FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol | Hacker News Reader

FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

wusa9.com

369 pointsdanso492 comments

Forensic methods used by police and intelligence go much deeper than just looking at phones near the crime scene.

1. They look at phones moving towards the crime scene and going dark when getting close. This is also how you can detect secret meetings between people. They move towards the same area and shut down their phones.

2. They look at suspect phone going dark anywhere around the time of the incident.

3. Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect).

3 raises a very interesting and somewhat concerning possibility. In the near future as AI develops more in the crime detection arena you may become a suspect for crimes occurring in your geographical area based on things you are not doing or based on some set of states your smart devices have that match a statistical model of a suspicious person. The idea of becoming a suspect because you didn’t touch your smartphone during a particular timeframe is chilling.

You can become a suspect for all sorts of random things you have no control over, like being near a crime, knowing certain people, etc.

I don't see how it can work any other way.

The problem is that one is explainable and the other is not. "He was near the scene of the crime and has no convincing alibi," is very different from, "The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant." People being targeted for being anomalous is bad, but centralizing and scaling it up is worse.

I doubt that is something to be much concerned about, as I doubt there would be much use of anything that produces lists of suspects without explanation. What would one do with such a list? It would be like getting a bunch of anonymous tips all saying that a different person did the deed, without any clues to follow up on.

Getting a list of suspects is rarely a problem for law enforcement; the difficulty is in winnowing it down to the actual culprits. When a body is found, for example, family and acquaintances are all initially suspects, and experience has shown that summarily dismissing any of them, merely on intuitive grounds, will eliminate some fraction of actual culprits.

If a system did start suspecting the actual culprits with a significantly higher success rate than people achieve, there would be much reason to reverse-engineer the process in order to figure out how this was accomplished, as doing so would provide clues (and, ultimately, evidence) that otherwise could only be found by an independent process.

This assumes that due process exists, such that unsupported accusations are not taken as evidence, but if due process has been abandoned, we would have a much greater problem than that posited here.

> The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant.

Mission critical ML systems (G/FB ads, crime forensics, medical decision support, financial algorithms) do not work like this.

The designers know exactly which features are causing responses/predictions in the model, their respective perturbation sensitivities, and have clear bounds regarding adversarial inputs/outliers.

“Not knowing how the model works” is definitely true for deep learning, though.

To me "being a suspect" is a long way from a warrant being issued.

If cops can get a warrant on mere hunches, then I agree we have real problems. But a separate problem.

> "The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant."

We are not talking about black box models here. "Phones that pinged near the Capitol" is a very specific query. They want to identify those who trespassed and those who aided the trespassers. I believe it's pretty fair.

It means the person is a suspect. It means we might have to ask them a few questions. Doesn't mean they did anything.

Being near a crime when it occurred is entirely different than your phone being at your house when a crime occurred somewhere else.

Which means there will be 100 suspects where usually there would be maybe 2. Which means the data is useless and therefore won't be used.

Law enforcement doesn't want a system that incorrectly flags hundreds of people, unlike what some people seem to think. They want systems that reliably flag potential suspects, because that reduces work in stead of increasing it.

That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted.

However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.

When the crime in question is a headline crime they're happy to go through hundreds of "leads" in order to find someone they can pin it on.

Unless they can use it target they people they already "know" committed the crime, maybe?

All metadata being collected for the lifetime of all our phone numbers also includes all relationships, with varying degrees of separation.

Or even data from genetic testing, literally showing relationships.

Eventually everyone is a potential criminal and guilty until presumed innocent.

I recall (likely pre-covid) seeing a story posted here of some unsuspecting schmuck who became a suspect in a crime because his smart watch showed him circling near the area on his usual bike route.

Scary times.

Perhaps this story about a Florida man and his fitness app data that "placed him" at the scene of a burglary because he had the misfortune of having ridden by the crime site three times during his ride?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-ru...

Being a suspect does not mean you are guilty. Being arrested and charged does not mean you are guilty.

This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system.

Being arrested, even if never convicted, even if never charged with a crime and released with a hug and an apology, will have long-lasting negative effects on your life. For example, a citizen of a Visa Waiver Program country cannot travel to the US visa-free for the rest of his or her life if they have ever been arrested. They have to apply for a visitor visa and convince an immigration officer that they deserve a visa. Just a simple mistaken identity arrest can make the rest of your life difficult and there is nothing you can do to fix it, you just have to endure it.

It's almost become that arrested is conflated with guilty.

> This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system

The sickness is in how the criminal justice system works. Jury trials are a rare edgecase, most detminations of guilt are made by DAs. For most people in this country, being arrested and charged means you will be pushed into a plea deal and those that fight for their innocence face retaliatory harsh charges and sentencing.

That’s already a thing, not a future possibility. Jogging too close to a crime can get your location subpoenaed from Google or whoever has it. Stories crop up on HN occasionally about this.

ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.

What is even scarier is the likelihood of law enforcement agencies buying tech from fly-by-night companies who will use all of the buzzwords in their sales pitches (AI, ML, big data, etc) but who have no real knowledge of such things and are just selling a shit product that will entrap innocents.

You will end up with "Computer says no" situations if there are no knowledgable humans that review the decisions from the models.

It's really no different in banks but they are regulated and must provide proper reasoning to denied customers for the models they use in my country. It's not enough to say "your score is too low".

It's very easy to create artificial stupidity!

They already do that with their human brains. I've been stopped by the police for:

- Sitting in a parked car in a suburban street for too long.

- Going shopping at 2am.

- Walking under a bridge at night.

It's OK as long as they quickly realize you're harmless and leave you alone.

Policing in the USA, to a nearby outsider, appears to be more about enforcing societal norms than safety or laws.

It seems to me they harass anyone they perceive to be abnormal.

As a delightfully abnormal human, I'm very glad I was born just north of the 49th parallel. It's not perfect, but I do feel free to be myself.

We have had the RCMP racially profiling native Americans and picking on people of color. The exact reason they are not supposed to pull you over for offenses as you mentioned but need a reason such as speeding or failure to follow traffic laws. It's NOT OKAY and should not be considered normal for them to do.

Human brains tend to be stateful, they can be talked to. And they're only deployed at small scale. AIs don't update and can be deployed at scale.

How do you train for anomalies, given that the data is widely different every time? Or in other words, how do you obtain a dataset that is representative?

I'd argue that it is often difficult to impossible, but that doesn't stop companies from making AI/ML products for law enforcement. I'm someone who regularly trips up my bank's weird behavior detection system, and have my debit card frozen more often than it should be because of my purchasing patterns and travel.

it's inherently scary if one is somewhat anomalous in behavior.

Indeed. Witness all the folks who insisted Amanda Knox was guilty because she didn't act and look as they thought she should were she innocent.

This is such a general bs statement

This already happens, most of us just don't live in the neighborhoods where it happens. That's the unfortunate reality of today's America. It's also the reason that these techniques will be employed in a ubiquitous fashion in tomorrow's America.

