mobile ecosystem is comprised of SDKs. Over the past decades, Google has managed to streamline all of its past services, acquisitions and mergers, such as Google Ads, Double Click, Google Analytics and Crashlytics, into its SDK Firebase, which has 3 million apps and is a primary asset.[120] These transactions (the selling and purchasing of users’ data behind the scenes) are unknown to most users and can be qualified as “illiberal data dealings,” furthering Haggerty and Ericson’s “surveillant assemblage,” Feldstein’s “surveillance strategies,” Kauth and Kings’ “disruptive illiberalism,” and Laruelle and Dall’Agnola’s “technological illiberalism.”

Technological Illiberalism of Geofenced Warrants

As demonstrated above, dragnet policing reflects a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach to citizens’ rights, and although Google’s “data brokerage” with geofencing has been brought to light, Google’s complicity with federal and state agencies is still of concern. On April 23, 2019, the US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai enquiring about “a massive database of precise location information on hundreds of millions of consumers.”[121] These enquiries forced Google to divulge some of the workings of Sensorvault, especially concerning activities of “bulk surveillance”—the 24/7 capturing and storing of user metadata: “login details, our [users]IP address, ISP, device hardware details, operating system, as well as cookies and cached data from websites.”[122] Google’s response reveals that, even when people are not using apps or making calls, sensitive information can be gathered and that Sensorvault has not deleted users’ data in the past 10 years. In response, on April 13, 2020, New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie and New York State Assemblyman Dan Quart introduced the Reverse Location and Reverse Keyword Search Prohibition Act. According to the bill’s proposals, future rulings on geofence warrants could “apply old protections in the Fourth Amendment to a totally new and uniquely disturbing context.”[123]

Starting in January 2020, Google now charges law enforcement fees for its bureaucratic labor, except in extreme cases of “child safety investigations and life-threatening emergencies.”[124] These “Notices of Reimbursement” help shed light on what data Sensorvault holds and other Google exchanges with governmental actors. Google has found another way to monetize surveillance capitalism—besides letting third parties utilize its user data[125] and selling data as a “Super SDK”—creating another business model for its service of responding to Sensorvault reverse search warrants. Nonetheless, the amounts are inconsequential compared to the market value of Alphabet (a record $1.761 trillion in 2023). Due to growing media attention about geofence warrants involved in criminal investigations, beginning with the New York Times article in 2019 by Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel,[126] Google now publishes a “transparency report” that shows the number of requests for user information in Sensorvault from law enforcement over a period of time. Over the past three years, Google has released these “transparency reports” every six months. The website explains:

A variety of laws allow government agencies around the world to request user information for civil, administrative, criminal, and national security purposes. In this Global requests report, we share information about the number and type of requests we receive from government agencies where permitted by applicable laws. Requests from US authorities using national security laws are not included in these Global requests and are instead reported separately with our US national security requests.[127]

Simultaneously, seemingly due to public pushback on geofence warrants, the Feds have been instead also buying location data from a range of companies. In 2020, leakages revealed that the IRS was being investigated for using location data without a warrant, as they were purchasing data from a contractor called Venntel.[128] The US military was also “buying granular movement data of people around the world,” such as a Quran app, a dating app, etc., relying on a company called Babel Street that sells a product called Locate X and X-Mode. In July 2023, the FBI was lobbying Congress to allow it to continue its surveillance “loophole” (purchasing data on citizens from data brokers without a warrant), thanks to the Carpenter v. US ruling mentioned previously. Rather than appealing to a judge for a court order, subpoena or a search warrant, as supported by the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, the NSA and other members of the US intelligence committee (Defense Intelligence Agency, National Space Intelligence Center) were lobbying to oppose an amendment that would stop them from paying companies in order to obtain location data. In January 2024, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) reached a settlement with X-Mode, now rebranded as Outlogic, which downplayed the cost to its business model and was required to delete data it had illicitly gathered so far.

