As Google’s front line for external data requests, its legal research team handles a relentless barrage of user data requests: seeking court orders, subpoenas, requests for data inherited from bereaved family members.
During devastating flooding in the Brazilian state of Rio do Sul last May, the country’s Ministry of Justice and Civil Police turned to the LIS to download location knowledge from people’s phones who were lost in the deluge. They were quickly provided. Sources familiar with the matter told Forbes that it stored about 40 lives.
Later that month, LIS was hit by a series of layoffs affecting 20 team members that had around 120 members. Ten were fired outright, while another ten were given the option of leaving or moving to centers in Chicago and Austin. it was another reminder from Google for an already struggling unit, which had been frozen in hiring since mid-2022; This freeze is still in effect today.
Forbes spoke with several current and former LIS members and others familiar with the team’s operations for this story. Together, they painted a picture of a team doing important work in public protection: responding to natural disasters, locating kidnapping victims, engaging in criminal activity. research, however, has been reduced and demoralized in recent years.
“The team has incredibly delicate work, but they have to make do with critical care,” said one existing employee. The fact that the layoffs came so soon after the good fortune of the Brazilian rescue operation was “shocking” and reduced an already suffering and morale-low team to the point that “it’s going to be very difficult for them to stay in charge”. said some other user familiar with its operations.
Layoffs and opportunistic departures have left the remaining LIS team with a developing list of incoming and urgent knowledge requests, resources said. The warnings from branch bosses were stark: for a team already running on “extremely limited bandwidth,” the delays would be “substantial. ” and will build up over the summer and probably beyond. Among the biggest delays are the thousands of requests from grieving families to access the Google accounts of their deceased loved ones, which have skyrocketed since the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 and have continued to rise.
Google’s relief on LIS is particularly ill-timed given the previous wrist pats from the U. S. Justice Breakdown. The U. S. tech giant has been asked to point to an agreement that promises to “maintain a sufficient degree of compliance personnel” with its obligations to government orders. Google would have possibly pointed to the dotted line, but it still maintained the hiring freeze on LIS and proceeded with the May layoffs and reassignments. .
An aerial view of the devastation from the floods that devastated southern Brazil.
The Justice Department declined to say whether or not Google violated the agreement related to those discounts. However, lawmakers raised considerations about the cuts. House Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) told Forbes that cuts to groups that help the public and law enforcement agencies were “definitely a concern. “”Platforms will have to ensure that they have the mandatory resources to maintain user knowledge and comply with moderate requests from authorities,” he said.
Google spokesman Matt Bryant disputed the perception that the company reduced LIS’s ability to perform its task effectively. “We make normal changes to the team and, in particular, we have improved our processes around forensic investigations,” he said. “The recent changes consolidate the team’s paintings into fewer locations while maintaining our core criteria for law enforcement requests. He said the job cuts and hiring freeze were unrelated to Google’s commitments to comply with the US legal process, adding that for the ten positions where there was selection to move, all would be filled regardless of whatever the existing painters decided. Bryant did not provide a timeline for filling those roles.
As LIS has declined in recent years, its various workloads have been increasing. Google’s own transparency reports show an increase in global requests for law enforcement knowledge every year for the past five years. For the most recent reporting period, between January and June 2023: governments around the world submitted more than 210,000 requests for disclosure of user data, compared to just over 190,000 in the last six months. In one of the highest-profile cases in recent years, the LIS was tasked with providing geolocation. data to investigators seeking to identify the other people who stormed the United States Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2020, riots.
Beyond those geolocation orders, federal law enforcement has made significant requests to LIS, ranging from requesting data on anyone who entered safe search terms to information on everyone who watched YouTube video series. Array LIS was unable to respond as the police wanted. In July 2022, as the hiring freeze approached, the FBI asked Google to review YouTube videos for alleged racially motivated death threats. According to court documents exposed through Forbes, an employee told the company that a “lack of manpower” prevented the team from doing this properly. Google disputed the FBI’s account, saying the challenge was that authorities didn’t provide enough explicit data to identify the live streams in question.
Google tried to use AI to speed up LIS work, although it didn’t go as planned. Sources said that in 2021, the company introduced a tool to analyze subpoenas, request warrants and other court orders to determine what data had been requested before exporting it to the LIS team. But the effects were poor, and team members told Forbes that it made their paintings more confusing and time-consuming.
“It didn’t work very well,” said one user familiar with the LIS’s operations. “All the red flags and mistakes made ended up adding time spent on manual review and processing. . . “Bryant said Google is still experimenting with efficiency tactics, some of which may not result in commentary.
Therefore, with a reduced workforce and few technical responses likely to compensate for this, LIS struggles to move forward. However, some technical tweaks may provide some relief. An update to the way Google’s outlets locate data on a device rather than their own cloud systems means the company will soon no longer be able to respond to geolocation requests. But, as Google has confirmed, this update also means that it would no longer be imaginable to assist in rescue operations like those in Brazil in the future.