If we wanted to stop this, the time to complain was years ago when the practice was started in the drug war. Or even recently, when the practice was employed during the BLM riots. Any attempt to stop it now brings howls of racism. Causing police departments and other law enforcement agencies to double down on insisting that they use it on everyone in their attempts to prove the people screaming racism wrong.

Like with any other form of surveillance, if it's a bad practice, then it shouldn't be used on anyone, regardless of race.

Thats his point this was being done years ago but white americans were not part of the demographic surveilled this way so didn't care now that they are and it gets stopped because of it then people accusing the police and government of racism are correct.

Point is, the time to stop that particular practice was in its infancy. Waiting until the practice is both widespread and normalized is a losing strategy. The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. To come along and unwind all that now is sisyphaean. We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. And certainly not allowing privacy violations that affect others, then trying to prevent the very same privacy violation from affecting our own.

The people doing the violating are going to double down. They don't want their critics being proved right. They don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. So what are they going to do?

As privacy activists, we need to make it easy for potential partners to cooperate with us. Right now, we're making it very difficult for potential partners to cooperate with us. We're putting potential partners in very difficult positions, and then asking why they won't support us?

Yet another reason to not let them normalize mass surveillance.

You are a suspect because you do not own a smartphone.

You don't need a smartphone to get tracked, even your flipphone reports its location, here's a wired article from 1998: https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q

There is a low tech solution to every problem.

For a real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusi...

I would think a warrant would still be required, so not as minority report as all that.

There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent. We do want to catch criminals. That's the whole point of having law enforcement. It's funny that in America, people seem to have so given up on the idea of the police being honest and competent that all they want is to reduce their power. They don't seem to want reform and instead would rather suffer from crime than be investigated by the police.

Becoming a suspect shouldn't be a scary thing to avoid. You should be able to just ignore your status and wait for the police to exclude you. But somehow it's a problem in America that people just accept.

It's generally well accepted in the criminology field that you can reduce crime and that actually the most effective way to reduce crime happen well before and are not related to policing anyone. No one wants to suffer from crime by inaction.

>There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent

"there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly" Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Because basing the system on the assumption that police will always be honest and competent is what got us into the situation we're in. Once bitten, twice shy.

I'm talking about accountability, not blind trust.

Are these methods actually used by police, or are these speculations based on the sort of inferences police could draw?

I am also wondering the same. Would be great if the OP would provide some sources around this.

>3. Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect).

Won't most phones being left at home generate no traffic because it's connected to wifi? AFAIK most phones turn off their mobile data connection if connected to wifi. It's also not too unreasonable to have very little baseline voice traffic, since everyone's texting these days. As for texts, it might be suspicious if you have a high baseline amount of texts, but it's also not too unreasonable for someone to communicate almost exclusively using chat apps (eg. signal, imessage).

Maybe the data connection, but not the radio that's listening for incoming calls (and it's periodically pinging the closest cell tower so that the cell network knows which cell tower to send that call to)

Location and traffic data still happen over wifi of course, so I wouldn't think that's considered "gone dark"

I was more thinking of data collection by cellphone companies, but what you've described can conceivably be done if you had cooperation from os vendors (apple/google).

Probably that's not what happens.

Elaborate?

Yikes, I don't know if I'd call it "forensics" using a negative to suggest a positive. That actually sounds pretty dystopian to me.

What happens if you just happen to be in the area of random nefarious deeds and your phone runs out of battery? Or maybe you accidentally left your phone at home? Now you're caught up in some drag net you had nothing to do with? Cities are large and a lot of things are going on all around us all the time...

Interestingly the same techniques are applied to the fishing industry to monitor for illegal fishing in protected areas.

Looking at AIS dropping out I assume?

Check out HawkEye 360. They use a cluster of three satellites to triangulate AIS and radio transmissions (CB/UHF/etc) and do a bunch of ML to detect people where they shouldn't be.

Regarding 3 I’ve been thinking of launching a courier service for this that would pollute data on a wide scale.

Basically a “phone walking” service that also charges your phone.

Could just be a side gig for Uber drivers, having phone lock boxes in their cars. The infrastructure is already there, phone lock boxes for charging exist in airports and nightclubs. This would be one that moves.

It sounds to me like something that it would be basically impossible to get enough clients for that you could charge a small amount to make it worthwhile, so if you can't get a lot of clients you have to charge a large amount, but if you charge a large amount you shut even more people out that just are a little paranoid and care about the polluting data as a privacy thing, so basically at the point where your pricing could work would have to be for criminals, and then you have to have clever criminals who are organized.

on edit: wait, with proper marketing maybe great for celebrities. might need some extra services.

Subscription service like everything else whether the subscribers use it often enough for themselves, drop a couple lockboxes in uber driver’s cars. Free advertising to other uber riders, no ongoing overhead costs for operation.

Service just needs to exist.

Its not economically “unviable” its also not economically “worth my time to make”, but for someone else that gets one idea in their life, maybe its worthwhile for them

Is there a use for this that isn’t to enable criminals?

I don’t see how you can have it both ways. Any privacy protections for the average law-abiding citizen is going to help out the criminals too.

The question is what the non-crime use case is. I can't think of such a thing. In any event, having your phone in an uber with a bunch of other phones and not following "normal" uber ride patterns would be yet another detectable pattern.

Of course. All privacy is like that. All encryptions is like that.

Depends on whether you consider the people doing warrantless tracking to be criminals.

Obviously people doing tracking with warrants will have useless data too and stop asking for that kind of dataset.

I like to think of it as phantom cloning. You physically could be where you normally are at home, or out somewhere else with no phone, or out somewhere else with a burner. All while what people normally use to identify you is moving around randomly.

There are plenty of times I wish I was connected but not tracked all the time because I get distracted with my device easily while Im just not used to being with no connectivity any more. Hiking, running errands, you name it.

Might as well pollute the data set for everyone else while you’re at.

I remember a former-NSA penetration tester telling me, a naive college hire, that for us to be successful developing BitLocker Drive Encryption, we’d have to make it good enough for terrorists to be willing to use it. It was a few years after 9/11 and that was a sobering conversation.

To protect against harassment: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2019/08/t-mobile-hands-over...

Yes. Protecting innocent people from getting caught in the fallout.

It seems the idea is to make (extended) phone tracking unviable and therefore stop the practice; not to enable criminals, but to avoid the side effect, which are perceived not worth the risk (in GPs opinion).

Maybe... phone walkers who scrape your data while charging and hand it over to the cops?

The innovation that the gig economy needs.

While everyone is worried about criminals, everyone else that wants to disconnect and has benign data is doing just fine.

Law enforcement isn't going to tell you their capabilities or what behaviors put a red flag on you. This "cell phone pinged near the capitol" is the kind of language I expect them to use in a press release. It's generic enough and close enough to true that it conveys the basic idea without revealing secrets.

Another recent example is how the FBI was asking people to help identify people who entered the White House on Jan 6 by their pictures. I'm sure the FBI has some of the best facial recognition software on the planet at their disposal and they knew who those people were in real time during the event. Asking the public to help identify people serves two purposes. First, it doesn't reveal their full facial recognition capabilities to other threat actors. Secondly, it trains the population to snitch on each other.