Big Brother Meets Big Other

Enquiries from congressional antitrust committees are still seeking to obtain access to Sensorvault’s contents to address the ethical and legal issues concerning user data that are interwoven with these biannual “transparency reports,” Google’s media responses about its services and the extent of its own “logic of accumulation” data collation activities. As alluded to at the beginning of this article, the “automated ubiquitous architecture of Big Other[129] has expanded to include “products and platforms” engaging over one billion monthly users, who “willingly subordinate all knowledge and decision rights to Google’s plan.”[130] Through “incursion, habituation, adaption and redirection,” the expansion of geolocative technology (number of satellites, cell towers, smartphone advancement) has propagated the tactics of geofencing by advertisement agencies and law enforcement alike in a surveillance-rich, commercial environment where “surplus extraction is normalized.”[131] Google tracks its users (on Android continuously and on iPhone if location data is enabled and/or Google Maps is being used) and collects personal information to construct a profile of a user, on which it then earns revenue by targeting advertisements in tandem with third-party advertisers.[132]

The value generated by technological illiberalism is not limited to the “whole” of the individual but emerges from the constellation of infinitesimal attributes created from users’ data[133]—a Sensorvault Subject. These “technological affordances” are what make advertising companies such as Google able to “lock in” users, as a platform of capitalism with a near monopoly in search,[134] but also result in “deleterious consequences.”[135] When users say “yes” to authorizing the sharing of their data, they have granted access to the apps owned by companies whose aim is to compile a complete record of people’s movements, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers. Sensorvault’s “embodied data”[136] from Android and Google Maps, marketing practices, such as SDKs that occupy a legal gray zone,[137] and geofence warrants and legislation all comprise the “surveillant assemblage.” With the addition of Google’s “transparency reports,” it becomes clear how this network of heterogeneous elements and actors comprising the “reverse search warrant surveillance assemblage” is global,[138] which facilitates its spread rhizomatically. These new phenomena allow Google near-perfect surveillance with the ability of time travel, real-time auctioning of user data by advertisement brokers and mapping a person’s locative history with geofencing, which can be shared with law enforcement.

Already in 2015, Zuboff keenly asked: Who (other than Google) is learning from the global data flow that is collected? How is it accumulated? And what if there is no oversight and “authority fails”?[139] Besides the “global surveillant assemblage,” Big Brother’s legislation is also in a constant process of making. Based on Ybarra v. Illinois, a lawful search that results in identifying someone who is not subject to that search “does not inherently violate the Fourth Amendment.”[140] Additionally, Carpenter v. United States did not consider “collection techniques involving foreign or national security.”[141] Moreover, the question of the third-party doctrine left open by the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States could be understood to mean that “geofence queries temporally limited to 45 minutes do not constitute a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”[142] Therefore, while international and national (US) privacy legislation must be updated and enforced, state agencies also should be held accountable when they purchase data unethically through legal loopholes. At the time of this writing, such legislation is still evolving and mutable.

Chilling effects?

To return to Kauth and King’s “disruptive illiberalism,” which combines the technological illiberalism of governmental authorities intercepting citizens’ communication with mobile devices and “blanket” metadata collection, geofence warrants have been applied to public protests as well. The exponential rise of reverse search warrants over the past nine years has implications for those engaged in protests of late, like Black Lives Matter, Me Too and Extinction Rebellion, to name a few. Recall that when violence erupted two days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, on May 27, 2020, police in Minneapolis, with the help of a geofence warrant, requested Google to release Sensorvault data on suspects in the vicinity of an auto parts store. A videographer, Said Abdullahi, who was merely filming the incident, told the media (TechCrunch) that he had received an email from Google “stating that his account information was subject to the warrant, and would be given to the police.”[143]  

Whereas previously many innocent bystanders (data subjects) had been taken up in the sweep of locative data, with the storming of the US Capital on January 6, 2021, mobile phone data of predominantly violent protesters was captured in the troller of Sensorvault data. “[C]ourt documents show that the initial Google geofence warrant included the US Capitol building and the stairs leading down to Capitol plaza,” and anyone within this cordoned area was a suspect or a witness.[144] As of this writing, the rioters and trespassers captured through their locative Sensorvault data, text messaging and video footage have been arrested and charged with federal crimes, with some already serving jail time of various lengths.

