When it was revealed that foreign governments were demanding push notification data from Apple and Google, it was suspected that the US government was doing the same. This has now been confirmed, one use of it being to investigate January 6th Capitol rioters.
Apple was not previously allowed to reveal that it was receiving legal demands for the information, but now that it can do so, it has also set a higher bar for compliance …
What is this all about?
It was last week revealed that both Apple and Google were receiving legal demands to hand over data about the push notifications sent to the phones of persons of interest in legal investigations. Both companies had been complying with these demands, but were not allowed to reveal that it was happening.
An open letter by a senator made the facts public for the first time. While push notifications don’t allow a third-party access to the content of end-to-end encrypted messages like iMessage, we noted that they can still reveal a lot.
For example, imagine a US journalist exchanging messages with a Chinese whistleblower about human rights abuses. A report on the abuses appears today, and the push data shows that the source and journalist exchanged many back-and-forth messages yesterday. That could easily be enough to confirm the source of the leak.
The open letter freed Apple and Google from legal restrictions on disclosing the practice, and the iPhone maker promptly confirmed the claim, and added these incidents to its transparency reporting.
Push notification data used by US law enforcement
While the open letter referenced “foreign” governments, it was widely suspected that US law enforcement agencies were also demanding the same data. This has now been confirmed, with The Washington Post reporting that the data helped investigations of Capitol rioters, among other cases.
The Post found more than two dozen search warrant applications and other documents in court records related to federal requests for push notification data. Though many were redacted, nine of the documents pertained to the federal hunt for Jan. 6 rioters. Two documents sought data on suspects accused of money laundering and distributing child sexual abuse material […]
In one search warrant application seeking data related to a Facebook account used by Josiah Colt, an Idaho man who breached the Senate floor, an FBI special agent said the push notification tokens could lead to “useful information” that could help identify a user’s account.
Apple sets higher legal bar
One somewhat surprising fact we’re learning is that Google applied a higher legal bar to these demands than did Apple.
Google required a court order before it would hand over push notification data, while Apple did so on the basis of a subpoena. The crucial difference between the two is that law enforcement agencies can issue subpoenas without judicial oversight (in other words, they alone decide they need the data, and then demand it), while a court order requires a judge to review the justification for the demand, and approve it.
Apple’s guidelines to law enforcement agencies have been updated to state that push notification data now requires either a court order or search warrant, both of which have to be signed off by a judge.
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