Forensic methods used by police and intelligence go much deeper than just looking at phones near the crime scene.

It’s amazing how efficient the FBI has suddenly become, practically overnight.

>> Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect).

Interesting. My phone uses WiFi for everything by default. I wonder if they'd be able to tell (probably via Google?) If I were to leave it home for a day. On the weekend of course, since daily commute will hit the towers except for an atypical occurrence.

With such capability I feel like it's obvious they don't want to stop certain things.

Your phone still stays connected to a tower when it can unless you turn that off explicitly, else how would a call be able to come in?

Good point.

> 3. Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect).

I wonder if there’s any value to putting a phone in airplane mode and saying you were watching a movie or having a date night with a partner. Probably only useful if someone pulled logs off a phone within a short window of time.

Well during covid my phone doesn't leave home 99% of the time, so that wouldn't tell them anything.

Where did you learn this by the way? (I'm assuming this is not just a speculation.)

I read books about spatial techniques used in forensic investigations and listened some lectures. The company I worked for used to have law enforcement customers needing GIS and data mining consultants.

I think with open WiFi networks and city mesh networks, using a WiFi-only tablet (probably iPad given their treatment of unique device ID's and privacy to prevent tracking by commercial device catchers) with a VPN is probably the best way to avoid this type of surveillance.

Although it does leave you in a sticky situation if you can't find an open network.

3 could also be perfect. Call your friend, let him come pick your phone up and show it a good time, while you go commit a crime, perfect alibi!

I know of a murder case where the suspect is trying to use a web page refresh in the middle of the night as evidence he did not kill his lover. The prosecution thinks it was an automatic refresh but have difficulties proving it.

Browsing fingerprints would not be the same.

You don't have to browse all the time, if it's a pattern just being alongside friends phone, and your phone is locked - it'd make sense. You're enjoying conversation, he's doing the spotify playlist..

There you go.

Gait recognition is supposed to be as good as a fingerprint. Plenty of video footage to identify everyone there even with masks on and no phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Gait_as_biometri...

So if you want to do something illegal, put a small stone in your shoe to change things a bit?

Gaits, like fingerprints, would do a pretty good job of matching a suspect to evidence, but if they have a gait (or fingerprint) and there is no match in the system, then what?

Are you aware of a database of everyones gait to match against?

> 3. Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect).

solution: always leave it at home

but then they will use the sensors from phones[1] in your vicinity to detect your particular brain waves... /s

1. super spying device

Good thing I rarely answer calls and my phone creates traffic on its own. Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if I could just spoof my phone's traffic with simple scripts.

basically leaving you phone or going dark is by itself already suspicious behavior warranting a quick interview with the police AI-based precognition screener and/or dispatch of a police welfare check drone.

If you've never seen it, it's worth your time to watch "Don't Talk to The Police", a lecture by a law professor, in case the FBI, etc. come knocking on your door.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

It's a video that even lawyers should watch to remind themselves just how harmful talking can be.

Here's a great example of a lawyer in need of a refresher https://youtu.be/_rVsRmcE-u8

These folks weren't smart enough to leave their tracking devices at home and a ton of them filmed their crimes. Everyone has a right to remain silent, but it's not going to help in most of these cases where the evidence is so abundant.

Not only that, but the videos I have seen are from people so proud of themselves for trying to take over the government.

I wonder if these same techniques will be used to track down all the rioters and looters from this past summer. Or is it just used against particular groups?

That’s some next-level reality distortion to frame this as “against particular groups.” Unless you define the “particular group” as people that directly attack the heart of the government.

The actually violent leftie anarchists knew all this stuff ahead of time and didn't leave digital trails. Their whole gig was opposition to the police, which means they knew what they were facing and how the system worked.

What's notable about the capitol mob is the fact that, while yeah, they knew they were attacking congress technically, they figured that doing it in service to a sitting president made it legal somehow.

Needless to say, one of those motivations is a lot scarier than the other.

Remember when police used an etsy purchase to make an arrest of a blm protestor

now they have mountains of pictures and video evidence and are only making a few dozen arrests

Literally thousands of protestors were arrested over the summer, violent and nonviolent alike. Hundreds had the shit kicked out of them by police and have no recourse, please take a few hours and watch some of the videos. It seems heavy handed policing, brutality and large numbers of arrests are certainly happening to only one group, just not the way you are implying.

I've never been in law enforcement, but I think as in any other resource-constrained endeavour, effort and resources have to be prioritized after triaging tasks. I'm guessing in this case, it would be by the severity of the alleged crime). Also, it has become apparent to everyone - not all "protests" are equal, hence not all responses will be similar.

If you are from EU take it easy at 27:25, I’m sure there’s no data about what he’s talking about.

Yeah, I was going to react to that. I'm not from Italy or Spain but definitely could be in "so forth", I found that somewhat offensive. Especially coming from an American policeman, where police brutality is no small problem...

I found him a good advocate of "don't talk to police", a lot of things he describes as standard police practice I would have hoped are illegal, and probably are in some EU countries (police can lie in interview??)

Just because there's a lot of news of US police brutality and little or no news from [insert country]'s police brutality, that data point could just as well mean that the news are more robust in the US than that there's less of it in other countries.

Oh yeah. They're allowed to say pretty much anything they want.

One basic interrogation technique involves lying to you about what you're suspected of. The interrogator might accuse you of something they KNOW you didn't do. He then notes your reaction.... typically you will be outraged and confused.

Later when he accuses you of other crimes, he studies your reaction and compares it to the earlier reaction. He already knows what you look like when you truthfully deny a crime. Is your denial different this time? Yes? Then that gives him a hint that his current accusation might be accurate.

Yeah. I’d rather take the word of a random HN’er versus some guy who has actually worked with those European police forces.

I'd need a real study and not just a quote from a US police officer to believe that the US police is less violent than southern European police. There is so much statistics that they are more violent already, he need evidence to back that up.

Nobody asks to take the word of a random HN'er, just to suspend our judgment. This officer _coult_ be right, but I'd need data to believe it

Unrelated, but when I saw this first comments were still allowed.

Everywhere on YouTube it seems comments are being disabled on new and old videos :/

It's because leaving comments enabled invites the worst of humanity to post excrement on your videos.

It's a well known issue.

Unless you have time to devote to deleting offensive comments (and many comments are just swear words copied and pasted a few hundred times), just disable comments.

Often case it's the author disagreeing with a good number of the viewers, and not any spam or vulgar content.

Watch this 2 times.

Well, if you agree with that advice then you shouldn't say anything in public either, e.g. here on HN, since that too can be used against you.

Can you think of a way that talking to the police might be different from posting on HN when it comes to self-incrimination? If you truly can't just let me know and I'll give you a hand, but you should try the exercise yourself first.

It's a talented cop who can tie you to a murder based on your favourite JavaScript framework.

Who said anything about a murder?

Why don't you come in to clear the air about these JavaScript muders? Just a friendly chat...

Are you talking about getting downvoted? Or how are people using things against one other on HN?

Unless you use your real name and really start mouthing off, this isn't really the kind of network the DA is going to start shooting off subpoenas to....unless you Enron...

