This was a few years ago in Europe not the US. I think this was one of the positive aspects, since law enforcement here (especially dealing with people from different countries) would have different expectations for the type of information that they could receive or ask for.
A representative from Italy might ask for one specific element of information, another one from Germany might look for associative information (who a person is and who they were with) and one from the UK might ask for things as precise as the hour and minute at which a particular action would occur (this is due to the high amount of cameras that cover London for example, which could then be used to match movement around a region with surveillance to the data I would provide).
I would say most of the requests were reasonable from my point of view given the background they would provide - I guess it's also down to the person requesting the information. But as time progressed they figured out that I was able to get information or that we had information on a wide variety of elements... As I said initially, it goes from "Find info on John Doe, with an email account [email protected], with a date of birth of 33/33/2033 who did this activity at 11:30 PM on 01/01/2053" to "We have this email which is either jdoe@email or jdoe@gmail but we're not sure. Can you check all such occurences?".
I think the point is also that Europe isn't THAT much better and while people might wave privacy laws and GDPR as proof of Europe's "superiority", I think a lot of those things look good on the surface, but they still don't protect you as much as you'd think.
A representative from Italy might ask for one specific element of information, another one from Germany might look for associative information (who a person is and who they were with) and one from the UK might ask for things as precise as the hour and minute at which a particular action would occur (this is due to the high amount of cameras that cover London for example, which could then be used to match movement around a region with surveillance to the data I would provide).
I would say most of the requests were reasonable from my point of view given the background they would provide - I guess it's also down to the person requesting the information. But as time progressed they figured out that I was able to get information or that we had information on a wide variety of elements... As I said initially, it goes from "Find info on John Doe, with an email account [email protected], with a date of birth of 33/33/2033 who did this activity at 11:30 PM on 01/01/2053" to "We have this email which is either jdoe@email or jdoe@gmail but we're not sure. Can you check all such occurences?".
I think the point is also that Europe isn't THAT much better and while people might wave privacy laws and GDPR as proof of Europe's "superiority", I think a lot of those things look good on the surface, but they still don't protect you as much as you'd think.