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A troubling Forbes article recently came across my news desk at WantToKnow.info. The piece describes how federal investigators secretly forced Google to provide identifying information about who watched certain YouTube videos. Here's an excerpt:
Undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker "elonmuskwhm," who they suspect of buying bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times. The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. ... The court granted the order and Google was told to keep the request secret.
There's a lot going on with this story. For starters, buying bitcoin for cash isn't illegal. Reporting the acquisition incorrectly may be a crime, but simply buying the asset is perfectly legal. So the entire basis for this investigation is in question already. And it just gets weirder from there.
What agency or agencies were involved? The article refers to federal investigators and to undercover cops, but it doesn't specify who was actually doing the investigating. Was it local or state police with FBI support? DHS? My guess is that FinCEN was the agency behind this. They're supposed to be policing crypto and they don't yet seem to know how to do that right.
In order to identify elonmuskwhm, investigators didn't seek records from whatever website this person was active on. Instead, they sent YouTube videos to elonmuskwhm and requested the identities of all viewers of those videos. Why would they do it this way? It's less direct and more resource intensive than the alternative. One possible answer is that there was a preexisting relationship with Google that simplified and streamlined the government's request for information.
This case likely runs afoul of both the 1st and 4th Amendments. Saying you'd like to buy bitcoin is protected speech. The Google records request seems unreasonable, particularly given its sweeping breadth, and the Constitution explicitly protects us against unreasonable searches. The government agency involved must've known that its actions were unconstitutional.
Privacy advocates were understandably outraged when this story broke. It confirmed that the government can easily find out who consumes what media. At the same time, the story of Rolla Abdeljawad recently came out. Here's how that story begins:
The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity.
The government's escalating digital intrusions into our lives are unsurprising. Big Tech has been monitoring us closely all along. They built tools designed perfectly for tyranny, often in partnership with the intelligence community, and now government agencies are beginning to pick these tools up to make use of them. Soon, AI monitoring of our activities will become the norm. Predictive policing blunders will enrage civil rights activists, but most people will accept the new normal with barely a complaint.
The obvious path out of digital tyranny is to abandon the legacy system in favor of better alternatives. That could mean watching videos on sites that can't provide the government with identifying information. It could mean defeating efforts to go cashless. But ultimately, I think society is unavoidably becoming more transparent as new technologies are integrated into our lives.
We can't have tech that monitors our every move AND have privacy in the traditional sense. What we do have, by natural right, is ownership of all of the data arising from our being. If someone is using this data in a way we don't approve of, we have grounds to demand that they stop. Ethical grounds, if not legal.
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