Google shrunk a team that has helped police save lives and investigate major crimes, even as it promised the DOJ it would keep it adequately staffed.
By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff
As Google’s frontline for outside data requests, its Legal Investigations Support crew handles an endless barrage of demands for user information — search warrants, subpoenas, appeals for legacy data from grieving family members.
During devastating floods in the state of Rio do Sul in Brazil last May, the nation’s Ministry of Justice and civil police turned to LIS for location data from the phones of people lost in the deluge. They got it quickly. Sources familiar with the effort told Forbes it helped save some 40 lives.
Later that month, LIS was hit by a round of layoffs that impacted 20 members of the roughly 120-member team. Ten were let go outright while another 10 were given a choice to either leave or relocate to hubs in Chicago and Austin. It was another dialing back of Google’s support to an already red-lining unit, which had been under a hiring freeze dating back to mid-2022; That freeze remains in place today.
Forbes spoke with multiple current and former members of LIS and people with knowledge of the team’s operations for this story. Together they painted a picture of a team that does vital public safety work – responding to natural disasters, locating kidnapping victims, assisting in criminal investigations – yet has been diminished and demoralized in recent years.
“The team is tasked with extremely sensitive work but asked to make do with bottom-barrel attention,” said one current employee. That the layoffs came so soon after the success of the rescue operation in Brazil was “shocking” and reduced a team already suffering with low morale to the point where “they’re going to have an extremely hard time with retention,” said another person familiar with its operations.
The sackings and opportunistic attrition have left the remaining LIS team with a fast growing list of inbound and urgent requests for data, sources said. Warnings from department chiefs have been frank: for a team already working with “extremely limited bandwidth” backlogs would be “substantial” and they would mount over the summer and likely beyond. Among the most significant backlogs are thousands of requests from grieving families seeking access to the Google accounts of deceased relatives, which have skyrocketed since the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 and have continued to rise.
Google’s diminishment of LIS seems particularly ill timed given prior wrist slaps from the US Department of Justice. In October 2022, partly in response to Google losing data related to an investigation of cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, the agency asked the tech giant to sign an agreement promising to “maintain sufficient compliance staffing levels” in support of its obligations to government orders. Google may have signed the dotted line, but it still maintained the LIS hiring freeze and went ahead with the May layoffs and reassignments.
The DOJ declined to comment on whether or not Google had breached the agreement with those reductions. Lawmakers, however, have raised concerns about the cuts. House Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) told Forbes that making cuts to teams that assist public safety and law enforcement agencies was “definitely a concern.” “Platforms must ensure they have the resources necessary to keep users’ data safe and comply with reasonable law enforcement requests,” she said.
Google spokesperson Matt Bryant disputed the notion that the company has diminished LIS’s ability to do its work effectively. “We routinely make team changes and have significantly improved our processes around legal investigations,” he said. “Recent adjustments consolidate the team’s work to fewer locations while maintaining our high standards for law enforcement demands.” He said the cuts and hiring freezes in no way impacted Google’s commitments to complying with U.S. legal process, adding that for the ten roles where staff were offered the choice to relocate, they would all be filled, regardless of current employees’ decisions. Bryant didn’t provide a timeframe for when those roles would be filled.
As LIS has shrunk over recent years, its various workloads have grown. Google’s own transparency reports show a rise in global law enforcement demands for data every year for the last half decade. For its most recent reporting period – between January and June 2023 – governments across the world filed over 210,000 requests for disclosure of user information, up from just over 190,000 in the six months prior. In one of its most high-profile cases in recent years, LIS was responsible for providing geolocation information to investigators trying to identify people who stormed the US Capitol in the January 6 riots of 2020.
Beyond such geofence orders, federal cops have made significant demands of LIS, from asking for information on anyone who entered certain search terms or data on all individuals who viewed sets of YouTube videos. LIS has not always been able to respond as law enforcement desired. Back in July 2022, as the hiring freezes hit, Google was asked by the FBI to review YouTube videos for alleged racist death threats. According to court documents unearthed by Forbes, one of its staff told the agency that a “lack of manpower” prevented the team doing this properly. Google disputed the FBI’s narrative, saying that the issue was that law enforcement hadn’t given specific enough information to identify the livestreams at issue.
Google has tried to use AI to expedite LIS work, though it hasn’t gone as planned. Sources said that in 2021, the company debuted a tool to scan subpoenas, search warrants and other court orders to determine what data had been requested before exporting it to the LIS team. But it performed poorly, and team members told Forbes it often made their jobs more complicated and time-consuming.
“It didn’t work super well,” said one person with knowledge of LIS operations. “All of the false flags and mistakes it made ended up adding time spent manually reviewing and processing… it would miss things or pull things that shouldn’t be pulled, or make date ranges overbroad.” Bryant said that Google always experiments with ways to improve efficiency, some of which won’t result in improvements.
And so, with reduced headcount and few technical solutions that might offset it, LIS struggles along. Some technical changes could provide some relief, however. An update to the way Google stores location data on a device rather than its own cloud systems means the company will soon no longer be able to respond to geolocation requests. But, as Google confirmed, that change also means assisting rescue operations like those in Brazil won’t be possible in the future.
