>as I read it the police are asking for people who searched for pictures that were used in the fraud.
Yes. This is the crux of why I'm uncomfortable with the court order. If the police don't have the criminal and files in custody, there's no way for them to know how the criminal got the image. If they do, how the criminal got the image is immaterial, since google image search is a legal way to obtain images. Maybe they got it from a source before Google indexed it for search. Maybe they got it from a file directory at work, or from someone else's computer, etc. Or from GIS, which is the only thing the police are searching. Without more information than is presented in the article, all the police will be able to definitively say is "These IPs from our region are a small subset of the people who had access to this image."
I'm harping on this thread a bit, both because I think the subpoena won't result in meaningful information, and because no judge should have given de jure authority to such a poorly thought out request which breaches privacy. Long-term, the victim of this case might be everyone affected by the legal precedent of granting broad, unnecessary subpoenas for private information. That kind of cost is well over the $28k the victim lost.
Yes. This is the crux of why I'm uncomfortable with the court order. If the police don't have the criminal and files in custody, there's no way for them to know how the criminal got the image. If they do, how the criminal got the image is immaterial, since google image search is a legal way to obtain images. Maybe they got it from a source before Google indexed it for search. Maybe they got it from a file directory at work, or from someone else's computer, etc. Or from GIS, which is the only thing the police are searching. Without more information than is presented in the article, all the police will be able to definitively say is "These IPs from our region are a small subset of the people who had access to this image."
I'm harping on this thread a bit, both because I think the subpoena won't result in meaningful information, and because no judge should have given de jure authority to such a poorly thought out request which breaches privacy. Long-term, the victim of this case might be everyone affected by the legal precedent of granting broad, unnecessary subpoenas for private information. That kind of cost is well over the $28k the victim lost.