- Unsealed court records show how police relied on Facebook to investigate protests in 2020.
- A warranted demanded Facebook hand over a vast amount of private information for six users.
- Facebook is seeing more police requests for user information, receiving 63,000 in six months.
Social media accounts can be set to “private” and may feel like they belong to you. But the reality is no individual owns or controls the data they share on a platform like Facebook, and law enforcement can often access it if they wish. That’s exactly what happened to several people suspected of participating in civil unrest after the police shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.
In late August of that year, protests erupted in Kenosha, about 90 minutes north of Chicago, after Blake, a Black man, was shot multiple times by local police during a traffic stop. Rallies, public demonstrations, and general civil unrest followed for about a week, a time that included the fatal shooting of two Black protestors in Kenosha by white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse.
In the weeks that followed, local police, state attorneys general and the Department of Justice began to investigate and identify people suspected of engaging in property damage.
Six people from Minnesota were identified as suspects who allegedly traveled to Kenosha, broke into a local CVS, and set fire to a local bar on the night of Aug. 24, according to a recently unsealed search warrant filed by the US Attorneys Office in Wisconsin . Most of the suspects were connected to the CVS break-in by police searching Facebook accounts for people who matched images from security camera footage from that night.
The information the police could access on their own was not enough, however. They were also in search of “information about the protests, riots, and civil unrest in the Kenosha, Wisconsin area” at the time, according to court documents.
The DOJ in September 2020 filed a search warrant for a record of seemingly all information held by Facebook related to the six suspected accounts, including any that may have been deleted. Facebook handed over the information in October 2020.
Over 63,000 information requests from US government entities
A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment on the warrant or how it typically engages with law enforcement. The company said in a report that for the first half of 2021, it received more than 63,000 information requests from government entities in the US. In 89% of those cases, Facebook handed over information.
More than 13,000 people were arrested during protests and unrest over the summer of 2020, which occurred across the US after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. More than 1,400 felony cases have been filed against those deemed to have committed crimes during this time, according to a tracker maintained by The Prosecution Project.
Below is a breakdown of how law enforcement used Facebook to identify the six suspects in Kenosha, what information Facebook handed over, and how long the process took.
Search of public profiles
Police started on their own, according to the unsealed documents, going through the available Facebook profiles of the six suspects and comparing security camera images to profile pictures posted on the social media platform. They identified four suspects by name this way.
The other two suspects remained unknown, but the police thought they were associated with certain Facebook accounts. They had other clues, too: They’d arrested a 24 year-old suspect in the CVS burglary who gave some first names of the other suspects.
Demand for private information from Facebook
Making further progress required a warrant for much more information from Facebook. The police hoped to not only identify the remaining suspects by name, but also find out where they all lived, worked, traveled and who they associated with, including during the unrest in Kenosha.
The DOJ was quick to seek a warrant for all of the private Facebook account information, filing for court approval Sept. 18. That was about two weeks after the end of the unrest in Kenosha. The DOJ said that, in accessing the accounts of the suspects, it would be able to collect more general information on the protests and anyone who may have participated in a “conspiracy” to commit crimes, like property damage and arson, according to the unsealed document.
The DOJ requested seemingly any information that could possibly be associated with a user’s Facebook account, including names, addresses, phone numbers and any location tracking information. All likes, posts and comments on Feed, Messenger and Stories were requested, as well as the account IDs and user names they interacted with and complete activity logs. Records of voice and video calls and all records of IP addresses and hardware used by the accounts were included in the warrant.
The police got everything they wanted
Within four weeks, Facebook had complied. The warrant was returned to a federal court in Wisconsin as “executed,” suggesting the police got everything they wanted. The contents of the requested accounts were downloaded by the company and given to law enforcement on Oct. 20
Although Facebook says it will “challenge or reject” a data request from a government agency seen as “overbroad” or “legally deficient,” there is no record of it having come to such a conclusion in the case of the Kenosha suspects.
There have been several arrests related to the Kenosha CVS break-in. A spokesman for the US Attorneys Office in Wisconsin would not say whether the suspects targeted in the Facebook warrant have been indicted or arrested, but did say none have yet been tried or convicted of any crime.
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