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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

#451

Post by bzbarsky »

newacct583 wrote: post #393
atlih wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Largely true. It's not that the US police are less abusive per officer or per interaction, it's more than the US does way too much policing .

How are you defining "way too much policing"?

Just looking at Western Europe (arbitrarily defined, granted, and leaving out some really small countries) in the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen..., the US has fewer police per capita than (in increasing per-capita order) Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain. More police than (in decreasing per-capita order) England+Wales, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway.

The US has about 25% more police per capita than Norway. Germany has 63% more police per capita than the US does.

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

#452

Post by person_of_color »

Drip33 wrote: post #151
DebtDeflation wrote: post #8

>"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…

You should be fired.

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

#453

Post by YuccaGloriosa »

sneak wrote: post #271
ficklepickle wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a weird person who grew up in the USA (and eventually left for just this reason), I can attest to the accuracy of this analysis. I even wrote about it recently: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...

That font on your article looks awful on my phone

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

#454

Post by brantonb »

grumple wrote: post #163
vmception wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#455

Post by joncp »

Drip33 wrote: post #151
DebtDeflation wrote: post #8

>"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…

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

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

#456

Post by valvar »

kaishiro wrote: post #422
valvar wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not particularly, no. The nature of having caught a "criminal" means the crime has already occurred. Crime prevention is less a cause of justice and more a cause of social work.

I would imagine that past offences correlate quite strongly with a proclivity for future offences. Hence reformation and/or incarceration should reduce the number of opportunities for repeated offence.

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

#457

Post by kaishiro »

valvar wrote: post #456
kaishiro wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not particularly, no. The nature of having caught a "criminal" means the crime has already occurred. Crime prevention is less a cause of justice and more a cause of social work.

I would imagine that past offences correlate quite strongly with a proclivity for future offences. Hence reformation and/or incarceration should reduce the number of opportunities for repeated offence.

For an individual, yes. However criminality is not a finite resource. You can't lock up everybody.

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

#458

Post by shakna »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #104
shakna wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More guns and C4, fewer selfies. It's not like there weren't homemade explosives found on the site: > Coffman, 70, told police he had mason jars filled with "melted Styrofoam and gasoline." Federal investigators believe that combination, if exploded, would have the effect of napalm "insofar as it causes the flammable liquid to better stick to objects that it hits upon detonation," according to the court record. [0]…

FWIW, those aren't explosives. Flammable, yes, but definitely not explosive. Spreading gross misinformation like this is part of the problem.

> The court documents said that those items and the explosive-filled mason jars "in close proximity to one another constitute a combination of parts" that could be used as a "destructive device."

I used "explosive" because that was how it appeared in the court filings. Without knowing the precise mixture, it could result as either something to cause a conflagration, or a detonation.

Calling it misinformation is somewhat disingenuous when not all the information is publicly available.

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

#460

Post by White_Wolf »

anoyesnonymous wrote: post #417
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...

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