Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the difference though. This isn't a warrant against a person. It's a warrant against "anyone who google recorded as being in an area"
Police search areas around crimes, people known to be in those locations (log books, identifications on surveillance), and warrants against locations searching for evidence. Warrants don't need to be against a person.
“Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
191–200 of 256 posts
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#192In Germany the "Funkzellenabfrage" ("reverse location" request by cell) provided by the providers is used quite often. On the last Chaos Communication Congress there was a talk about this and the police uses it quite frequently. The guesses were that on average every german phone is identified multiple times per year during this procedure. According to the Berlin statistics from 2017 there were nearly 450 requests re…
of all places you would Germany is the country the most aware of the dangers of broad surveillance powers. Strange that police gets such a blank check...
But it should also be noted that the US had its fair share of influence in eroding the actual application of privacy laws in Germany, by pressuring Germany to modify its G-10 law to appease the NSA [1].
People need to remember that the German BND (German intelligence agency), traces its roots straight back to the Gehlen Organization [2], which was established in alliance with the CIA after the end of WWII.
It's this old shared-history that allows the BND and NSA to work as closely as they do, to this day, bypassing privacy protections of the German Grundgesetz trough designed loopholes and secret agreements.
Case in point: According to German law it was completely legal for the NSA to listen in on Angela Merkel's phone calls [3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz
[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... (Page 3)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization
[3] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-uerberwa...
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes. Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass hous…
This comment is unproductive and ridiculous. 1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel. 2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools". 3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen. This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected offi…
Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways.
Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people honestly think this is disproportionate for investigating a home invasion? I think the concern is not Google sharing this data once they have it. The concern is Google having it, in the first place (in personally identifiable form). There's a lot of unclarity about which free and paid Google services and products are and aren't tracked. Who knows if their DNS resolver or their wifi-visibility-to-phone-locat…
We know, because its outlined in their privacy policy that they store dns logs for 24 hours, and store the location data of devices which allow the location history feature, and provide data to governments who send a proper search warrant with reasonable cause.
What I do have a problem with is what this line from the article suggests:
>An Associated Press investigation last year revealed that even with these settings disabled, Google continued to collect and store users' location data.
Maybe I’m missing something from the TOS, but it seems to me that the opt-out process doesn’t do what it describes; so what is it for?
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I understand, every request has to be done with judicial approval, which is given every time since there's no mechanism to check for effectiveness after the fact and most judges have no clue how broad the request might be (and the police will certainly not dwell on that fact).
So the opposite of a blank check.
You seem to be implying that needing to go get blank checks with no meaningful questions asked makes something not a blank check. But that's exactly how checks work. They're pieces of paper after all. This situation is more like blank checks than if they had 24/7 access to the entire database.
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#196Asshats: cOnSpIrAcY ur paranoid lol haha
News: that feature is being used against you by authorities
Rinse and repeat. Never gets old.
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#197This feels like a method of catching criminals that criminals will rapidly adapt to avoiding. "Don't carry the thing that broadcasts your location at all times while you're committing a home invasion" seems like a pretty obvious thing to avoid once a threat model is understood. Regardless of the privacy issues, I don't anticipate this approach will stay useful in the long run.
So this approach will just ensnare random innocents, who happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Edit: Upon reflection, it's worse. Being aware of this approach, professional criminals could capture IMEIs in the target area for a while, write some SIMs, and carry some cloned phones during the operation. Then destroy all of those SIMs. So the police will target the people whose phones were cloned.
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good news! The train of logic doesn't do that! Traditional methods are just fine. Some technological methods are fine, others are not.
Ah, my mistake---you wrote "all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are not legal" and I think you meant it as "not all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are legal". English needs parenthetical binding. ;)
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate. Agreed. Also, all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are not legal. So let's take your examples one at a time: > Police collects data from security cameras, If a proprietor wishes to give the police footage. If not, they need a warrant in the U.S. to search them. If the police asked for a…
If your train of logic basically reaches the conclusion "police cannot legally investigate crimes," I'm afraid I have some bad news about the facts underpinning your train of logic, because society will not conclude crimes can no longer be investigated.
But then if this least generous interpretation you chose represented my train of thought, one would have expected me to clearly argue that both "road cameras" and "mobile service providers" are illegal. Instead I replied with, "Agreed." Did you read down to those parts? If so I'm curious what you thought that could mean in a worldview where police cannot legally investigate crimes.
Re: “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
#200> He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." ...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah? This blasé attitude about sweeping-up data of innocent people is preci…
All criminal investigations start with group of innocent people. That's the only way to investigate. Police collects data from security cameras, road cameras, credit card purchases, witnesses, and now from mobile service providers. I agree that privacy erosion is real, but you argument was not convincing.
If you start by making random accusations against innocent persons in an attempt to generate additional leads, you're not investigating, you're just playing "Clue".
Police resort to unlawful tactics when they have no leads to investigate and political/administrative pressure to close cases. Or when they are rewarded for making large seizures and well-publicized arrests, and are never punished for the sloppy work that led up to them.
The US system is supposed to encourage following the evidence to the suspect, rather than picking a likely suspect and then trying to connect that person to the evidence. "Parallel construction" is a direct attack on the presumption of innocence and personal privacy. It is part of a policing culture that encourages individual police to be lazy and slipshod in their investigations--and that's how you get 2 corpses and injured police at 7815 Harding Street, with some heroin dealers doing an orderly cleanup and evacuation at 7815 Hardy Street, even as the PR flack from the police union and the police chief are busy blaming the victims and doubling down on the botched raid. That's how flashbangs land in a baby's crib. That's how the family dog gets shot, no matter what.
When we do not make police work difficult enough that some investigations fail, one does not need to be diligent, attentive, and dedicated to pursue a career with the police. A person who is violent and sloppy can still get their promotions and pensions. Computer says arrest this guy, so cop goes out to pick him up. The person who is not smarter than the computer cannot recognize the limitations of the system. It becomes a magic box that spits out the right answers--most of the time--without having to do any of the homework.