A procedural request for static information is very different than an intentional action to create interaction with another person.
Also, in this case, the warrant asks for (to adapt your analogy) the numbers of anyone who called such phone:
-only during a small time window, when in reality it doesn't matter when the query happened
-from a phone only in town, when in reality the scammer could have called (google searched) from amywhere
-also assumes the caller was the end user of the dialogue, and that the dialogue was relevant to the crime
(images can be traded and downloaded from places other than GIS)
I think a more correct analogy is to say that a crime happened to a certain phone number, and now a warrant exists to find everyone in town who looked at that page in their phone book in a certain time range.
We don't know what other investigation the police have done. By limiting it to a geographic area I can at least imagine they have done some other investigation to narrow it down to that area. I don't know this but I do think it is promising that the police are narrowing their search to a specific time and area, that seems like something that should happen in an investigation.
I don't think that is a more correct analogy because as I read it the police are asking for people who searched for pictures that were used in the fraud.
The term doesn't sound like it was for the victim it was for some supporting material to attempt the fraud. "Douglas" (the search term/phone number) is not the victim.
You do make a good point about the page in the phone book, that is something I had not considered.
>as I read it the police are asking for people who searched for pictures that were used in the fraud.
Yes. This is the crux of why I'm uncomfortable with the court order. If the police don't have the criminal and files in custody, there's no way for them to know how the criminal got the image. If they do, how the criminal got the image is immaterial, since google image search is a legal way to obtain images. Maybe they got it from a source before Google indexed it for search. Maybe they got it from a file directory at work, or from someone else's computer, etc. Or from GIS, which is the only thing the police are searching. Without more information than is presented in the article, all the police will be able to definitively say is "These IPs from our region are a small subset of the people who had access to this image."
I'm harping on this thread a bit, both because I think the subpoena won't result in meaningful information, and because no judge should have given de jure authority to such a poorly thought out request which breaches privacy. Long-term, the victim of this case might be everyone affected by the legal precedent of granting broad, unnecessary subpoenas for private information. That kind of cost is well over the $28k the victim lost.
Also, in this case, the warrant asks for (to adapt your analogy) the numbers of anyone who called such phone:
-only during a small time window, when in reality it doesn't matter when the query happened
-from a phone only in town, when in reality the scammer could have called (google searched) from amywhere
-also assumes the caller was the end user of the dialogue, and that the dialogue was relevant to the crime (images can be traded and downloaded from places other than GIS)
I think a more correct analogy is to say that a crime happened to a certain phone number, and now a warrant exists to find everyone in town who looked at that page in their phone book in a certain time range.
edit: formatting