The Digital Dragnet: How Google Searches Cracked a Tragic Denver Arson Case

The shrieking of smoke detectors tore Amadou Sow from his sleep just after 2:30 am on August 5, 2020. His house in the Green Valley Ranch suburb of Denver, Colorado, was engulfed in flames. A wall of smoke and heat blocked his bedroom door, forcing the 46-year-old to scramble to a rear window. He broke the screen with his hand and leaped from the second story, fracturing his left foot upon landing.

His wife, Hawa Ka, woke their 10-year-old daughter, Adama, who shared their room. Hawa dragged the terrified girl to the same window and pushed her out. Amadou, despite his injured foot, tried to catch her but missed. Miraculously, Adama landed on her hands and feet, unharmed. Then it was Hawa’s turn. Her jump ended in agony; she landed on her back, shattering her spine in two places. Amadou barely registered her cries. His mind was fixated on their 22-year-old son, Oumar.

He couldn’t see any sign of Oumar in his room. Frantically, he hurled a rock at the window, but the glass held firm against the heat and smoke. Despair washed over him. Then, a flicker of hope: Oumar’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He must be working his night shift at 7-Eleven. Thank God, his immediate family was safe. But the relief was fleeting. Nine people called 5312 Truckee Street home.

Amadou Sow, a Senegalese immigrant who often worked nights at Walmart, had purchased the four-bedroom property in 2018. Green Valley Ranch was a newly built, sparsely populated neighborhood, feeling isolated from the rest of the city by miles of prairie. It was a quiet refuge for Sow and his family. Not long after they moved in, his old friend Djibril Diol’s family joined them. Djibril, known as Djiby to his friends, was a towering 6'8" civil engineer, 29 years old, with dreams of returning to Senegal to apply his skills.

The first fire truck arrived at 2:47 am. By then, the house was a raging inferno, windows shattered, thick smoke billowing into the night sky, carrying the acrid stench of burning wood across the neighborhood. When firefighters finally managed to enter through the front door, they made a horrifying discovery. The small body of a child lay inside. It was Djiby’s daughter, Khadija, just two months shy of her second birthday. Deeper within the house, they found Djiby himself and his 23-year-old wife, Adja.

Next to Adja lay Djiby’s 25-year-old sister, Hassan. She had only been living in the house for three months, having recently arrived from Senegal. Like Adja, she had aspired to return to school to study nursing. She died with her arms still wrapped protectively around her 7-month-old daughter, Hawa Beye. Medical examiners later determined that all five victims died from smoke inhalation, their airways coated in black soot, their internal organs and muscles displaying the tell-tale “cherry-red” hue caused by carbon monoxide poisoning and heat.

As firefighters battled the blaze and discovered the tragic loss of life, Neil Baker, a homicide detective with the Denver Police Department (DPD), was awakened by a call from his sergeant. Baker, in his fifties with reading glasses and thinning hair, quickly dressed in a suit, offered a brief goodbye to his wife, and headed out into the pre-dawn darkness.

The Investigation Begins: A Mystery Shrouded in Smoke

With nearly 30 years on the force, Baker was intimately familiar with the Denver area. He also knew that Green Valley Ranch, with its repetitive street layouts and identical homes, could be disorienting. Before setting off, he did something routine, something millions do every day: He Googled the address, 5312 Truckee Street. He was focused on getting directions, on the map and route that would appear on his screen. He wasn't thinking about the invisible exchange of data – the packets of information traveling between his device and Google's vast network of servers, the automated logs recording his search query and location. Yet, this unseen digital infrastructure, the very system he used for simple navigation, would become the unexpected key to unlocking the mystery of the Truckee Street fire and would ultimately raise profound questions about the reach of law enforcement into the digital lives of ordinary citizens.

Arriving at the scene two hours later, Baker found the street swarming with neighbors, their faces illuminated by the eerie glow of the still-smoldering house. The air was thick with the taste of ash and the smell of destruction. He met up with his partner, Ernest Sandoval, a detective nearly 15 years his junior, who had recently transferred to homicide from the nonfatal shootings unit. The initial assessment from the officers on the scene suggested a terrible accident, perhaps faulty wiring. Five fatalities – a horrific tragedy, but one that, if accidental, would mean a straightforward case for the homicide unit. “We’ll have some reports to write,” Baker recalled thinking. “We’ll have to probably go to the autopsies.”

