“Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene

> I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction.

Which is exactly the problem. The system spits out a list of 25 names, 20 of them have an alibi and only one of the remaining five had the capacity to commit the crime. So you've got your man, all you have to do is dig up some evidence. Unless the true perpetrator wasn't on the original list to begin with, or fabricated an alibi, in which case you're attempting to convict an innocent person. Which huge databases are ideal for doing because it's very easy to use selection bias to raise the apparent probability of random events.

It's like the reverse pyramid scheme. You choose a stock and send brochures to a million people telling half it will go up and half it will go down. Then it goes up or down and next week you send brochures to the half million people you sent the accurate prediction to last week, telling half of them that a different stock will go up and the other half that it will go down. By the end of ten weeks you have about a thousand people who think you can predict the market when all you've really done is to start with a large pool.

"99.9% accurate" in a city of two million means that 99.95% of the matches are false positives.

You can't start with a list of names and then look for evidence it was them. You have to start with the evidence and see who it points to.

You're asking the previous poster to answer a question he has already sufficiently answered. Rhetoric or not, it's the truth.

While you may consider the literary sources he pulled from to be "BS", we've had more than enough precedent implemented in the last 30 years that these literary "cautionary" tales are instead of being used as a warning to not encroach on civil rights, are instead being viewed as instruction manuals for how to do so.

I.e. Semantic/linguistic engineering, appeals to nationalism, declaration of 'war' against nebulous but never seeming to disappear enemies, silencing or suppression of journalism/access to information, and engineering of artificial socioeconomic classes.

If you haven't read the books, and are just tired of seeing people talk about them, then I recommend you read them and take them to heart.

If you have read them, and yet still consider them irrelevant, then I can only question your motives/ position and whether it is fundamentally dependent on slowly eroding others right to be free of surveillance, because in no way whatsoever does the implementation details of the government in the United States proof its' citizens against these forces which are very actively employed by parties foreign and domestic.

I don't like to assume malice, but I find it absolutely mind boggling that anyone paying enough attention could not recognize this in good faith. It's just too painfully obvious.

So, if you truly aren't gaslighting, please enlighten me as to how you're trying to do anything but undermine actually valid concerns through rhetorically underhanded means? Because I'm honestly not seeing it.

You question them, ask if they saw anything unusual, ask if they saw anybody matching a suspect's description, spot a known perp, spot somebody staking out the place hours before the crime...