The Daily Mail has an article that serves as a nice coda to my previous post on how to avoid search warrants and DuckDuckGo not logging searches. In case you thought that concern over keyword searches was overblown, the Daily Mail article discusses the issue and a recent warrant that was accidently unsealed that reveals how these warrants work.
The issue—and it’s a U.S. issue—is that these warrants very likely contravene the Fourth Amendment to the constitution that prohibits general warrants and overbroad searches. If you’re in or sympathetic to law enforcement, it’s easy to see the attractiveness of these warrants. If you care about civil liberties and privacy, they’re an anathema.
One positive side effect of these warrants is that they—at last—show the silliness of the apologists’ cry, “If you having nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. That was always nonsensical but these warrants show them to be explicitly so. You make an innocent Internet search and suddenly you’re caught up as a person of interest in a possibly serious investigation. To clear things up, maybe you miss some work. Maybe the authorities question your boss. Maybe you lose your job. So yeah, you do have something to fear.
The authorities understand all this too. That’s undoubtedly why they make these warrants secret even though there’s no reason to, especially after the investigation. The takeaway for us innocent bystanders is just what it was in the previous post: don’t use search engines that log your searches. There are plenty of perfectly fine search engines that don’t—DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Startpage to name just the ones I use—and you should get on intimate terms with at least one of them. And lose that abuser search engine that spies on you and goes running to Mom to tattle on what you’re up to.