But the narrative of a tragic accident was shattered when a man with melancholy eyes, Noe Reza Jr., who lived next door, approached Baker. “I have something you should see,” he said, pulling out his phone. The screen displayed footage from his home security cameras.

The video clips, starting at 2:26 am, showed three figures, their faces obscured by hoodies and masks, moving stealthily through the side yard of 5312 Truckee. One figure pointed towards the back of the house before they moved out of frame. Twelve minutes later, at 2:38 am, the trio sprinted back towards the street, disappearing into the night. At 2:40 am, flames erupted from the lower floor of the house, rapidly consuming the structure within two minutes. Someone screamed in the background of the audio.

“Oh, are you kidding me,” Baker thought, the realization hitting him with sickening force. This was no accident. Five people had been murdered, and the only lead was a few seconds of grainy video showing masked figures, revealing nothing about their identities.

A Community in Fear, Detectives Under Pressure

The news of the fire and the confirmed fatalities sent shockwaves through Denver and beyond. The tragedy sparked headlines and discussions worldwide. The Council on American Islamic Relations issued a statement urging police to investigate the possibility of a religious hate crime. Leaders of Colorado’s African community expressed deep fear and anxiety, wondering if other members might be targeted. Even Senegal’s president tweeted, stating he would be closely monitoring the case. The pressure on Baker and Sandoval to find the perpetrators was immense.

That August, Denver’s usually clear skies were thick with smoke from distant wildfires, a fittingly somber backdrop to the grim investigation. Baker and Sandoval spent their days and nights in the DPD’s aging 1970s-era headquarters, under fluorescent lights, the lobby offering the only distraction of gumball machines. They began with traditional investigative methods: interviewing the victims’ friends and family, poring over text messages, financial records, and social media accounts. The more they learned, the clearer it became that the families living at 5312 Truckee led quiet, devout lives centered around work, mosque, and home. There was no apparent motive within their social circles or financial dealings.

The detectives returned to the video footage, piecing together clips from nearby Ring cameras. They observed the suspects’ car – a dark four-door sedan – making hesitant, wrong turns as it entered the confusing neighborhood and swerving wildly, even mounting curbs, on its escape. However, the video quality was insufficient to identify the exact make or model of the vehicle.

Facing a dead end with conventional leads, the investigation turned to digital data. They obtained “tower dump” warrants, compelling major phone networks to provide lists of all cellular devices that connected to towers in the vicinity of 5312 Truckee during the time of the arson. They also issued “geofence” warrants to Google, requesting information on all devices Google had tracked within a defined geographical area around the house just before the fire. At the time, Google collected and retained location data from Android devices and any phone using Google applications with location services enabled.

These warrants returned thousands of phone numbers and device IDs. The sheer volume of data was overwhelming. Mark Sonnendecker, an agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) specializing in digital forensics, was tasked with sifting through it. Sonnendecker, described as slim and soft-spoken, focused initially on T-Mobile subscribers, noting a pattern in previous cases where suspects often used this network.

There were 1,471 devices registered to T-Mobile within a mile of the house when the fire ignited. Using specialized software that analyzes the time it takes for a signal to bounce between a cell tower and a phone, Sonnendecker narrowed this list down to the 100 devices nearest to the house. To further refine the list, detectives drove through the area around 5312 Truckee one evening towards the end of August with a cell-phone-tower simulator, capturing the IDs of all devices within range – 723 that night. Sonnendecker cross-referenced this list with the earlier list of 100, eliminating the 67 devices that appeared on both, as they likely belonged to neighborhood residents who could be ruled out. This left 33 T-Mobile subscribers whose presence in Green Valley Ranch in the early hours of August 5 was unexplained.

Investigators considered bringing these 33 individuals in for questioning but decided against it. Without concrete evidence linking them to the crime, they feared alerting the arsonists, potentially causing them to flee the country. The list provided no obvious suspects, and as summer gave way to fall, progress on the case stalled. Hundreds of Crime Stoppers tips poured in, some from psychics, none leading anywhere. Baker and Sandoval traveled across the state, interviewing a trio found with drugs, guns, and masks in Gypsum, and speaking with members of the Senegalese community in the mountain town of Silverthorne, where many West Africans worked in the ski industry. They even chased a lead to Iowa. “We got pretty hopeful here and there, but it just kind of fizzled out,” Baker recalled, the frustration evident.