This influx of “disruptive illiberalism” impinges on the privacy of data subjects, who, because of their proximity to crimes, become not only “surveilled and surveilling subjects”[145] but also algorithmically produced Sensorvault subjects. The use of geofence warrants also impinges on Fourth Amendment “search and seizure” rights, resulting in “collateral damage” whereby “people forgo their right to protest because they fear being targeted by surveillance.”[146] Additionally, the interrelatedness of corporate and state surveillance, along with (meta)data collection that embodies its “parallelization and recursitivity,”[147] is leading to what is now called a “chilling effect.” According to a recent study, this “can have a considerable impact on human development, namely via autonomy, creativity, social identity experimentation (without fear of repercussions), and multifaceted deviance from the dominant socio-cultural norm.”[148]

At the end of 2023, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act bill was reintroduced by members of the House Judiciary Committee (originally introduced in the Senate in 2021 by Senator Ron Wyden) to put in place similar protections against “commercial data grabs.” Perhaps because of investigative reporting on law enforcement purchasing locative data and pushback in the US Congress, in December 2023, Google announced three changes regarding how it will deal with “Location History data” in the future:

First, going forward, this data will be stored, by default, on a user’s device, instead of with Google in the cloud. Second, it will be set by default to delete after three months; currently Google stores the data for at least 18 months. Finally, if users choose to back up their data to the cloud, Google will “automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.[149]

Yet, as with many of Google’s public statements, it is unclear when the announced policies will go into effect, whether they will actually be implemented and, if so, whether they will be maintained.

On April 12, 2024, the US House of Representatives reauthorized Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a self-described “substantial and important targeted intelligence collection program” that collates, analyzes and shares information regarding national security threats. Although the US Supreme Court acknowledges “geolocation data as protected from seizure by the ‘probable cause’ standard,” the spy program was approved without an amendment to prevent the government from purchasing geolocation data from private companies, which was killed before it came to a vote.[150] Now, the FBI may continue to search these databases without a warrant to access Americans’ information.[151] How long this wiretapping program targeting Americans and their contacts overseas will continue is unknown, yet the collected data is stored indefinitely on FBI servers. On August 9, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which encompasses the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, determined that police’s seeking data on a suspect from Google’s massive Sensorvault of location data indeed constitutes an unlawful search. No information about specific users is included in warrants, only their geographic locations where any user could turn up, and, as this article demonstrates, a person might be using someone else’s device. The court reasoned that reverse search warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”[152] This ruling only applies to the abovementioned jurisdiction, however. In regard to legislative loopholes, as of September 2024, the Pentagon is still trying to hide that it bought Americans’ data (phone location and internet metadata) without warrants.

Conclusion

Over the past nine years, US legislation has enabled law enforcement to request users’ location data from Google with reverse search warrants without specifying each user, or as in the past, the specific place to be searched. Precedents such as Carpenter v. United States ruled that CSLI is private, but the justices did not answer the question of police access to location data for every phone in an area during a certain period. Moreover, the data captured by Google is viewed as an opt-in service. Thanks to the global surveillance assemblage, Google’s Big Other collects user locative data, which is sold to advertisement brokers and shared with law enforcement—Big Brother. Despite recent rulings and Google’s declaration of changing its data storage policy, currently in the US, government agencies are still allowed to purchase data on citizens from a range of companies, including data brokers, without a warrant. In the future, legislation will continuously need to be updated with the advent of new technologies. Perhaps coming rulings on geofence warrants will apply old Fourth Amendment protections to prevent technologically illiberal surveillance practices.


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[3] Shiva Vaidhyanathan, Googlization of everything (And why we should worry), (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).

[4] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 401.

[5] Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 86, https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5.

[6] Renée Ridgway, “Deleterious consequences: How Google’s original sociotechnical affordances ultimately shaped ‘trusted users’ in surveillance capitalism,” Big Data & Society, 10(1), (May 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231171058.

[7] Zuboff, Big Other, 86.

[8] MarkCoté, “‘Bulk Surveillance’, or The Elegant Technicities of Metadata,” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. John Beck and Ryan Bishop (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 188-209.

[9] Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, “Google’s Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement. This Is How It Works,” New York Times, April 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorvault-location-tracking.html.

[10] David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

[11] “Global requests for user information,” Google Transparency Report, accessed January 1, 2025, https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=en.

[12] Sidney Fussell, “An Explosion in Geofence Warrants Threatens Privacy Across the US,” WIRED, August 27, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/geofence-warrants-google/

[13] Marlene Laruelle, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” East European Politics, 38, no. 2, (June 2022): 303-327, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079.

[14] Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage,” The British Journal of Sociology, 51: 605-622, (2000), https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310020015280.

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[16] Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 97

[17] David Murakami Wood, “What is global surveillance? Towards a relational political economy of the global surveillant assemblage,” Geoforum, vol. 49 (August 2013): 317-326, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.07.001.

[18] Moritz Büchi, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Christoph Lutz, Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux, Shruthi Velidi, and Salome Viljoen, “The Chilling Effects of Algorithmic Profiling: Mapping the Issues,” Computer Law and Security Review, vol. 36: 2-15 (April 2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2019.105367.

[19] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 303-304.

[20] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 312.

[21] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 312.

[22] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 314.

[23] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 314.

[24] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 314.

[25] Laruelle, Illiberalism, 314.

[26] Jasper Theodor Kauth and Desmond King, “Illiberalism,” European Journal of Sociology 61, 3 (March 2021): 367,https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975620000181.

[27] Kauth and King, Illiberalism, 398.

[28] Steven Feldstein, “Surveillance in the Illiberal State,” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, Stephen Holmes (New York: Routledge, 2021), 352 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367260569.

[29] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 352.

[30] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 352.

[31] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 354.

[32] Fernando N. Van der Vlist, “Counter-Mapping Surveillance: A Critical Cartography of Mass Surveillance Technology After Snowden,” Surveillance & Society 15, no. 1 (2017): 138, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v15i1.5307.

[33] Renée Ridgway, “Re:search – the Personalised Subject vs. the Anonymous User,” (PhD diss., Copenhagen Business School, 2021), research.cbs.dk (21.2021).

[34] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 352-353.

[35] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 353.

[36] Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1983).

[37] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 605.

[38] Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 48.

[39] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 605.

[40] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Big Brother, (New York City: Signet Classics, 1949); Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 605.

[41] Feldstein, Surveillance in the illiberal state, 351.

[42] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 608.

[43] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 608.

[44] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 609.

[45] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 610.

[46] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 609.

[47] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 610.

[48] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 617.

[49] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 611.

[50] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 617.

[51] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 617.

[52] Zuboff, Big Other, 75.

[53] Murakami Wood, What is global surveillance?, 324.

[54] Michael Glassman and Min Ju Kang, “Intelligence in the Internet Age: The Emergence and Evolution of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT),” Computers in Human Behavior 28, no. 2 (March 2012):673-682, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.014.

[55] Björn Fastering and David Lewis, “Leaks, Legislation and Freedom of Speech: How Can the Law Effectively Promote Public-Interest Whistleblowing?,” 153, no. 1 (March 2014): 71-92. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1564-913X.2014.00197.

[56] Murakami Wood, What is global surveillance?.

[57] Ridgway, Re:search – the Personalised Subject vs. the Anonymous User.

[58] Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter- Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[59] Feldstein, Surveillance, 354.

[60] Masa Galič, Tjerk Timan, and Bert- Jaap Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation,” Philosophy and Technology 30, no. 1 (2017): 9–37, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1.

[61] Cameron Colquhoun, “A Brief History of Open Source Intelligence,” Bellingcat, July 14, 2016, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/07/14/a-brief-history-of-open-source-intelligence/.

[62] Feldstein, Surveillance, 354.

[63] Jean-Christophe Plantin, “Google Maps as Cartographic Infrastructure: From Participatory Mapmaking to Database Maintenance,” International Journal of Communication 12, (2018): 494.

[64] Plantin,Google Maps, 492.

[65] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 141.

[66] Plantin,Google Maps, 492.

[67] Plantin,Google Maps, 492.

[68] Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American 265, no. 3, (September, 1991): 94-104.

[69] Ridgway, Deleterious consequences.

[70] Andrew Pressey, David Houghton, and Doga Istanbulluoglu, “The Problematic Use of Smartphones in Public: The Development and Validation of a Measure of Smartphone “Zombie” Behaviour,” Information Technology & People 37, no. 1, (2024): 479-501, https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-06-2022-0472.

[71] Jane Mavoa, Simon Coghlan, and BjørnNansen, “It’s About Safety Not Snooping: Parental Attitudes to Child Tracking Technologies and Geolocation Data,” Surveillance & Society 21, no. 1, (2023): 56, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i1.15719.

[72] Jennifer Pybus and Mark Coté, “Super SDKs: Tracking Personal Data and Platform Monopolies in the Mobile,” Big Data & Society, (February 2024): 4, https://doi/10.1177/20539517241231270.

[73] Mavoa et al., It’s About Safety Not Snooping, 46.

[74] Pybus and Coté, Super SDKs, 4.

[75] Pybus and Coté, Super SDKs, 4.

[76] Pybus and Coté, Super SDKs, 4.

[77] Pybus and Coté, Super SDKs, 2.

