09/01/2020 / By JD Heyes
No doubt there are some right-leaning Americans who pose threats to the national security of our country.
But what is equally clear is that there are plenty of Left-wing anarchist, Black Lives Matter and Antifa types who do so as well, and so do openly.
Yet, as usual, the Marxists at Google are only interested in the former.
And what’s more, the search behemoth is turning over the names of people who lean right to law enforcement by proclaiming they, and only they, are ‘threats’ to society.
A little-known investigative unit inside search giant Google regularly forwarded detailed personal information on the company’s users to members of a counter-terrorist fusion center in California’s Bay Area, according to leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian.
But checking the documents against Google’s platforms reveals that in some cases Google did not necessarily ban the users they reported to the authorities, and some still have accounts on YouTube, Gmail and other services.
The users were often threatening violence or otherwise expressing extremist views, often associated with the far right.
“…[O]ften associated with the far right.”
Sure. More like always associated with the far right because that’s who and what Google is, an enemy of conservatives.
The Guardian noted that the documents originate from a trove known as “Blueleaks,” which hackers managed to steal from servers at a Texas-based hosting firm that was used by a number of law enforcement agencies. The trove contains hundreds of thousands of documents dating back to 1996 and extending through June 2020.
Cybersecurity experts have verified the leak, by the way, so it’s legitimate.
The Google documents were signed by the search giant’s CyberCrime Investigation Group (CIG) and most definitely contain subscriber info. And while the group has been mentioned in media coverage of criminal actions involving alleged cyber crime, until now CIG’s feeding of raw information to law enforcement agencies had not yet been exposed.
The Blueleaks trove revealed that documents are tied to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which is part of a nationwide fusion center network created after the 9/11 attacks to speed the sharing of information between local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement agencies, The Guardian notes.
“In a moment of reckoning on the failure of police to keep people safe, it is reckless for Google to hand off private user information to law enforcement,” said Steven Renderos, executive director of MediaJustice, a non-profit that pushes “a media and technology environment that fuels real justice.”
“While the prevalence of hateful activities across Google-owned platforms is a real problem, deflecting responsibility to police is not the solution,” Renderos continued. (Related: Review of Google Health – Technology Achievement or Privacy Disaster?)
Without a doubt, the information Google is providing law enforcement is a blatant violation of statutory law and the Constitution’s privacy provisions; information is literally stolen by the CIG and provided to police and law enforcement without a warrant or, perhaps, even probable cause — and certainly, it seems, without the user’s knowledge.
“The Google documents retained by NCRIC highlight the activities of individual users, providing detailed subscriber information, which often includes real names, street addresses, credit card numbers, Gmail and recovery email addresses, YouTube channel addresses and the time and IP addresses of recent logins,” The Guardian reported. “Many of the documents also include copies of comments users have made on Google services like YouTube.”
Electronic Frontiers Foundation staff lawyer Saira Hussein told The Guardian that her organization was concerned about the “vast amounts of user data” that Google appears to be handing over voluntarily. Hussein also questioned the search behemoth’s motives.
“Are they expecting law enforcement to do something, or is this just a way of covering themselves? Does Google see its responsibility as simply reporting this to law enforcement and moving on?” Hussein said.
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Tagged Under: BlueLeaks, Constitution, Cybercrime, data theft, Google, hacking, law enforcement, privacy, spying, warrant
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