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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

#461

Post by ForHackernews »

guilhas wrote: post #344
ForHackernews wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What euphemism do you prefer for trying to overturn the result of democratic election using violence?

Overturn by peacefully protest, showing Pence that there is popular support to investigate the election inconsistencies. The biggest act of violence was a policeman shooting a protester point blank in the neck, after being let through by 6 other policeman. I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?

> I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?

I have no idea! As I stated above, it seems like it was mostly a dumb angry mob that didn't think this through! That group in Michigan thought they could kidnap the governor and hold her hostage to remove covid restrictions, so maybe they were hoping to do something like that.

The fact remains, that they did use violence against people and property, and they might have done worse if they had managed to get their hands on politicians, or if the IEDs planted at GOP/Dem party headquarters had gone off.

If you want to call it a "mostly peaceful protest that featured one attempted violent coup" then knock yourself out.

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

#462

Post by williamdclt »

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.

Nobody asks to take the word of a random HN'er, just to suspend our judgment. This officer _coult_ be right, but I'd need data to believe it

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

#463

Post by emteycz »

mikem170 wrote: post #449
chronic3802 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd like to throw a thought out there: It is a problem if the government uses algorithms or ML systems that are secret and/or cannot be independently vetted by the citizenry. Judges cannot just sign off on warrants and sentencing just because "the computer says so", for all we know the computer may be programmed to say "poor and non-comformist = guilty" or some other nonsense, and/or reprogrammed after every election…

Is it what's happening? I thought "computer says so" triggers an investigation, which in turns produces reasoning for the judge, based on which the judge decides?

Is there any source that confirms the belief about judges deciding based on computer output in the past or in the future - relevant cases, law, etc?

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

#464

Post by KMag »

KMag wrote: post #149
stretchcat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight correction: Legal automatic weapons. It is hard to estimate how many people have or could retrofit semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons illegally. There are public plans for such modifications floating around the net, and at least some of them actually work, with some guns. And that's not counting the quasi-automatic stuff like bumpstocks or gimmicky 'trigger cranks.' I once met somebody who wears a li…

I think the risk-to-reward ratio is pretty low for having an illegal automatic weapon. It takes a lot of trigger discipline even for average trained soldiers to not to quickly waste most of their ammo with fully automatic weapons. Then again, just because it's not smart doesn't mean people don't do it.

Err... I mean reward to risk ratio is pretty low... probably even negative advantage gained, and lots of risk exposure.

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

#465

Post by williamdclt »

atlih wrote: post #353
williamdclt wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was going to react to that. I'm not from Italy or Spain but definitely could be in "so forth", I found that somewhat offensive. Especially coming from an American policeman, where police brutality is no small problem... I found him a good advocate of "don't talk to police", a lot of things he describes as standard police practice I would have hoped are illegal, and probably are in some EU countries (police ca…

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.

34.8 people murdered by the police per 10 million residents in the US, versus 3.8 in France, 1.3 in Germany and 0.5 in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...).

It's pretty weak evidence, as the officer in the video is talking about violence during interview, not about killing civilians and I'll agree that these are different things. But it's more than enough to make me skeptical that you should be grateful that you're being interrogated by an american officer rather than an european one...

Very anecdotally, I've watched/read a lot of american news during the elections and the idea that they are "more robust" or more impartial than european news makes me chuckle (at least western europe as it's what I know, and not pretending that our journalism is laudable either)

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

#466

Post by sneak »

thethethethe wrote: post #245
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>assault on the capitol; insurrection; attempted assassination I just want to point out the two problems with the rhetoric that mass-media and you are using to describe this event: 1. These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life. In using these words, you are conjuring extremely violent images within the minds of your listeners. When your listeners discover the truth of the event, that the images you…

> These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life. There were pipe bombs found. A guy had a car full of molotov cocktails. People were carrying guns and wearing body armor. Five people died. Its pretty surprising it didn't go much worse

I guess what they're trying to say is that if this had been a real insurrection, the bombs, incendiary devices, and guns would have been used, and in volume.

The fact that some were found, and basically none were used (none of the deaths were a result of people being shot by the rioters) indicates the level of seriousness we're dealing with here.

This is not to say that they shouldn't face consequences: they should; what they did is seriously illegal and, more generally, bad and wrong.

But it's terribly important to remember that what happened here was crime, not war.

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

#467

Post by MertsA »

Raed667 wrote: post #182
iamacyborg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that raises a whole bunch of other ethical questions though, like why you’re able to do this, what access to PII you have and why you’re able to run queries like this on a Saturday. I hope your employers keeps track of stuff like this.

Does your company log every select query you do on your prod db? If yes, does it automatically raise alerts when PII is accessed? I'm genuinely asking, I have never seen such a setup.

As someone who works for a tech giant I'd like to provide some input here.

1. Absolutely yes for ad hoc queries and there's a wealth of logging and privacy features built into all of our tools.

2. Absolutely yes and those queries are audited. For any query that matches some heuristics it'll warn us with a big scary message to make sure the query is legitimate work.

For the query linked above about checking who was around a location at a given time I'd probably be fired before the query completed. It's a pretty comfortable job but they don't mess around with user data, it's zero tolerance if it's abused and even if there was never a warning message your ass is still out the door when they catch you.

For all the flak tech giants get around PII I think it's horrifying that smaller players can still get hordes of sensitive data and yet have basically no safeguards to prevent misuse like querying whatever some internal engineer wants to look at.

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

#468

Post by sobriquet9 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #384
sobriquet9 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both GPS receivers and cell phone towers use the same basic approach based on the time it takes for the signal to travel between transmitter and receiver. The only substantial difference is that in case of GPS the calculation happens on the receiver side (GPS signals only go in one direction), while cellular service providers calculate time advance on the tower side.

AFAIK, cell towers don't even calculate phone position beyond what's needed to determine which tower should handle it. Maybe there is an element of triangulation in that, but it's far less precise and ambitious than GPS.

Cell tower needs to know timing advance [1] (how long it takes for the signal to travel between the tower and the handset) to make sure signals from different handsets do not overlap.

Once you know which tower the phone is connected to, coordinates of that tower, antenna pattern, and distance (from timing advance and speed of light), you can calculate approximate cell phone location.

You get more data if the phone moves or propagation changes and phone changes towers. In urban environment with many towers location obtained this way can be very precise. Not as good as GPS, but good enough to within a block.

This is a simplification. Real systems also use signal strength, take into account multipath propagation, and apply some filtering from physical constraints (how fast a cell phone can move).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_advance

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

#469

Post by javajosh »

seamyb88 wrote: post #360
javajosh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you agree with that advice then you shouldn't say anything in public either, e.g. here on HN, since that too can be used against you.

It's a talented cop who can tie you to a murder based on your favourite JavaScript framework.

Really good example of a strawman attack, though.

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

#470

Post by Drip33 »

person_of_color wrote: post #452
Drip33 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if I own the company and it's an acceptable Terms of Service use? What if I'm unemployed? Should I still be fired?
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