Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...By Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg The search giant had cooperated with earlier warrants in the probe, but Google protested that the US Justice Department’s 2023 demand was “grossly overbroad,” documents show. Complying would subject innocent people to government scrutiny based on politically-oriented searches in the aftermath of the divisive 2020 presidential election, the company argued.
The Alphabet Inc. unit ultimately lost and produced the names and other personal information to investigators. The records unsealed by a federal district court in Washington within the past month offer a window into how US authorities have used such digital dragnets in criminal investigations and how Google responded. The records also shed new light on the pipe bomb probe, which stymied investigators for years.
Warrants based on search engine queries raise the possibility of the government “rummaging around in our most intimate thoughts and questions and concerns,” said Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit privacy advocate that has opposed keyword search warrants.
The government’s demands in the pipe bomb investigation were far more expansive than others he’d seen, Crocker said.
Google spokesperson Katelin Jabbari said in a statement that the company reviews all law enforcement requests to protect users’ privacy and will oppose or try to narrow the scope of demands it considers too broad. Google’s policy is to notify users about these requests unless there is an order prohibiting it or other special circumstance, she said.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Suspect Arrested
The unexploded pipe bombs were discovered hours before violent riots at the US Capitol temporarily disrupted Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results. The Justice Department announced in December that it had charged a Virginia man, Brian Cole, with placing the bombs. Cole has pleaded not guilty.
Documents in Cole’s case don’t specify if the warrant Google opposed yielded useful information, although prosecutors said he admitted using the company’s maps application to look up the addresses.
In a typical case, the government can issue warrants for digital evidence about individuals under investigation, including online search histories or where they may have used a mobile phone. The demand in Google’s case involved what’s known as a “reverse warrant,” in which law enforcement authorities follow a digital trail to find potential suspects.
One such request, known as a geofence, involves asking companies to identify users who were in an area at a certain time. The US Supreme Court is weighing a constitutional challenge to the once-popular tactic, although its use has appeared to drop. Google announced in 2023 that it would no longer have access to users’ location histories, meaning it couldn’t comply with geofence warrants.
The government can also ask for data on users based on online search histories. In a pair of much-watched decisions, the Colorado and Pennsylvania state supreme courts largely rejected challenges to evidence obtained from reverse keyword warrants. Those cases involved searches for private residences, however, distinguishing them from searches related to political party headquarters, Crocker said.
Orin Kerr, a criminal law expert at Stanford Law School, said Google’s decision to go to court was consistent with its past efforts to limit what it considers invasions of users’ privacy by law enforcement. Keyword-based warrants represent a relatively new area of US law, but Kerr also said it wasn’t surprising that Google lost.
“Courts have generally said it’s not the providers’ job to challenge what they see as defects in the warrant before complying,” he said.
Google received geofence and keyword-based warrants in the pipe bomb investigation, the unsealed records show. It produced data about users in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings in Washington.
The company also complied with a warrant for users who searched for locations of the RNC and DNC headquarters or the committee names paired with words such as “security,” “camera,” “bomb” and “explosive.” That data was anonymized, however, meaning Google didn’t reveal names or other personal information.
By the summer of 2021, the company had complied with the government’s initial request to identify more than 250 users whose searches included references to bombs or if users repeatedly looked up the RNC or DNC.
Two years later, the government went back to Google with a warrant to identify more than 300 users who did a single search about either committee. Investigators also sought information about devices used and other people sharing the same internet connection.
Google protested that this request went too far.
“The individual harm to potentially thousands of innocent users wrought by the government’s invasion into their anonymous political activities and associations renders the search unreasonable,” Google’s lawyers argued.
Government lawyers countered that Google couldn’t “vicariously assert” the rights of its users against unconstitutional searches. They disputed that the warrant violated those protections or would place an “undue burden” on the company, but did drop the request for information about “technically connected” individuals.
The Justice Department pushed back on the idea that the warrant intruded on individuals’ political beliefs.
“The relevance of the RNC and DNC to this warrant is only as locations of a crime,” department attorneys wrote.
The case sat in limbo for a year before a federal magistrate judge denied Google’s request to toss the warrant in November 2024, agreeing with the Justice Department. Google unsuccessfully challenged the ruling before US District Chief Judge James Boasberg, who concluded in February 2025 that the magistrate “got it right.”
–With assistance from Davey Alba and Julia Love.
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