The pressure mounted. In the wake of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that summer, a petition demanding police prioritize the investigation into the deaths of the Diol family and stop “undervaluing the lives of BIPOC individuals” garnered nearly 25,000 signatures. Baker and Sandoval were instructed to clear their schedules and work the case full-time.

The Breakthrough: A Novel Legal Strategy

At a department meeting in September, feeling the weight of the unsolved case, Baker and Sandoval pleaded with their colleagues for fresh ideas. Had they overlooked anything? Was there any stone left unturned? It was then that another detective posed a seemingly simple question: Had the perpetrators Googled the address before going there? And if so, would Google have a record of that search?

It was a concept neither Baker nor Sandoval had considered, a door they hadn’t noticed was there until it was suddenly flung open. They contacted Sonnendecker and the district attorney, Cathee Hansen. None of them had ever heard of police asking Google to provide a list of users who had searched for a specific term – a “reverse keyword search” warrant. Unbeknownst to them, such warrants had been used before, albeit rarely and often under seal: in a 2017 fraud investigation in Minnesota, after a series of bombings in Austin in 2018, in a 2019 trafficking case in Wisconsin, and a theft case in North Carolina the following year. Federal investigators had also used one in connection with an R. Kelly case to investigate witness intimidation.

Unaware of these precedents, Hansen and Sandoval drafted their warrant from scratch. They requested names, birth dates, and physical addresses for all users who had searched variations of “5312 Truckee Street” in the 15 days leading up to the fire.

Google initially denied the request. The company, according to later court documents, employs a staged process for responding to reverse keyword warrants to protect user privacy. First, they provide an anonymized list of matching searches. Only if law enforcement can demonstrate that specific results are relevant to their investigation will Google, if prompted by the warrant, identify the users’ IP addresses. The DPD’s initial warrant had been too broad, asking for protected user information upfront. It took another failed warrant 20 days later and two calls with Google’s outside legal counsel before the detectives refined the language to something the search giant would accept.

Finally, the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Sonnendecker received the results: a list of 61 devices and their associated IP addresses that had searched for the Truckee Street house in the weeks prior to the fire. Five of those IP addresses were located in Colorado. Crucially, three of them had searched for the address multiple times, including queries specifically seeking details about the house’s interior layout. “It was like the heavens opened up,” Baker recalled, the memory still bringing a sense of awe.

Connecting the Digital Dots to the Suspects

In early December, DPD served another warrant to Google, this time requesting the subscriber information – names and email addresses – for those five Colorado IP addresses. One belonged to a relative of the Diols, who was understandably searching for information after the tragedy. Another was linked to a delivery service, likely a driver looking for the address. But one surname stood out – a name that also appeared on the earlier list of 33 T-Mobile subscribers identified as being in the vicinity of the fire: Bui.

The phone was registered to Kevin Bui’s older sister, Tanya. Kevin may have been using her phone after his own was stolen in the robbery that precipitated the arson. A quick scan of the social media accounts linked to the remaining subscribers on the list yielded three potential suspects: Kevin Bui, Gavin Seymour, and Dillon Siebert. They were teenagers, friends, and they lived nowhere near Green Valley Ranch. Their homes were in the Lakewood area, some 20 miles across town. There was no innocent explanation for why they would be repeatedly Googling a residential address so far away.

“There was a lot of high-fiving,” Sandoval recalled, the relief palpable after months of dead ends. But the celebration was tempered by the daunting task ahead. They now had to build a case strong enough to prosecute minors for a high-profile, horrific homicide. “We knew this was going to be a big, big, big fight,” Baker said.

The detectives began corroborating the digital evidence with physical clues. On New Year’s Day 2021, Baker drove by the Bui family’s home in Lakewood and snapped a photo of a 2019 Toyota Camry parked in the driveway – the same make and model observed in the security camera footage from Truckee Street. Another warrant to Google provided the search histories for all three teens dating back to early July. Siebert’s history included searches for “Party City” in the days before the fire. Baker visited Party City’s website and spotted black theater masks similar to those worn by the perpetrators in the video. The company confirmed that their Lakewood location had sold three such masks hours before the fire. Baker then contacted the shopping complex where Party City was located and obtained exterior security camera footage from that night. The video showed a 2019 Toyota Camry pulling into the parking lot around 6 pm.

“It just snowballed,” Baker said, shaking his head in disbelief at the accumulation of evidence. “I cannot believe the amount of evidence that we were able to come up with.” The digital trail, starting with those seemingly innocuous Google searches, had provided the thread that allowed detectives to unravel the entire plot.

The Suspects and Their Motive: A Robbery Gone Wrong

Through the teens’ texts and social media, detectives pieced together the motive and the events leading up to the arson. Three weeks before the fire, 16-year-old Kevin Bui had gone into central Denver to buy a gun. Bui, despite describing his early childhood homes as “the projects,” had experienced a significant upward turn in his family’s fortunes. His father’s accounting business had become successful, allowing the family to move to a large house in Lakewood with mountain views. Bui cultivated an image of success, wearing Gucci belts and Air Jordans. He was academically gifted and athletic, playing inside linebacker on his school football team and swimming.

However, this seemingly charmed life had a darker undercurrent. Kevin and his older sister, Tanya, were involved in dealing fentanyl and marijuana, often finding customers on Snapchat. Kevin also planned to engage in “carding,” stealing credit card information from the dark web. He had also begun accumulating weapons.

The meeting in central Denver to buy a gun turned into a robbery. The individuals Bui met stole his cash, iPhone, and shoes. Bui was left seething with humiliation. The pandemic had shut down football practice and moved classes online, leaving him feeling adrift and “just doing bullshit.” The robbery was the final indignity. That night, back home in Lakewood, Bui resolved to retaliate. He used the Find My device feature on his iPad, watching as it pinged his stolen phone. The map zoomed east, past downtown Denver, finally stopping at Green Valley Ranch. A pin dropped at 5312 Truckee Street.

The next afternoon, Bui messaged his friend Gavin Seymour on Snapchat. “I deserved that shit cuz I knew it would happen and still went,” he wrote, according to court records. “They goin get theirs like I got mine.” Bui and Seymour ran track together and lived only a four-minute drive apart, but their personalities were starkly different. Bui exuded confidence, while Seymour struggled with insecurity and learning disabilities. Seymour’s family life was less stable than Bui’s, with his parents splitting when he was young and his father largely absent.

Seymour responded to Bui’s message with remorse: “idk why I would let you go alone I’m sorry for that.” Bui replied, attempting to downplay his anger: “I cant even be mad cuz we used to do the same shit to random niggas.” But he was undeniably furious and felt disgraced, his self-image as a “top dog” shattered.

A week later, Bui searched the Truckee Street address 13 times, using sites like Zillow to view interior layouts. He persuaded Seymour, who was almost 16, and another friend, 14-year-old Dillon Siebert, to help him get revenge. In late July, Seymour and Siebert also searched the address multiple times.

Bui would later claim their initial plan was merely vandalism – throwing rocks or egging the house. But in the final days of July, the plan escalated dramatically. On August 1, Bui messaged Seymour: “#possiblyruinourfuturesandburnhishousedown.”

Three evenings later, Siebert and Bui went to Party City to buy black theater masks, then grabbed dinner at Wendy’s. They met up with Seymour, and around 1 am on August 5, the three piled into Bui’s Toyota Camry. They stopped at a gas station, filling a red fuel canister. The drive to Green Valley Ranch took at least 30 minutes, a long, quiet journey that offered ample opportunity for any of them to reconsider, to express doubt, to turn back. But they didn’t. Not even when they arrived at 5312 Truckee and saw a minivan – clearly a family vehicle – parked out front.

They found the back door unlocked. It remains unclear which of them poured the gasoline on the living room walls and floors, or who struck the match. When the fire erupted, all three stumbled back to Bui’s car and sped away, leaving behind a scene of unimaginable horror and destruction.

The morning after the arson, with the house still smoldering and the community reeling, Bui and Seymour embarked on a camping trip. A week later, Bui went golfing. A few months after that, Seymour joined the Bui family on vacation in Cancun, where smiling photos of the two teens on beaches and boats emerged. These posts, viewed by the detectives building the case, fueled their anger. “Where’s the remorse?” Baker questioned, seeing the apparent lack of contrition.

Shortly after 7 am on January 27, 2021, police arrested Bui, Seymour, and Siebert. Seymour and Siebert refused to speak, but Bui agreed to an interview and promptly confessed. “He’d had six months of just keeping this inside,” Baker said. “He knew that his time had come.”

