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December 8, 2020

Sundar Pichai
Chief Executive Officer
Google, LLC
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
sundar@google.com
Via U.S.P.S & Email 

Re: Need for Improved Transparency on “Geofence” and “Keyword Warrants.”

Dear Mr. Pichai,

We, the undersigned civil rights, labor, and civil society organizations, call on Google to aid us in opposing the alarming growth in law enforcement searches of Google user data. While law enforcement agencies have sought Google account data for years, we write in response to the increasing reports of novel warrants and other court orders that demand far more data than in the past.

This includes the use of so-called “geofence warrants,” which compel disclosure of all devices in a geofenced area, and so-called “keyword warrants,” which identify every user who searched for a specific keyword, phrase, or address. These blanket warrants circumvent constitutional checks on police surveillance, creating a virtual dragnet of our religious practices, political affiliations, sexual orientation, and more.

Reports indicate that Google has complied with an increasing number of these non-traditional warrants in recent years.[1] For example, according to Google’s submission in United States v. Chatrie, you received a 75-fold increase in geofence warrant requests from 2017 to 2019.[2] This limited reporting has been indispensable in building public awareness about this unconstitutional surveillance tactic. While we are grateful that Google made the limited disclosures that it did in United States v. Chatrie, we urge you to do more.

As a leading recipient of geofence and keyword warrants, Google is uniquely situated to provide public oversight of these abusive practices. We ask you to do just that by expanding your industry-leading transparency report to provide monthly data on the number of non-traditional court orders received, including granular information on geofence warrants, keyword warrants, and any analogous requests. By providing this semiannual breakdown of requests, tracking the growth of these abusive tactics over time, you’ll provide us and other civil society organizations vital ammunition in the fight for privacy.

We look forward to working with your staff on this matter. Please contact Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn with any questions, comments, or concerns.

 

Sincerely,

  1. S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

  2. Access Now

  3. Advocacy for Principled Action in Government

  4. Alternate ROOTS

  5. Amnesty International - USA

  6. Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)

  7. Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus

  8. Brennan Center for Justice

  9. Brooklyn Defender Services

  10. CAIR-Minnesota

  11. California LGBT Arts Alliance

  12. Center for Human Rights and Privacy

  13. Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU Law

  14. Community Alliance for Global Justice

  15. Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York (CAIR-NY)

  16. Cypurr Collective

  17. Defending Rights & Dissent

  18. Demand Progress

  19. Due Process Institute

  20. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

  21. Emonyo Yefwe International

  22. Empire State Indivisible

  23. Encode Justice

  24. Equal Justice Under Law

  25. Ethics in Technology a 501 c 3

  26. Fight for the Future

  27. Freedom of the Press Foundation

  28. FreedomWorks

  29. Government Accountability Project

  30. Hacking//Hustling

  31. Islamophobia Studies Center

  32. Legal Action Center

  33. Media Alliance

  34. National Coalition Against Censorship

  35. New America's Open Technology Institute

  36. New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)

  37. New York County Defender Services

  38. Nicaragua Center for Community Action

  39. Northern New Jersey Jewish Voice for Peace

  40. Oakland Privacy

  41. Occupy Bergen County (N.J.)

  42. OCF @ U.C. Berkeley

  43. PDX Privacy

  44. Policing and Social Justice Project

  45. Project South

  46. Restore The Fourth

  47. Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment (RISE)

  48. TechActivist.Org

  49. Technology for Liberty Program, ACLU of Massachusetts

  50. Tenth Amendment Center

  51. The Bronx Defenders

  52. The Calyx Institute

  53. The Legal Aid Society of NYC

  54. The Project On Government Oversight

  55. TKE

  56. United Voices of Cortland

  57. Urban Justice Center

  58. Visionary V

  59. Wolfson Cybersecurity Club

  60. X-Lab

[1] E.g., Alfred Ng, Google Is Giving Data to Police Based on Search Keywords, Court Docs Show, CNET (Oct. 8, 2020, 1:21 PM), https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-giving-data-to-police-based-on-search-keywords-court-docs-show.

[2] Brief of Amicus Curiae Google LLC in Support of Neither Party Concerning Defendant’s Motion to Suppress Evidence from a “Geofence” General Warrant at 3, United States v. Chatrie, No. 3:19-cr-00130 (E.D. Va. Dec. 23, 2019), ECF No. 73 (reporting a 15-fold increase in geofence warrants from 2017 to 2018 and a further 5-fold increase in 2019).