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FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol

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

#411

Post by powersnail »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #313
powersnail wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just policing. I've found that in USA, the society in general wants to meddle with people's business. Me and my buddy were standing on the sidewalk of a bridge, making a time lapse. Within one hour, someone called the police on us twice.

How can anyone possibly draw conclusions about the USA based on this? Like, really stop and think about all of the fallacies here. Do that 10 more times on 10 different bridges, and I’ll be shocked if that happens even one more time.

My bad. I was speaking in too general a tone.

I should have said that my interaction with the US society has been that people tend to meddle with others' business more often than in other countries that I've been to.

But, yeah, I have many more anecdotes.

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

#412

Post by djmips »

XorNot wrote: post #376
_underfl0w_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

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

#413

Post by curiousllama »

stretchcat wrote: post #398
curiousllama wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

If you’re on the list, you know. You’re part of a gang (or clique, as they’re apparently called now), probably beefing with another, and almost definitely carrying a gun on you for protection. You’re well aware.

The city has tried various interventions - social workers, police visits, calling the kid’s school/parents (a lot of the people aren’t 18) - but the things that work are the same as always: social support plus significant police presence in the neighborhood.

Which leads me back to my original point... they recently stopped maintaining the list IIRC because it just doesn’t provide any actionable info beyond what we already have.

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

#414

Post by pnw_hazor »

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #382
djrogers wrote: post #367

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...

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 ph…

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.

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

#415

Post by username90 »

refurb wrote: post #402
tuxone wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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.

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

#416

Post by Consultant32452 »

nabla9 wrote: post #33

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…

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.

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

#417

Post by anoyesnonymous »

nabla9 wrote: post #33

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…

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...

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

#418

Post by yters »

BurningFrog wrote: post #207
suifbwish wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

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

#419

Post by thylacine222 »

chronic3802 wrote: post #350
da_big_ghey wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 knowi…

This seems... incorrect.

First of all, deep learning absolutely is used in mission critical systems: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/intel-and-ge-healthcare...

Second, simply because designers use systems that are formally interpretable, that doesn't mean that designers know exactly what causes a given response in the model. Formal interpretability means you know what function the model is approximating -- there's a long way from that to a human-readable interpretation.

Finally, even if the designers can tell you what features cause a certain response in the model, they can only tell you that for features that are encoded in the data! There are plenty of features that aren't encoded in your data that can nevertheless affect the outcome of a model!

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

#420

Post by 7402 »

new_guy wrote: post #178
throwawy4rzn wrote: post #168

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…

> 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.

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