| Hey, it's Ryan on the Bloomberg Tech cybersecurity team. With coronavirus dominating the news recently, a lot of other interesting developments have slipped under the radar. One of them was buried in 1,700 pages of court documents, released late last month by the U.S. Justice Department, which revealed a little-known FBI data-grabbing tactic that has alarmed civil liberties advocates. The trove of documents was from the FBI's investigation of Roger Stone, the veteran Republican operative and one-time adviser to President Donald Trump. During former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Stone was in the bureau's crosshairs. Last year he was convicted on seven felony charges, including lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering. In its investigation of Stone, the bureau's special agents used many of the normal methods you would expect in a serious criminal case: They obtained search warrants to raid Stone's home in South Florida, and they interviewed people close to him. They also obtained copies of his emails, Twitter messages and iCloud data. But one thing the FBI did was unusual. According to an affidavit from Special Agent Andrew Mitchell, the bureau asked Google to turn over records on anyone who had searched for particular terms associated with the Russian hackers—"dcleaks," "guccifer" and ''guccifer june." The records allowed investigators to determine that Stone, from a computer in Florida, appeared to have searched for some of these phrases prior to the publication of the leaked emails from Guccifer and DCLeaks, indicating he had prior knowledge of their disclosure. Patrick Toomey, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has never seen the FBI publicly admit to using this method before. For him, the disclosure raised some important questions: Is the FBI now routinely identifying criminal suspects on the basis of search terms they have entered into Google? And is that constitutional under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures? The tactic raises "serious constitutional concerns," Toomey said, because its use amounts to "digital fishing expeditions, potentially sweeping up the private Google searches of many innocent people and subjecting them to FBI scrutiny." Warrants to obtain private data are supposed to be narrowly drawn and based on probable cause, he said, "but it's unclear from the public record how the FBI met either of those requirements here." The FBI declined to comment, and Google wouldn't provide any information on the number of times it has received similar requests to turn over search records. A company spokesperson said that Google "requires federal warrants to be signed by a judge, and we push back regularly on overly broad demands." The controversial nature of the tactic may be one reason why the FBI hasn't trumpeted it. But the practice does not appear to be restricted to federal agencies. In 2017, police in Edina, a town outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, obtained a court order requiring Google to hand over information on people who searched for the name of a particular financial fraud victim. On that occasion, the search giant said that it fought against the request and "significantly narrowed its scope." It's unclear if Google managed to do the same in the Stone investigation, or in other investigations like it. Catherine Crump, assistant clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that obtaining records showing searches for particular words or phrases could be an ingenious way to identify people who have special, insider knowledge. When it involves a "very unique search," judges may be inclined to sign off on warrants to give law enforcement agencies the data, she added. "In general, though, government requests for data designed to reveal people who searched for certain terms is alarming," Crump said. "People type things into Google that they wouldn't tell their doctors and spouses." —Ryan Gallagher | 
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