The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that.
The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.
They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers.
I don't think any of this appears legitimate.
Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have.
Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times.
Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera?
Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location.
Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.
In Berlin there used to be a notification system if you were subjected to cell surveillance in Berlin. It was recently stopped [0]. IMHO we need the same for all IP assignment or account lookups. The problem IMHO is that we, individualy, and particularly vulnerable groups like journalists and activists, might be subject to far more of such activities than we know.
[0] https://netzpolitik.org/2024/rolle-rueckwaerts-berlin-beende...
More-generally, imagine if every citizen was entitled to a yearly report on all how many times law-enforcement received records containing their names or personally identifying information, except in cases that are formally unsolved and in-progress.
So a line item might be something like:
{Ref ID}, {Date}, "All Youtube accounts that watched {Video Title}"