The Legal Battle: Privacy vs. Prosecution

For the next 18 months, the case wound its way through the court system. A year passed before a judge ruled that Siebert, who was 14 at the time of the crime, would be charged as a juvenile. Bui and Seymour, both 16 at the time, would be tried as adults, facing potential life sentences if convicted.

In June 2022, just as the prosecution seemed ready to proceed, Seymour’s lawyers dropped a bombshell: they filed a motion to suppress all evidence derived from the reverse keyword search warrant served to Google. This warrant was the crucial piece of information that had first led detectives to Bui and his friends. Nearly two years had passed since the Diol family was killed. Many of the victims’ family and friends were still living in fear, haunted by the nightmare. Now, the detectives had to deliver the devastating news that the entire case, built on this novel investigative technique, might be thrown out, potentially allowing the three teens to walk free.

Seymour’s defense team argued that, by asking Google to search through the private search histories of potentially billions of users, investigators had engaged in an unconstitutional “digital dragnet.” They likened it to police ransacking every home in America without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment, they contended, requires police to demonstrate probable cause for suspecting an individual before obtaining a warrant to search their information. In this case, police had no reason to suspect Seymour or the other teens before seeing the results of the keyword search warrant.

The judge, however, sided with law enforcement, denying the motion to suppress. He used the analogy of searching for a needle in a haystack. “The fact that the haystack may be big, the fact that the haystack may have a lot of misinformation in it doesn’t mean that a targeted search in that haystack somehow implicates overbreadth,” he stated, suggesting that the search for specific keywords was sufficiently targeted despite the vastness of Google’s data.

With the key evidence upheld, the teens’ fate seemed sealed. But in January 2023, Seymour’s lawyers announced that the Colorado Supreme Court had agreed to hear their appeal. This would be the first state supreme court in the United States to rule on the constitutionality of a keyword search warrant. While the verdict would only set precedent in Colorado, it was expected to influence law enforcement practices in other states and potentially shape the US Department of Justice’s stance on such warrants.

The Colorado Supreme Court Weighs In: A Landmark Privacy Case

The case dragged Baker and Sandoval’s investigation into a complex legal process that had the potential to redefine Americans’ right to search and learn online without fear of government surveillance. Seymour’s legal team articulated the profound privacy implications of keyword warrants in their brief: “Even a single query can reveal deeply private facts about a person, things they might not share with friends, family, or clergy,” they wrote. They offered examples of sensitive searches: “‘Psychiatrists in Denver;’ ‘abortion providers near me;’ ‘is my husband gay;’ ‘does God exist;’ ‘bankruptcy;’ ‘herpes treatment’ … Search history is a window into what people wonder about—and it is some of the most private data that exists.”

The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments for the case in May 2023. Seymour’s attorney argued that reverse keyword searches were alarmingly similar to geofence warrants, which courts across the country were increasingly questioning. Indeed, in August 2024, a federal circuit court of appeals – considered highly influential – would rule geofence warrants “unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment” because they fail to specify a particular user, instead targeting anyone who happened to be in a certain location.

Denver’s District Attorney, Cathee Hansen, who had helped craft the warrant nearly three years earlier, defended its use. She compared it to querying a bank for suspicious transactions. “You don’t go into each person’s account and scroll through their transaction history to see if it applies to that account,” she argued. “You just tap into a database.” She maintained that neither type of search violated any individual’s privacy because it was a search of a database, not an individual’s personal account until a match was found.

The judges on the court pressed Hansen on the potential for abuse, particularly in the context of increasingly restrictive laws in other states. Justice Richard Gabriel raised a pointed hypothetical: “I could see warrants coming in from one of those states to Colorado: Who searched for abortion clinics in Colorado?” he posited. “Under your view, there’d be probable cause for that. That’s a big concern.” This line of questioning highlighted the potential for keyword warrants to be used not just for solving violent crimes but for investigating deeply personal and potentially politically sensitive activities.

After a five-month wait that Sandoval described as “gut-wrenching” for the detectives and the victims’ families, the court finally issued its ruling in October 2023. In a majority verdict, four judges decided that the reverse keyword search warrant, as executed in this case, was legal. They reasoned that the narrow parameters of the search – a specific address and a limited time frame – and the fact that the initial search was performed by a computer rather than a human minimized the invasion of privacy. However, in a seemingly contradictory finding, the majority also agreed that the warrant lacked individualized probable cause – the police had no reason to suspect Seymour or the others *before* accessing their search history – rendering it “constitutionally defective.”

