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FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

wusa9.com

51–60 of 516 posts

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#51
post #41

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 pho…

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

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More guns" is right. I watched it live and then dug through the videos, selfies, etc after and inside the Capitol, I found one guy who might have had a gun. The other weapons appear to have been convenient - a fire extinguisher, flags, etc. It looks less and less like an "insurrection" and more like jackasses doing jackass things.

Luckily, you're not a police investigator, because you can't be more wrong. All manner of weapons were confiscated - guns, ammo, explosives, crossbows, brass knuckles, etc. These were people who came to kill. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35214244/cap...

[deleted]

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More guns" is right. I watched it live and then dug through the videos, selfies, etc after and inside the Capitol, I found one guy who might have had a gun. The other weapons appear to have been convenient - a fire extinguisher, flags, etc. It looks less and less like an "insurrection" and more like jackasses doing jackass things.

This is a good point - this is the same group that is very gun rights focused and has been wandering around the streets armed with automatic weapons. It's kind of weird to see them without guns.

*semiautomatic weapons

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#54
post #16

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."

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

And another self-centered European who can't countenance that the rest of the world has neither incentive nor inclination to kowtow to Europe's whims, instead preferring to lecture us on our moral inferiority.

But such things happen, and we should both get used to it.

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#55
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who the hell has a 5G device?

Alot of people buy new Iphones.

You don't even need iPhones - most of the cheap prepaid brands that you'd see next to a payday loan shop are offering Samsung's lower grade phones or OnePlus 5G phones for free if you set up autopay (it's locked to that carrier). Of course it comes with even more privacy-violating bloatware than ever, but still - 5G is no longer a rarity or expensive.

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#56
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More guns" is right. I watched it live and then dug through the videos, selfies, etc after and inside the Capitol, I found one guy who might have had a gun. The other weapons appear to have been convenient - a fire extinguisher, flags, etc. It looks less and less like an "insurrection" and more like jackasses doing jackass things.

Luckily, you're not a police investigator, because you can't be more wrong. All manner of weapons were confiscated - guns, ammo, explosives, crossbows, brass knuckles, etc. These were people who came to kill. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35214244/cap...

Read your article. None of those things were found inside the Capitol.

If they didn't go into the Capitol, we're clearly talking about different groups. The unasked questions are: Why not? What were they there to do?

I did work in law enforcement in DC. One of the first things you learn is how to separate facts from conjecture from imagination. Mixing up the three isn't helpful to anyone and often taints you as an investigator.

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#57
post #42
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

What is the harm that is incurred when the tower records are transferred from the operator to the government?

Is it just too scary of a slope to stand on or something?

To me it seems to fit under 'reasonable' for the government to issue a warrant for presence information in the locality of the capitol. Given the 3rd party doctrine that probably isn't what happened, but the objection there would be more procedural than about control over data stored on servers.

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#58
post #16

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."

Gonna guess it's a privacy law matter. WUSA9 is local to me in DC and I can open it just fine.

Article body:

------------------------------------

WASHINGTON — If you were anywhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, you may be getting a knock on your door from the FBI.

A D.C. woman said an agent visited her neighbor and called her, telling them investigators were tracking people whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol during the riots.

"They don't call first, they just come to your house," Bree Stevens, a legal investigator who lives near Capitol Hill, said.

Stevens said an FBI agent told her they were reaching out to every single person whose cell phone put them near the Capitol during the riots.

She was out for a walk with a friend and his two young daughters on the afternoon of Jan. 6, but they were diverted by bomb scares until they ended up right next to the insurrection. Adults and kids were cordoned off and unable to get back to their apartments for four hours.

"You don't want to be anywhere where they're going to go!" she said on a video she shot while police officers in riot gear quick-stepped toward the Capitol.

Monday night, an investigator knocked on the door of her friend's apartment, who was "in house clothes" at the time.

"His little girl had just painted his toenails, that was a little bit embarrassing," Stevens said.

Stevens was out of town, so the agent called her on the phone number that the FBI had tracked.

"Extremely creepy, because he explained that they have everyone’s phone number from pinging off the cell phone towers, and they know basically exactly where you were, within the vicinity of the Capitol," Stevens said. "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."

Stevens said the agent told her she wasn't a suspect, but said he wanted pictures of things she might have seen.

Some civil rights advocates are concerned about the FBI's surveillance power.

When contacted, the FBI declined to discuss its investigative methods.

Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And another self-centered European who can't countenance that the rest of the world has neither incentive nor inclination to kowtow to Europe's whims, instead preferring to lecture us on our moral inferiority. But such things happen, and we should both get used to it.

I don't live in the EU currently but I don't think "no means no" and "informed consent is good" and "stop abusing and violating all of your users" is a bad thing.

edit: This news article of several paragraphs is loading content from 11 domains directly. If you unblock a few of them, it loads JS that collects and sending your data and unique identifiers to dozens of domains. This one page of text makes over 1,000 requests, almost all of them for tracking/fingerprinting. According to devtools, the page itself is 900KB ungzipped. The ad XmlHttpRequest load is 37MB.

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