[78] Pybus and Coté, Super SDKs, 8.

[79] Mavoa et al., Safety Not Snooping, 57.

[80] Donna Lee Elm, “Geofence Warrants: Challenging Digital Dragnets,” Criminal Justice 35, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 8.

[81] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 244.

[82] Michael Calore, “Big Tech’s Role in Policing the Protests,” WIRED, June 5, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-lab-podcast-458/.

[83] Josh A. Roth, “Drawing Lines: Geofence Warrants and the Third-Party Doctrine,” International Cybersecurity Law Review 4 (2023): 215, https://doi.org/10.1365/s43439-023-00085-y.

[84] Gabriel A. Fuentes, “In the Matter of the Search of: Information Stored at Premises Controlled by Google,” Memorandum Opinion And Order, no. 20 M 392. (2020) https://www.eff.org/document/re-search-info-stored-premises-controlled-google-no-20-m-392-2020-us-dist-lexis-152712-nd.

[85] Sean Broderick, “Google Data and Geofence Warrant Process,” National Litigation Support Blog for Federal/Community Defenders and CJA Practitioners, January 8, 2021, https://nlsblog.org/2021/01/08/google-data-and-geofence-warrant-process/#_edn8.

[86] Thomas Brewster, “Google Dragnets Gave Cops Data On Phones Located At Kenosha Riot Arsons,” Forbes, August 26, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/08/26/google-gave-feds-data-on-phones-located-at-kenosha-riot-arsons/.

[87] Valentino-DeVries, Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police.

[88] “Geofence Warrants and the Fourth Amendment,” Harvard Law Review 134, no. 7 (May 2021): 2516.

[89] Elm, Geofence Warrants, 11.

[90] Valentino-DeVries, Tracking Phones.

[91] “Geofence Warrants,” Harvard Law Review, 2516.

[92] Liz Brody, “Google’s Geofence Warrants Face a Major Legal Challenge,” One Zero, June 11, 2020, https://onezero.medium.com/googles-geofence-warrants-face-a-major-legal-challenge-ac6da1408fba.

[93] Fuentes, Matter of the Search of.

[94] Fuentes, Matter of the Search of.

[95] Dell Cameron, “Rival US Lawmakers Mobilize to Stop Police From Buying Phone Data,” WIRED, July 18, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/fourth-amendment-is-not-for-sale-act-2023/.

[96] Valentino-DeVries, Tracking Phones.

[97] Armin Beverungen, Timon Beyes, and Lisa Conrad, “The Organizational Powers of (Digital) Media,” Organization 26 no. 5 (2019): 621–635, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508419867206.

[98] Olga Goriunova, “The Digital Subject: People as Data as Persons,” Theory, Culture and Society 36, no. 6, (November 2019): 125-145, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419840409.

[99] Elm, Geofence Warrants, 10.

[100] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 612-613.

[101] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 612-613.

[102] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 612-613.

[103] Poster, The Mode of Information, 97.

[104] Haggerty and Ericson, Surveillant Assemblage, 613.

[105] Roth, Drawing lines: geofence warrants and the third-party Doctrine, 214.

[106] Mark Harris, “How a Secret Google Geofence Warrant Helped Catch the Capitol Riot Mob,” WIRED, September 30, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/capitol-riot-google-geofence-warrant/.

[107] Catherine McGowan, “Geofence Warrants, Geospatial Innovation, and Implications for Data Privacy,” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 1, (October 2023): 662, https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.835.

[108] Ridgway, Re:search, 258.

[109] Deborah Buckner, “Internet Search and Seizure in United States v. Forrester: New Problems in the New Age of Pen Registers,” Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law 22, no. 2, (2008): 504, http://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/jpl/vol22/iss2/9.

[110] Ridgway, Re:search, 330.

[111] McGowan, Geofence Warrants, 662.

[112] McGowan, Geofence Warrants, 662.

[113] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 243.

[114] Broderick, Google Data.

[115] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 242.

[116] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 243.

[117] McGowan, Geofence Warrants.

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[145] Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life, 6.

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[148] Büchi et al, The chilling effects, 2.

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[152] Zack Whittaker, “US appeals court rules geofence warrants are unconstitutional,” TechCrunch, August 13, 2024, https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/13/us-appeals-court-rules-geofence-warrants-are-unconstitutional/.

Renée Ridgway

Postdoctoral researcher, Aarhus University, Denmark rridgway@cc.au.dk