You know what... Nevermind.

All cells phones, at all times, are tracked everywhere. I'm sure there are 1000's of cameras that are also used to capture visual data (in DC area). Every person flying (domestic/international) is already tracked. MC/VISA/Bank/ATM records are tracked. Every txt, post, voice call, letter you send, package you receive, is tracked (OCR's). Your vehicle is tracked via programs like Onstar, etc, even if you don't sign up for the service.

People are waiting for the day when you have zero privacy and anonymity. It's already here. Everyone should assume they can or are being tracked all the time.

And yet, violent crime this year is at a multi-decade high[1]. It's one thing to suffer the indignity of a surveillance, but it's quite another when the surveillance doesn't even deliver its purported benefits.

[1] https://time.com/5922082/2020-gun-violence-homicides-record-...

The “multi-decade high” here is the highest in 20 years, which is two decades - a time of historically low crime. “Multi-decade” sounds like a much longer range than two decades.

That article throws out a bunch of numbers without really putting things in a proper historical context. Violent crime has fallen dramatically since the 90's and the murder rate is about as low as it was in the 60's in 2019 (according to the FBI). While a ~35% spike is alarming, one should look at what the full 2020 stats end up being.

Furthermore, with the massive disruption of the Covid-19 crisis it'd going to take a lot of analysis before we can draw any useful conclusions.

But to your main point, I'd agree that surveillance doesn't really buy you safety. Crime has a lot of facets and just increasing the number of security cams and license plate readers is no substitute for problems with the criminal justice system and socioeconomic woes.

It’s pretty clear that a huge percentage of police budgets have nothing to do with public safety. All one needs to do is point out how many small towns have APCs for some inexplicable reason. It’s not a huge jump to assume that a non trivial percentage of police techniques don’t have anything to do with stopping crimes either.

This is only “clear” if you are completely unqualified to make such assertions but do so anyway to fit some narrative.

It’s not hard to discover why some departments have APCs (which are used extremely rarely) and how much they actually spend on them (almost nothing, they’re free). By and large, Police budgets go almost entirely to personnel costs.

LAPD spends 94.4% on salaries. That remaining 6.6% covers everything including equipment, helicopters, cars, body cams, firearms, IT infrastructure, forensics labs, and supporting services. They spent more on servers, radios, and body and dash cams alone than they did on ground vehicles.

http://www.lapdpolicecom.lacity.org/112415/BUDGET.pdf

You’re correct that a lot doesn’t have anything to do with stopping crimes though, but since that is not their primary responsibility (nor should we want it to be), this is expected. They are not psychic, so they cannot really act on a crime until the crime happens. As you can see from this thread, doing anything proactively is not something that the public wants. Most prefer to be left alone until they have done something wrong.

Nearly all of that gear was distributed by the DOD after the war and it was already paid for. Nearly all of it is never used. When it is used, it is in fact used for public safety. It’s not like they use the SWAT team to get groceries.

That sharp rise in crime makes 2020 dissimilar to recent years which largely continued a multi-decade decline in violent crime.

Could it be there is something else peculiar to 2020?

Well, realistically, it isn’t about preventing crime, it’s about catching criminals. (I’m not a fan of all this)

Isn't catching criminals a pretty good way to prevent crime?

No one said the surveillance was meant to stop poors stabbing each other. Its for protecting assets and securing power.

Surveillance is hardly the only variable in play, though. Unemployment is also at a multi-decade high, due to covid. Seems like the second option passes the Occam test a bit better to my eyes.

Yeah but the funny thing is that these surveillance networks never actually seem to be used to solve normal crimes. Is it laziness on the part of the police? Are they trying to reserve these systems for more serious crimes so we forget they exist? Is it just a matter of time before police culture catches up and we see license plate readers, cell phone records, CCTV networks, etc used to track down petty thieves and robbers?

Last year the police were begging for help to solve some of the gun store robberies that happened during the BLM unrest. Why did they need the public's help? They could have checked cell phone records, stitched together traffic camera video, and likely tracked down the suspects within weeks.

I think the most likely scenario is that we gave all these tools to create a surveillance state, but the bureaucracy is too lazy to use them.

Should be feasible to track all contacts for covid cases through existing intelligence infrastructure. But we don't.

Didn't you hear of Snowden's revelations?

NSA has full access such data. The police does not.

The police cares about murders and bank robberies. NSA does not.

The police and other areas of the government who apparently doesn't have direct access to the NSA data just buys it from brokers anyway.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/22/22244848/us-intelligence-...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/09/us-secret-evidence-erode...

The data is already being used by domestic law enforcement in a technique called parallel construction.

Police are busy searching private DNA databases for serial killers and trying to normalize that avenue.

They are used in murder cases

Why did they need the public's help? They could have checked cell phone records, stitched together traffic camera video, and likely tracked down the suspects within weeks.

They will mysteriously remember that they can do that in the next spate of unrest, now that it serves no useful purpose.

Putting my tin foil hat on real quick. Just wait until they implement AI into all these sensors to "predict crimes", turning life into Minority Report. The interesting part is its the common people who will naively go along with it to feel more safe while at the same time further imprisoning themselves.

They've been doing this for years. Chicago has a list of everyone that will get shot (or shoot someone) over the next year or so. It's like 2k people with 90%+ recall. St Louis has something similar. But it hasn't exactly stopped crime.

Sci Fi is fun, but crime is a social phenomenon of the type that tech is deeply unsuited to actually solve. Privacy is a legit consideration in the short and long term, but AI taking over isn't really.

How does this work for people on these lists? If Chicago PD thinks I'll be shot, do they warn me?

Predictive Policing is already a thing. It was in use for a decade by the LAPD in the US. See:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lapd-precision-pol...

and

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-21/lapd-end...

The TV Show Person of Interest's "Samaritan" AI, is how I see reality to be when we get general purpose AI for police use.

There will be no "good AI" (aka "The Machine" in the show) to combat it.

This is kind of what Musk has been constantly warning about. Also important in another scenario is that legislators, police heads, and civilians simply have no idea how task specific AI (rather than general purpose) that governs them works so its a tiny unelected shadow club mass governing people.

Add license plate scanners and high resolution police/military drones to that list.

And yet, the DMV cannot have access to a I94 form even if they already have all the information.

And they also need me to print it so that they can scan it back in their computer system !

What a world we live in.

Yeah; on one hand, we're tracked everywhere. On the other, since the systems are so disparate, it takes a lot of leg work to put the data together, even without a warrant. It's better than nothing.

That is a function of funding. The DMV isn’t well funded but we’ll pay 8 and 9 figure contracts to domestic intelligence agencies.

Accuracy is generally not great compared to gps. When towers are more dense accuracy is increased. However, an LTE phone generally pings a tower every few minutes on average so you can track people pretty well. Telecom operators have tools (generally 3rd party) that indexes and geolocate this log data from the towers in order to solve network issues. It can obviously also be used for law enforcement purposes but probably require a warrant

Just don't use services that track you. It's possible to live a fairly normal life despite all this. I do it. Don't carry a cell phone, turn off javascript everywhere, use a non-onstar/etc car, don't fly commercially, use cash for in person transactions and bitcoin (or monero) online where you can.