This ambiguous ruling left many legal observers scratching their heads. While the evidence from the warrant was allowed in this specific case, the finding that it lacked individualized probable cause suggested future challenges could be successful. The ruling created uncertainty about the future of keyword warrants in Colorado and potentially nationwide.

Aftermath and Implications: Justice Served, Privacy Threatened?

Because of the ruling’s ambiguity and the ongoing legal debate, some law enforcement agencies remain hesitant to use keyword warrants. The ATF’s Denver office, for instance, stated it would only consider using one again if the search terms could be sufficiently narrowed, as they were in the Truckee Street case (a specific, unusual address searched within a tight timeframe). They also emphasized that the crime would need to be serious enough to justify the level of scrutiny involved.

However, not everyone shares this caution. Baker and Sandoval regularly receive calls from police departments across the country requesting copies of their warrant template. Baker himself is considering using the technique in another case. A new “cottage industry” of consultants, who previously trained police on tower-dump warrants, is now teaching them how to request data from Google using keyword warrants. While no systemic data is being collected on how often these warrants are used, Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, estimates there could already be hundreds of examples nationwide.

The legal challenges are far from over. Another case, involving a keyword search warrant used to identify a serial rapist, is currently before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If that court upholds the warrant, as Colorado’s did, the use of this technique could accelerate significantly across the country. Crocker warns that “Keyword warrants are dangerous tools tailor-made for political repression.” He paints a chilling picture of potential future uses, such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requesting a list of everyone who searched for “immigration lawyer” in a specific area, or law enforcement in states with abortion bans seeking out individuals who searched for clinics in states where it remains legal.

By the summer of 2024, all three teens in the Truckee Street arson case had accepted plea deals. Dillon Siebert, charged as a juvenile, received a sentence of 10 years in juvenile detention. Gavin Seymour was sentenced to 40 years in adult prison, and Kevin Bui received the harshest sentence, 60 years in adult prison, as he was deemed the mastermind of the arson. (Bui was also found with fentanyl and methamphetamine while in detention, further complicating his case.)

For the victims’ families, the sentences offered little solace. Amadou Beye, the husband of Hassan Diol and father of seven-month-old Hawa, addressed Kevin Bui directly at his sentencing. “I will never forget or forgive you for what you did to me,” he said, his voice thick with grief. “You took me away from my wife, the most beautiful thing I had. You took me away from my baby that I will never have a chance to see.” A shudder ran through his tall frame. Amadou Beye had been in Senegal awaiting a visa when his family was killed. His daughter was born in America, and he never had the chance to meet her.

Bui remained expressionless throughout the victim impact testimonies, his only visible reaction a furiously bobbing Adam’s apple. Peach fuzz now darkened his 20-year-old jaw. He wore a green jumpsuit, clear-framed glasses, and white shoes. At the end, he read from a crumpled sheet of yellow ruled paper. “I was an ignorant knucklehead blinded by rage. I’m a failure who threw his life away,” he read. “I have no excuses and nobody to blame but myself.”

Yet, when the author spoke to Bui three months later, he sounded surprisingly upbeat. “When you go to prison there’s a lifeline,” he explained. His days were structured: Monday through Friday, he took classes focused on personal growth and emotional intelligence. Beyond that, “I just work out, I chill with some of the guys. We eat together, watch TV, watch sports,” he said. He followed the Denver Broncos and Baltimore Ravens religiously and had recently gotten into Sex and the City.

Bui never complained about the lack of privacy in prison or his isolation from the outside world, both physical and digital. Prisoners had minimal internet access, a stark contrast for someone of his generation who had grown up online. It prompts a question: Who was he, or indeed, who are any of us, without our iPhones, our social media profiles, our access to the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips? As Seymour’s lawyers argued, do our deepest, truest selves reside online, reflected in our search queries and browsing histories?

All Bui would offer was that he was in a good place now. Then he had to end the call; he was getting a haircut. Even in prison, offline and disconnected, he still had an image to maintain.

The Truckee Street arson case stands as a stark example of how technology, initially developed for convenience and connection, can become a powerful tool for law enforcement, capable of solving crimes that might otherwise remain mysteries. But it also serves as a cautionary tale, highlighting the delicate balance between public safety and individual privacy in the digital age. The legal battles over keyword search warrants are far from over, and the outcome will shape the future of surveillance and privacy for millions.