FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by dubbel » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #451

newacct583 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That 63% number for Germany fits very well with the fact that police in Germany it's always patrolling in groups of at least 3. I could imagine that that lessens the pressure on any single officer. In the US, if you are overwhelmed, you might be done, while in Germany there is always another officer ready to help. In case of vehicle stops, one officer can interact with the driver comparatively relaxed, which helps to deescalate, while the second officer is covering their colleague.

That is not to say that we don't have problems with police brutality or cover-ups here, they are just less deadly usually.

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

#472

Post by OnlyOneCannolo » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

thylacine222 wrote: post #419

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…

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…

I don't think the Intel/GE tool counts as mission critical. There are already radiologists reviewing scans. The tool just flags features they may have missed. Remove the tool, and you're back to business as usual.

I don't know much about ML. Are you saying that we don't know how to interpret any ML models at all?

Regarding your final point, isn't that true with or without ML? Any mission-critical design process should scrutinize the solution to see if it's complete enough and correct enough.

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

#473

Post by watwatinthewat » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #170

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…

>> Leaving a phone at home that is not answering calls or creating traffic during the time of interest is also a lead (if you already have a suspect). Interesting. My phone uses WiFi for everything by default. I wonder if they'd be able to tell (probably via Google?) If I were to leave it home for a day. On the weekend of course, since daily commute will hit the towers except for an atypical occurrence. With such cap…

Your phone still stays connected to a tower when it can unless you turn that off explicitly, else how would a call be able to come in?

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

#474

Post by exhilaration » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #310

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 are a suspect because you do not own a smartphone.

You don't need a smartphone to get tracked, even your flipphone reports its location, here's a wired article from 1998: https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tr...

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

#475

Post by jandrewrogers » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #458

jandrewrogers wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somew…

Your quote literally calls it a "destructive device", not an explosive, which is a term of art including mostly non-explosive things. The material in question is specified in the article. It is not explosive in any configuration as an incontrovertible matter of elementary chemistry. It does meet the criteria for being a destructive device in law.

Calling this "misinformation" is an accurate characterization. You are not responsible for what CNN reports but it should lead you to question the credibility of that news source.

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

#476

Post by thylacine222 » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #472

thylacine222 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the Intel/GE tool counts as mission critical. There are already radiologists reviewing scans. The tool just flags features they may have missed. Remove the tool, and you're back to business as usual. I don't know much about ML. Are you saying that we don't know how to interpret any ML models at all? Regarding your final point, isn't that true with or without ML? Any mission-critical design process shoul…

That tool has the potential to systematically reduce the likelihood that a certain disease/certain class of people receives extra scrutiny from a radiologist. That's maybe not mission critical on a small scale, but on a large scale it absolutely is.

Deep learning models are black box models, which means they are not formally interpretable. You can still sometimes get interpretations out of these models using various methods, but they are fairly underdeveloped, and without actual theories of neural network behavior I don't see that improving anytime soon.

You're right, it's true with or without ML. In fact, it's true with human-run systems, too. Consider a police officer who is more likely to pull people over in a certain neighborhood, and that neighborhood was 95% AfAm. IF they were asked why they pulled over more people in that neighborhood, they could say they were discriminating against the neighborhood, which, in and of itself is not racial discrimination. Of course, further inspection of that police officer's records could show that they are biased towards neighborhoods with a high AfAm population, which would be racial discrimination.

The same scenario can easily arise in an ML context, but interrogating a machine is a very different context from interrogating a human. First of all, people believe that computers are innately 'unbiased' because they are computers, so making the case that an algorithm is biased is already more difficult. Second, going back to the point I made before -- interpreting a model is not the same as providing a human-readable explanation. Asking a question about racial bias in a model which doesn't even encode for race (as many do, in an ill-conceived attempt to be 'neutral') requires skilled people to understand how to ask the question and how to interpret the answer. There's no plug and play process that one can follow to "scrutinize the solution to see if it's complete enough and correct enough".

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

#477

Post by exhilaration » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

pnw_hazor wrote: post #414

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is this downvoted? It's completely true.

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

#478

Post by ForHackernews » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

HNfriend234 wrote: post #263

guilhas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no one was there for an insurrection. Thats a conspiracy theory by mainstream media and the democrats

I visit right-wing websites for research purposes and this is actually true. If you visit right wing websites and review posts about the jan 6th protest it was actually related to basically having a peaceful protest to put pressure on the electoral vote. Most of the flyers related to it and were extremely vague. The slogan was simply: "be there, it will be crazy" with no other concrete details. The reality is that th…

> Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information.

Don't take it personally, but this is nonsense. TheDonald.win (now patriots.win) was full of all sorts of violent rhetoric in the run-up to January 6. Maybe they've scrubbed a lot of those posts now, trying to avoid FBI scrutiny, but the general online mood was absolutely apocalyptic[0] in the lead up to that riot. If anyone wants to go digging, look for contemporaneous archives or screenshots, and keep in mind that mods have sanitized already sanitized some of the most obvious incitiment.

[0] https://patriots.win/p/11Ql6NZEuL/civil-war/

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

#479

Post by rbanffy » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

AWildC182 wrote: post #427

inefficient wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted. However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.

This. To put it simply, they like Precise data, not Accurate data. They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target, not a bunch of data points saying a bunch of things, one of which is actually right. Precision data gives them convictions and convictions give them promotions. As they say, any metric that becomes a target... This is why giving the police in…

> They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target

If your system produces data points with 8 significant digits of wrong data, we have two problems: the system and whoever approved the purchase.

Any convictions will have to be corroborated by other evidence.

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

#480

Post by rbanffy » Sun, Jan 24, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

da_big_ghey wrote: post #281

BurningFrog wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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."

We are not talking about black box models here. "Phones that pinged near the Capitol" is a very specific query. They want to identify those who trespassed and those who aided the trespassers. I believe it's pretty fair.