All that said, I'm not planning on trying to overthrow the government or anything stupid. I just don't like being spied on. I'm glad these treasonous idiots carried their ankle bracelets (cell phones) while they committed their crimes.

I'm not too surprised at the spatial resolution that basestation multi-lateration gave either. The low noise and synchronization of clocks in modern cell phone basestations are getting really good. GPS is not required.

No. At this point you become a standout anomaly, or you will become one, in the not too distant future. The progress of society is becoming increasingly collective. Individual choices are becoming less important. I'm not saying we're there yet, but already we're at a point where meaningful societal change needs at least a considerable group of people all acting together, and even then, fundamental changes have been taken out of people's hands altogether, unless "we" are prepared to go to extremes, which is simply not a characteristic of large groups, unless the situation has deteriorated severely, but be sure, our overlords will keep us minimally complacent enough. /rant

Sure. You stand out because they can't spy on you. The point isn't to hide. The point is to not be spied upon. I see this as a win.

The point about cameras blanketing DC reminded me:

Do we know if there are any security cameras in the US Capitol building? Were they all working? Has the footage from the insurrection attempt been saved?

I ask because the capitol seems like one of those places that would resist internal security cameras because congresspersons wouldn't want their meetings potentially being recorded. Plus the general incompetence of security leadership before and on that day makes me wonder if any cameras were actually in working order and saving footage.

-> the insurrection attempt

That's wording that made me think, and I had to actually look up the definition of insurrection. I think it was complete insurrection, not a just an attempt at it. But, maybe there's a legal definition or duration of success matters?

I'm always puzzled by posts like this.

What is your purpose in posting this kind of extreme message claiming privacy is dead? Do you want people to give up on privacy and surrender themselves? Or, do you want people to be inspired to fight for more privacy? I would like to know what you intend for me as the reader to take away from this message, if you wouldn't mind clarifying.

Why should OP draw the conclusion for you? Everything they’ve said is most certainly true. You can decide what you want to do about it.

For me, it makes the “going dark” claims that the FBI likes to drum up about encryption particularly ridiculous.

My intention for the reader is to make them aware. What they decide to do is their choice.

For what it's worth, the FBI isn't the only entity keeping tabs on cellphones around the Capitol. The place is probably one of the more heavily surveilled spots on the planet:

https://gizmodo.com/israel-allegedly-installed-stingray-devi...

It will be interesting to learn how the FBI got this information, if the story is true. The government has been brushed back on requests for geofence warrants before:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/new-federal-court-ruli...

That said, if a phone pinged from inside the Capitol during the riot, that seems like it could be probable cause in and of itself. Most phones that pinged that day inside the Capitol were being carried by people committing criminal trespass sort of by definition. It's almost a perfect argument for a geofence warrant.

A lot of comments here about ‘overreach’ ‘privacy violations’ and such as if the FBI is showing up and accusing these people of crimes. If you actually read the story, the one person who they quote explains they weren’t suspected of anything but the agents asked for any photos they had of the events.

This is straight up classic police legwork...

> This is straight up classic police legwork...

Which may be built on the back of a massive privacy violation. Should location data be made available to the government when they don't have a warrant? Should they be allowed to "go fishing" with our data?

> they weren’t suspected of anything but the agents asked for any photos they had of the events.

There are plenty of other methods available to the FBI to achieve this goal.

classic police work...always starts with contacting a person of interest and saying “your not a suspect, we just want you to come down and answer a few questions.” If you don’t, it’s suspicious and they will continuing investigating you as a person of interest. If you do, they will conclude you were suspiciously nervous and begin building by their case.

Now they show up to your house telling you they “pinged” your phone near a suspected crime “but your not a suspect, we just want to see the pictures on your phone”. Refuse to show them, and they already know you posted one or more (maybe subsequently deleted it) and maybe it’s obstruction of justice. Deny you have any, and it’s lying to law enforcement.

And if you make a mistake on a date or location, you are open to be charged with a making false statements -- a felony if you do it a federal agent.

Why is this downvoted? It's completely true.

Worth noting that the headline refers to "DC residents get visits", but the story is based solely on one person's account (so far). It's not unbelievable that the FBI would overreach in an investigation, but if the interviewee's account is true, we should in the next few days see more people come out.

I didn't catch this! Good point.

>"And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on my cell phone ping."

You don't get that level of granularity by merely triangulating cell tower pings. Sounds like they got GPS location data from people's Google accounts.

I have access to some marketing data and for fun,

select * from mobile_location where latitude between 38.88778433380732 and 38.891917997746894 and longitude between -77.01269830654866 and -77.00613225870377 and epoch_timestamp between 1609954200 and 1610067600

Returned quite a number of mobile devices accurate to the meter. Was fun to see which phone was in which room or blade of grass of the building. I'm not even American.

Yeah, that raises a whole bunch of other ethical questions though, like why you’re able to do this, what access to PII you have and why you’re able to run queries like this on a Saturday.

I hope your employers keeps track of stuff like this.

My guess is that this being possible would be the norm, rather than the exception. And that keeping track of individual queries is not.

What do you think, most such data comes from Apps, they just ask for permission and give you no rights at all. Location data is a such business, for traffic or business. Look at this example from Thasos. The look many hours and shifts are in companys and sell the data to traders. http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla-wsj/

Does your company log every select query you do on your prod db? If yes, does it automatically raise alerts when PII is accessed?

I'm genuinely asking, I have never seen such a setup.

> to some marketing data

I guess this part answers the questions of "why", "what" and "does the employer care". Well, at least these people now know what they did "not" have to hide the whole time.

It’s precise to the meter but is it really accurate to the meter?

You should be fired.

What if I own the company and it's an acceptable Terms of Service use? What if I'm unemployed? Should I still be fired?

Interesting. Who sells marketing data like this?

It's not triangulation, it's multi-lateration and the spatial resolution depends on just how good the basestation clocks are. And they've become very good. Every telco in the USA stores multi-lateration for cell handsets location for 2-5 years by default. They both sell this commercially and provide/sell it to authorities on request.

>Multilateration should not be confused with triangulation, which uses distances or absolute measurements of time-of-flight from three or more sites, or with triangulation, which uses a baseline and at least two angles measured e.g. with receiver antenna diversity and phase comparison.

Is that first "triangulation" supposed to be "trilateration"?

5G significantly increases granularity by a metric shit ton, and if they were continually pinging in the same area, eventually you end up with roughly one zone.

Could you share some resources with more information on this- how does it increase granularity?

Here's Verizon's explainer [1] about how 5G works. Basically, since the frequencies needed to transmit large amounts of data are so high (28 - 39 GHz millimeter wavelength bands), the signal does not reach as far as a 4G tower. Therefore, a higher density of towers is needed (500 feet apart to effectively penetrate buildings [2]), allowing for higher granularity cell-phone triangulation/tracking as a by-product.

[1] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach

[2] https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/cell-tower-lease-news/...

Who the hell has a 5G device?

