Jay Greene and Drew Harwell recently reported:
At first, Ryan Lackey thought the email was a scam. It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos.
Even weirder, the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret. Six months later, Lackey, a computer security consultant in Puerto Rico, still has no idea what Facebook turned over to an FBI investigation that he believes may have started as early as 2019.
Read more on Washington Post. I am in a similar situation, I have heard, but I have no details as yet as to the gag order on Twitter that may have gone on for years.
For another aspect of law enforcement and tech, see It’s not easy to control police use of tech—even with a law by Sidney Fussell of Wired.com.
And in the most recent story about government surveillance, John Wright has a story on Raw Story: FBI used secret Google tracking data to nab Capitol rioters. It begins:
Federal prosecutors have cited secretive “geofence” warrants — which allow law enforcement to pinpoint cell-phone users’ precise locations over time — in 45 Capitol riot cases, including six where where suspects had not previously been identified.
Geofence warrants, also known as reverse-location warrants, allow law enforcement to obtain data from Google to identify potential suspects.
Read more on Raw Story.