REPORT: US Government Has Previously Ordered Google To Reveal Searches Of U.S. Citizens

According to a recent revelation, the United States federal government is covertly directing Google and other search engines to monitor and disclose data on everyone who searches for certain keywords. These orders are known as “keyword warrants.”

Only two such warrants have been made public in recent years, but inadvertently released court papers acquired by Forbes indicate that the government has been requesting them on a far more regular basis than previously thought.

The released warrant came from a federal investigation conducted in Wisconsin in 2019, during which investigators were looking for individuals who they suspected of being involved in human trafficking and sexually assaulting a child.

In an effort to track them down, officials ordered Google to provide any information on users, including account names, IP addresses, and CookieIDs, who searched for the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name, and her address over a 16-day period throughout the year, including the victims’ home address.

Forbes claimed that Google gave the information to federal authorities in mid-2020, but the paper did not specify how many individuals had their information given to government investigators.

The warrant was intended to be kept a secret, and the Justice Department only learned about the breach when an outlet reached out to them for a response. The inquiry is still continuing, and the warrant has been sealed as a result of the findings.

There were just two keyword warrants that were made public before to the Wisconsin case.

One from 2017 shows a Minnesota court signing off on an order for Google to disclose data on all users within the city of Edina who looked for a fraud victim’s name on the search engine Google.

Those who looked for the home of an arson victim who also happened to be a witness in the government’s racketeering case against R. Kelly were asked to provide information in the second scheme, which was disclosed in 2020.

The Northern District of California received a third unreported warrant, according to Forbes, which was filed in December of the previous year. In the meanwhile, the warrant is being kept under secret and has just been made public via a court docket entry. It is possible that the information sought will be very wide according to the wording of the warrant, which reads, “Application by the United States for a Search Warrant for Google Accounts Associated with Six Search Terms and Four Search Dates.”