Is this....a serious question? All new iPhones are 5G compatible for the start and they sell millions, and loads of other manufacturers have released 5G compatible phones. In fact I'd risk a guess that if you bought a phone in the last 12 months it's likely to be a 5G compatible phone.

Probably anyone that has signed a contract that came with a free phone in the last year and a half, anyone upgrading iPhones.

Lower cost prepaid carriers are also pushing 5G phones heavily (albeit somewhat crappy ones), and offering them for free.

It doesn’t matter if you have a 5G device, it is a function of the increased tower density. Those towers are capable of the old frequencies, too.

Alot of people buy new Iphones.

I’m guessing people who flew into DC on a weekday are more likely than average to own a decent smartphone. QAnon folk don’t seem to avoid mainstream technology in the quantity HN users do.

AT&T is still installing Carrier IQ on almost all Androids. That application is collecting info like GPS and barometric readings to estimate floor location in a highrise, etc.

Absolutely. In addition all carriers use multi-lateration and sectorization to fine tune location. The better the location the more valuable it is for commercial resale and CALEA sales.

Notice that all of this is entirely legal, above board, and you agreed to it as part of your service agreement.

Source: I worked for AT&T and Carrier IQ

> you agreed to it as part of your service agreement

"Agree" implies willful consent and being in harmony with the implied outcome.

People accept because they have no meaningfully acceptable choice - which is the exact target that carriers aim for.

They don't even need Carrier IQ, they can use Minimization of Drive Tests, it's part of 3GPP standards.

But even using timing advances, if the cells aren't too big, you get a pretty reasonable accuracy.

You don't get that level of granularity from a single ping, but you theoretically could from hundreds, the noise will tend to center around the true location.

Also consider that more than 3 stations probably were nearby.

Modern mobile networks choose the best 7 for the client but the number of towers within physical range getting pinged is quite substantial.

It's an awesome, deep and nuanced topic certainly not suited to a political HN comments section. "Timing Advance" is the probably the jumpoff keyword for anyone interested.

Mobile towers also use beam-forming in two directions and have a few other techniques to get better signals, the metadata involved with these things (if kept) essentially drops the error range down to GPS levels if not better.

LEO using cellphone triangulation is not new.

I worked as a network tech for one of the big providers. I was pulling tower location data for LEO regularly at request of corporate legal only. Though sometimes LEO would try to end run around and go to stores who would contact me.

I socially engineered them to believe I could not access that info without a code generated by corp legal.

Not true, of course. But hell if I was going to risk being mired in a legal fiasco for a possibly immoral investigator.

Tracking of our cellphones has been a thing since well before smartphones. Smartphones just enable it to be real time, and more granular than a tower triangulation.

> I socially engineered them to believe

You lied, which is totally fine, but trying to obfuscate that behind word salad is just silly.

You can be imprisoned for up to 5 years for lying to a federal investigator. It's up to 8 years for offenses that "involve" international or domestic terrorism.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

You want to be careful about that.

If you change the subject or redirect when someone asks you a difficult question you're not lying. That sort of thing could be called social engineering.

Obscuring information from Law Enforcement is still probably perjury if they find out and can prove you knew

> LEO using cellphone triangulation is not new.

Everyone was listening to Serial in 2014, and it went into depth on how it was done in the early 2000's.

Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.wusa9.com/article/features/producers-picks/fbi-tr..." on this server.

All European visitors, I take it?

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210120062149/http://www.wusa9....

This is cool! Good job on the FBI.

Remember it's a good thing to have phones be pinging.

1. I want to be billed correctly

2. If my service drops often in a certain geo, I want engineers to be able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is and fix it.

3. If I get attacked by a shark, I want to provide breadcrumbs for rescuers to find me.

4. If my wife accuses me of going to the arcade, it is important that my dog running in the park with my cell phone in his harness is being properly tracked and creating an alibi for me.

If you don't want to leave a trail of geo pings, don't carry around a device that literally could not work if it didn't leave a trail of pings.

IMO the embedding of electronics and tracking in every aspect of our lives becomes too complex for the average non-techie to make informed decisions about the technology they use.

Maybe it should be "obvious" with a phone, but what if your bluetooth headset tried to pair against someone's electronics and got detected? What about the GPS history from your Apple Watch (should that data be available)? How many RFID-tagged devices are in your wallet?

I'm not saying that any of these aren't convenient or worth the tradeoff, but the last assertion (telling people to just be smart about what electronics they bring) is not realistic as the vast majority of THINGS we own become trackable electronics, whether the average consumer knows it or not.

A fair point.

Ideally we can build ways to make it easier to learn how tech works.

God knows it took me decades to figure it out.

I was wondering if they were going to do this, and I'm on the fence. If they can accurately (90%+) get it to a very tight parameter, ok, but a lot of protesters in the general aread weren't actually involved in entering the building, so if they're getting investigated too, it's a bit of an overreach.

well, tbf it absolutely could work without a trail of pings. But no system is designed that way because metrics are, unsurprisingly, useful. All that said I still agree 100% with you, don't carry an internet connected GPS with you while you're out criming!

This seems like an extension of "“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” (NTHNTF) fallacy [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Identity-Privacy-and-Tru...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-...

[3] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/you-may-...

Not a big deal. Good engineering demands logged pings. Not doing that would be bad engineering.

Could it be abused? Sure. But that's why we need to continue to engineer a better democracy as well.

We can do both.

No we cant, the US was never to be a democracy, and you can not engineer a better one

We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government, we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society

Attempting to "engineer" a better society is the exact problem we have. That is Authoritarianism not liberty

Liberty is not attempting to engineer a better society or democracy, Liberty is allowing people to live their lives unmolested by government laws and regulations

There's nothing about this that's cool! Not even close.

"Access denied"? (UK)

Anyway, we're now going to see what happens when the huge post-Patriot act homeland security machinery is turned on people who thought they were untouchable, and all of a sudden a lot of powers that everyone was OK being used against nebulous "enemies" are going to end up in the news.

outline.com to the rescue:

https://outline.com/sf9LfV

GDPR'd?

I support law enforcement using tech where it is necessary and proportional, but completely against it when not the case.

This seems to me like a dragnet and I would hope the ACLU takes this up and hopefully the press can start to make some noise about it.

This makes me appreciate kill switches more on the librem five phone.

And it also makes sense why Apple doesn’t want you to be able to fully disable wifi on your phone.

> And it also makes sense why Apple doesn’t want you to be able to fully disable wifi on your phone.

If you're referring to the lack of a hardware kill switch, that's true for 99.9% of Androids too.

If you're referring to the temporary WiFi off toggle in the Control Center, the reasoning is that most people don't remember they turned off WiFi (my parents for example) and won't remember to turn it back on. But you absolutely can disable it by going into the Settings app.

Maybe that’s new in iOS14. I remember last year seeing a Shortcut for turning off wifi completely. But even then I thought it turned itself back on randomly.

You've always been able to ask Siri or go into settings to disable wifi since the first beta of that feature; I ran it.

I think it's nice since I frequently need to tell my phone to hop to mobile data while walking around campus since it's hopping from AP to AP and the control center switch is geofenced, so when I stop walking I'm almost always outside the geofence and wifi is back on like I wanted it to be.

Kill switches seem a bit silly against the US government. If you're doing something that drastic, it's probably better to take pains to organize without any electronics on you at all.

You’re probably right. But we’re also at the point where software is so tightly controlled by the hardware manufacturers that the devices simply don’t do what you expect them to do.

If I can flip a switch to disable wifi instead of tap three times, that’s a UX improvement to me.

Most common use case of disabling Wifi is when you're at a range where wifi traffic is so degraded that you're better off using the cell network. Thats why it is temporary from the control center but you can disable permanently in settings.

The way to disable WiFi on your device to change the password in the access point

It will still try to connect to wifi points that you happen to pass by, though.

People make a big deal about cell phone tower ping data, but compared to the "anonymized" meter-accurate GPS and sensor traces that GLS uploads 10 times an hour and the massive datacenter power that Google has dedicated to storing this location data, this is complete chumpchange. They can track your footsteps and know which room and which floor you are on. They have been quietly building indoor maps of millions of buildings.

If you use Android, turn off "high accuracy location" and do not agree to any setting that prompts for sharing "anonymized" data. If you can, just uninstall Google Play Services.

If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.

>If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.

People who challenge google policy seem to have a bad habit of being fired

If it matters that someone, anyone, knows you were at this or that location at this or that point in time, don't bring your phone with you at all. We're at a juncture where you cannot trust your smartphone (I'm looking at Android specifically) to not have its cellular transceiver running even when the phone is supposedly powered off.

> If it matters that someone, anyone, knows you were at this or that location at this or that point in time, don't bring your phone with you at all.

This hardly matters if your appearance is captured by no less than 4 live streams, an additional 6 videos and 21 pictures posted by third parties to social media. Not bringing your phone is the bare minimum, but not close to being enough to cover your tracks. Once someone with wide-enough information sources suspects you were at a location of interest, you are toast: it's the attack/defense scenario where defender has to get every step right. Any mistake by the defender (or their ally or even an npc), no matter how small, means the attacker wins.

It amazes me that 6.5 years after Snowden, people aren't aware of this stuff. The police, the FBI, and everyone down to your local scout leader have a shit tonne of information about where you are, where you've been, who you've been with and talked to, what you've searched etc.

I find it resembles the techniques we find ourselves doing in software engineering. Given good practice clear logs of events for traceability. As in a mass outage which everyone sees, which can be tracked backwards for root cause analysis and well as interviews with anyone connected to systems or vicinity at the time of event.

As in cases of anyone possibly interacting with a production server, there may be interviews with those who may have "logged in" or accessed to such systems to help find a root cause.

every few seconds your phone (if not in airplane mode) will contact all base stations whiting in range and send a globally unique identifier to it. it doesn’t matter if the base station is for your company or if it’s fake (stingray). even if the tower does not give you access, maybe it’s not the company you’re a subscriber for, they still know you were in that area

This is not true:

It is true that your phone listens to control channel on currently selected base station. It is also true that your phone scans other channels relatively frequently to see if a better signal is available, but unless the phone decides (based on data received from the network) to switch to another base station, it will only talk to the network about once or twice per hour.

The network can ping the phone if it wants (and does so whenever there is something to be signalled, or if law enforcement decides to).

That's a very interesting and more refined insight then people usually get (everything thinks it's ever few seconds etc). I'd love to know more about how the process works

Can one track/log how often a phone gets pinged?

There are a few CCC talks of interest around this:

https://media.ccc.de/v/ARMP3D https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11406-spot_the_surveillance

Only with a specially prepared phone. There was a talk about this a few years back at ccc

Presumably this also includes journalists and other people the government has no business tracking.

At what point will people say enough is enough to these kinds of insane overreaches?

The same people complaining about the Patriot Act and cheering on Snowden for publicizing NSA PRISM are the same people cheering on govt mass triangulating civilians.

That's quite a generalization, and not really the case going off people I know. Most aren't cheering on the surveillance state. Many are mocking the people who attacked the Capitol with their phones in hand, but that's not the same as approval of the big electric cage we're in.

And some of the same people who cheered on the Patriot Act and called Snowden a traitor are now getting swept up by government surveillance, after they committed serious crimes.

Many of these people are cheering for the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021.

Turning your phone off or leaving it at home is already used to identify suspects.

Yes. It is possible to believe in law enforcement and the curbing of privacy-invading legislation at the same time.

yep, and in the other half I know people who made their entire careers in surveillance and cooperating with the sort of organizations implementing these things, but it was "good actually".

Either way, no sympathy for these hypocrites.

If the technical capability exists, it is going to be abused. And there is no better catalyst for (ab)use than attacking congresscritters' personal safety.

These latest techno-authoritarian actions are best seen as effects from having lost the battle, rather than another front. For decades, clued in people have been droning on about the insecurity of cell phones allowing them to be persistently tracked by the network, the MITM-idiocy of webapps, etc. The best time to get people to care is before there is some real tangible threat that will make them seek the comfort of authoritarianism, but yet crickets. I blame the sheer amount of money behind big tech, making tech people turn a blind eye to the faults of centralized technology while pushing shiny-but-flawed technologies to the masses.

After something happens? Well of course the power structure wants to unlock phones, track phones, censor speech, etc. At this point, buckle up - political activism on the subject is done, or at least on pause for quite some time.

Huh? Insane? The capitol was assaulted in order to prevent the democratically elected president. An actual insurrection which maybe had some attempted assassination and theft/sale of national security secrets mixed in. Seems like a pretty reasonable response.

If that was an actual insurrection or attempted assassination, it was the weakest effort imaginable. That doesn’t necessarily change the thrust of your comment (that enforcement is appropriate) but the breathless hyperbole around what happened has really surprised me. An actual insurrection would have looked very different. More guns and C4, fewer selfies.

>assault on the capitol; insurrection; attempted assassination

I just want to point out the two problems with the rhetoric that mass-media and you are using to describe this event:

1. These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life. In using these words, you are conjuring extremely violent images within the minds of your listeners. When your listeners discover the truth of the event, that the images you've associated with the event do not match what actually happened, your listeners feel manipulated, they feel you're trying to deceive them, and you lose credibility.

2. If enough people keep parroting these particular words to describe this event, the meanings of these words become diluted. For example, prior to this event at the capitol, if you said "terrorist attack", my mind would imagine men wearing balaclavas, wielding AK's, beheading people on video, gassing villages filled with innocent families, scattering them as refugees across the globe. But now, if we accept this event at the capitol as a "terrorist attack", now I don't know if you're talking about a guy smiling and waving as he holds a podium, or if you mean a Wahabbi extremist raping a Yazidi woman after putting a bullet in her son's head.

Imagine this woman recounting her rape and the murder of her family, "I experienced a horrific terrorist attack." And then there's you, in referring to some guy taking a selfie at a politician's desk, "I witnessed a horrific terrorist attack."

Please, choose more precise, more honest words.

I don't see how putting everyone in a huge radius, journalists and those otherwise uninvolved included, under investigative suspicion and location surveillance to respond to what is only charitably described as an insurrection (the group was almost entirely unarmed) is in any way reasonable.

It seems like a massive overreaction. If we're truly interested in democracy and the rule of law, we'd do well to not shred our standard democratic and legal procedures (such as the presumption of innocence, and the fourth amendment's prohibition on searches without probable cause) the instant a few thousand angry, unarmed yahoos show up with pitchforks and banners and achieve precisely nothing.

We shouldn't even do that if a few thousand armed, trained people show up, with the express intent of doing battle, taking control, and holding territory (which, again, to be clear, is not what happened). We absolutely should not do it when a bunch of idiot yahoos break windows and set off fire extinguishers and steal shit.

Even had the building burned to the ground, universal surveillance such as this would not be a proportionate reaction.

Even if literally nothing had happened, the government still would have had this technical capability. I think that's what people are worried about, not the specific fact that they're using it to track down the Capitol rioters. If the FBI were evil instead of a force for good, they could use this capability to harass the "good guys".

Thank God the maga shaman didn't get his hands on the magic lecturn and legislate an election audit

Not to be a grammar nazi, but I fail to see how this sentence works "The capitol was assaulted in order to prevent the democratically elected president." On an emotional level, I can see how you see it as a threat to your illusions. Someone was trying to prevent your president from existing. It does sound scary and fits in line with the gnostic thought pervading the American left. "The world is broken, but we will fix it, and it will be not broken then." (Cue the unicorns...)

Now, addressing the actual proposition (short of an argument): Where was the "actual insurrection" and where is the evidence for "attempted assassinations" and "theft/sale of national secrets". I'm not a lawyer and certainly not in your jurisdiction, but it is apparent that you possess evidence of these three things. Hence, I urge you to contact the appropriate law enforcement and share your findings.

This is terrifying. I swear the tech community would have been universally against this just a few years ago. What happened?

I think people are also terrified by the political violence from both sides over the past year. That was obviously the impetus for this. Just as other extremist violence like 9-11 was the impetus for the patriot act.

I think there are still just as many of us who are against it as there were years ago, we're just no longer as vocal about it. A lot of us have given up being perceived as "doomsday" prophets. Mainstream culture doesn't really believe or care about mass surveillance until it personally affects them negatively.

Man all of this cool tech would have been useful during the... oh I don't know... entire summer of deadly riots and the formation of an actual rebel state in Seattle CHAZ

i will say this: consider from now on, no protester anywhere will have their cellphones on them.

Idiots who are worried about vaccines with chips ... you are willingly carrying it.

It blows my mind that a bunch of conspiracy-minded folks (the sort of people who won't get a vaccine because they think it contains a tracking chip from Bill Gates) would stage an insurrection and not turn their phones off!

Honestly, what did they think was going to happen? As the saying goes, "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." You don't get to fail miserably at your coup and then go back home to your regular lives.

>Honestly, what did they think was going to happen?

They thought they would succeed. The Democrats would be marched en masse to the gallows and revealed to the world to be the satanic blood drinking pedophiles the faithful always knew they were. The world would see the insurrectionists as patriots and heroes for stopping the CCP in league with the Democratic Party from stealing the election and denying Donald Trump his rightful second term .

Many of these people literally believe they're involved in a holy war and that Trump was sent by God, so for them, victory was a metaphysical certainty. The rest were certain Trump would pardon them in any case. Why bother with OPSEC when the Lord will prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies and your leader has infinite "get out of jail free" cards to hand out?

Because no one was there for an insurrection. Thats a conspiracy theory by mainstream media and the democrats

What euphemism do you prefer for trying to overturn the result of democratic election using violence?

Overturn by peacefully protest, showing Pence that there is popular support to investigate the election inconsistencies.

The biggest act of violence was a policeman shooting a protester point blank in the neck, after being let through by 6 other policeman.

I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?

I visit right-wing websites for research purposes and this is actually true. If you visit right wing websites and review posts about the jan 6th protest it was actually related to basically having a peaceful protest to put pressure on the electoral vote. Most of the flyers related to it and were extremely vague. The slogan was simply: "be there, it will be crazy" with no other concrete details.

The reality is that the actual insurrectionists were a small fringe group (Qanon) that managed to convince the rest of the useful idiots to join in. If you watch the videos of the siege you can see that it was mostly Qanon people leading the charge in while the other people simply walked into the building.

Of course comments like mine are not welcome because it paints a different picture compared to the narrative being presented in the media but the facts are still there. I encourage everyone to go online and do your own research. Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information. Same with the siege videos, you can watch the livestreams and reach your own conclusions yourself.

> Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information.

Don't take it personally, but this is nonsense. TheDonald.win (now patriots.win) was full of all sorts of violent rhetoric in the run-up to January 6. Maybe they've scrubbed a lot of those posts now, trying to avoid FBI scrutiny, but the general online mood was absolutely apocalyptic[0] in the lead up to that riot. If anyone wants to go digging, look for contemporaneous archives or screenshots, and keep in mind that mods have sanitized already sanitized some of the most obvious incitiment.

[0] https://patriots.win/p/11Ql6NZEuL/civil-war/

This isn't reddit, so the /s has to be presumed.

I just get: "Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://www.wusa9.com/article/features/producers-picks/fbi-tr..." on this server."

https://archive.is/vOVNn

Thank you

Another company that doesn't understand the first principles about data privacy and the GDPR.

Might be GDPR related if you are in Europe.

The FBI has been hiring advisors from China

Because that's legal. Totally acceptable under the U.S. Constitution /s

I watched the summer riots on youtube live streams, I don't recall the FBI using this technique for the tens of thousands of man-hours spent looting, burning and rioting in Portland, LA, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC or Atlanta.

I don't think its the FBI's job to figure out who smashed up a Target or looted a Footlocker.

Its definitely the FBI's job to figure out who breached a federal building, let alone the seat of our legislative branch during an active session.

That being said... the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and state agencies definitely do shady stuff and track people via their devices at protests. I'm remembering surveillance planes over Baltimore that were traced back to feds.

They pursued legislators and the vice president after gaining access to the building. The FBI should be aggressive.

Then you weren't paying attention enough, and just because you don't recall doesn't mean it didn't happen, which it did:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twitter-dataminr-police-...

Know where I recalled I read this? Here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23783503

Your linked article is about a company data-mining Twitter. TFA we are discussing is about the FBI getting location data from phones. These are two very different things...

Your point was clearly the broader law-enforcement tracking, you sought to draw a comparison between the two events to ask why one had been an infosec focus of law enforcement.

Yes, that's because they weren't trying to stage a coup.

In Minneapolis for the George Floyd riots they tracked down the right-wing agitator "umbrella man":

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/us/umbrella-man-associated-wh...

Maybe they used the same techniques there. Does that make you feel better?

Heh so steal someone’s phone and fedex it to the protest and back then return it to the owner (for maybe even a reward)

I find the rioting and looting and violence in American cities all summer much more disturbing than the half-assed attempt at the capitol. Especially when the violence continues in the nearby residential areas.

The people who invaded the Capitol Building are domestic terrorists who tried to overthrow the government. The former lot you refer to are just criminals. Huge difference.

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