Last month, the Department of Justice released over 3 million documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. While the dumps shed light on Epstein’s own social circle and activities, they also provide a rare window into the inner workings of a federal investigation, including how tech companies like Google respond to government requests for information.
WIRED found several grand jury subpoenas addressed to Google in the DOJ’s most recent release, along with files that appear to be Google data produced about specific users and letters on Google letterhead responding to specific subpoena requests.
Google declined to comment on the specific documents included in the dumps, but spokesperson Katelin Jabbari said in a written statement that the company’s “processes for handling law enforcement requests are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations. We review all legal demands for legal validity, and we push back against those that are overbroad, including objecting to some entirely.”
The documents show how much the government will sometimes attempt to obtain without a judge’s sign-off, how Google pushes back against requests that it says are beyond what’s required by law, and what types of information the company has turned over about its users.
Secret by Design
Subpoenas are normally shrouded in secrecy. A 2019 letter signed by the then US attorney for the Southern District of New York and addressed to Google’s legal department prohibited the company by law from revealing the letter’s existence to Epstein coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, the subject of the subpoena, for 180 days from the date of the order. The letter also instructed Google to alert prosecutors if it planned to tell Maxwell about the existence of the order after the 180 days were up, “in case the investigation remains ongoing and the order needs to be renewed.”
Even when not required by law, prosecutors requested Google’s silence. A 2018 letter instructing Google to preserve all emails (including those in draft and trash folders) and Google Drive content associated with four gmail accounts also requested that Google not disclose the existence of the letter to anyone, including the people who owned the accounts. The letter also requested that Google notify federal prosecutors if the company intended to make a disclosure, so the prosecutors could “obtain a non-disclosure order if necessary.”
It’s unclear whether Google informed the account holders of the redacted emails after the 180-day period described in the 2019 letter were up. Google’s privacy and terms says that when it receives a request from a government agency, it will email the subject of that request before it discloses that information, unless it is prohibited by law.
Back to Basics
Many of the files included in the Epstein dumps were titled “GOOGLE SUBSCRIBER INFORMATION,” and contained the account name, recovery email address and phone numbers, what Google services the account can access, when the account was created, the “Terms of Service IP” address, and a log of IP address activity.
Mario Trujillo, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that subscriber information requires the lowest legal bar for the government to access under the Stored Communications Act, a 1980s law that lays out a lot of the rules for what kind of information the government can access from electronic service providers like Google.
While some types of information, like email contents, require a search warrant under the law, “on the opposite end of that is basic subscriber information,” Trujillo says. The act explicitly permits the government to obtain that information with just a subpoena, which does not necessarily require judicial approval.
