Google is challenging a warrant from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) that asked the company to help get a lead in a homicide case by turning over information about individuals who searched specific keywords, saying it amounts to an unconstitutional search. 

The challenge, filed in the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County in September, is tied to a July homicide of a homeless woman. Google says that LVMPD served the company with an "invalid" warrant, known as a "reverse search" warrant, requiring the company to pull data on individuals who searched a specific set of keywords. 

Because most of the specifics of the case are sealed, it is unclear how many people could be affected and what search terms the police were interested in. Google is asking the court to quash the warrant, calling it an "illegal general warrant."

The case — brought forth by a tech company — represents a unique legal challenge to law enforcement's surveillance use, an increasingly hot-button issue in Nevada and beyond. 

In a court filing, Google says the order is "facially invalid" and "violates Federal and State constitutional provisions." It added that LVMPD and the Henderson Police Department have repeatedly served Google with reverse search warrants, further claiming that it had been prohibited from disclosing the warrants' existence for months. 

LVMPD said they do not respond to pending litigation. Google's attorneys — including David Koch, a prominent Nevada lawyer, and Alfredo Alan Garza, who formerly ran for Congress in Texas in 2024 — also did not return a request for comment. 

Although Nevada has no law explicitly addressing reverse search warrants, their use has been challenged in other states. Earlier this summer, Delaware became the first state to essentially ban the use of reverse keyword warrants. In 2025, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a challenge, ruling that general, unprotected internet search queries are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The technology's use in that case led police to identify a suspect who confessed to a crime in the previously unsolved case.

Andrew Crocker, the surveillance litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), expressed concern that such warrants allow the government to "rummage through people's information" without limits. He said that his foundation has been made aware of Google responding to reverse search warrants and to his understanding, Google does not challenge all of them.

"It does make me wonder what about this particular one has caused them to challenge it," Crocker said about the Metro warrant. "Of course, we don't know, but it does seem like there's something special about this warrant that is in Google's view particularly egregious."

Crocker likened the warrants to another type of surveillance technology known as geofencing, which allows police to tap into tech databases to see who was near the scene of a crime. Earlier this year, The Indy broke news that the Nevada Department of Public Safety had access to geofencing technology through the company Fog Data Science, letting it track a device's location in real time without a warrant.

Google introduced a policy limiting the use of geofence warrants following a 2023 Bloomberg investigation, but it did not respond to a question about its policy on reverse search warrants. 

Geofence warrants using data from sites such as Google Maps have been used to prosecute racial justice protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and participants of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

"It might end up being the kind of back door or substitute for these other kinds of warrants they have decided not to comply with anymore," Crocker said about reverse keyword search warrants.

The first hearing on the issue is scheduled in late October. LVMPD has yet to respond to the filing.

Read the filing here: