181–190 of 516 posts
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.
My guess is that this being possible would be the norm, rather than the exception. And that keeping track of individual queries is not.
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…
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.
I'm genuinely asking, I have never seen such a setup.
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…
The big deal here is not the technology, it is that the FBI is involved in tracking participation of a protest. For the past year we have had not-always-fully-peaceful riots with many deaths and tremendous amount of property loss. Through all this, the FBI never breathed down the neck of the protestors- not even those who could have been actually committing a crime. Most of the people who went to DC did so peacefully…
What does the political issue (left or right) have to do with this? Isn’t this a discussion about the surveillance state?
In this case that people become suspects because they happened to be near a riot.
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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?
Obviously people doing tracking with warrants will have useless data too and stop asking for that kind of dataset.
All cells phones, at all times, are tracked everywhere. I'm sure there are 1000's of cameras that are also used to capture visual data (in DC area). Every person flying (domestic/international) is already tracked. MC/VISA/Bank/ATM records are tracked. Every txt, post, voice call, letter you send, package you receive, is tracked (OCR's). Your vehicle is tracked via programs like Onstar, etc, even if you don't sign up…
Yeah but the funny thing is that these surveillance networks never actually seem to be used to solve normal crimes. Is it laziness on the part of the police? Are they trying to reserve these systems for more serious crimes so we forget they exist? Is it just a matter of time before police culture catches up and we see license plate readers, cell phone records, CCTV networks, etc used to track down petty thieves and r…
As in cases of anyone possibly interacting with a production server, there may be interviews with those who may have "logged in" or accessed to such systems to help find a root cause.
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?
There are plenty of times I wish I was connected but not tracked all the time because I get distracted with my device easily while Im just not used to being with no connectivity any more. Hiking, running errands, you name it.
Might as well pollute the data set for everyone else while you’re at.
All cells phones, at all times, are tracked everywhere. I'm sure there are 1000's of cameras that are also used to capture visual data (in DC area). Every person flying (domestic/international) is already tracked. MC/VISA/Bank/ATM records are tracked. Every txt, post, voice call, letter you send, package you receive, is tracked (OCR's). Your vehicle is tracked via programs like Onstar, etc, even if you don't sign up…
What is your purpose in posting this kind of extreme message claiming privacy is dead? Do you want people to give up on privacy and surrender themselves? Or, do you want people to be inspired to fight for more privacy? I would like to know what you intend for me as the reader to take away from this message, if you wouldn't mind clarifying.
The big deal here is not the technology, it is that the FBI is involved in tracking participation of a protest. For the past year we have had not-always-fully-peaceful riots with many deaths and tremendous amount of property loss. Through all this, the FBI never breathed down the neck of the protestors- not even those who could have been actually committing a crime. Most of the people who went to DC did so peacefully…
The story is about phones near the capitol building, not attendees at the Trump rally near the White House and certainly not the entirety of DC.
Most of the people at the capitol seem to have breached the perimeter, in fact. I haven't seen any coverage of a static demonstration that stayed outside the barricades anywhere. Once those fences went down the whole mob went across.
Can you point to the people at the capitol you think were incorrectly snared by this surveillance?