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
I wonder what kind of video it is. Maybe a shared link, so only people who secretly know about it knew about it, and they have become suspects. Is it mentioned in the forbes article?
And i wonder if people abuse videos on youtube by encrypting the content with a key and the key is then shared.
Why can't a court order be mass surveillance? In these cases, the videos were viewed 30,000 times and more than 130,000 times (if I understand the latter correctly). How is that not mass? Nobody suggests that more than a few of those people are suspects.