It amazes me that 6.5 years after Snowden, people aren't aware of this stuff. The police, the FBI, and everyone down to your local scout leader have a shit tonne of information about where you are, where you've been, who you've been with and talked to, what you've searched etc.
FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
241–250 of 516 posts
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surveillance in 2021 is way different than it was in the 60s.
So are police methods and brutality. In the 60s they would just brutally beat and imprison everyone at the protests directly. They did not need to track protesters afterwards, they were already in jail or hospital.
Even Russia cannot detain everyone at a protest. Most typically the leadership is followed and under covers trail them at protests and they get bagged.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well GPS is 1.2 to 1.5GZ and you can get accuracy to a few meters easily. I have a higher end module that gets down to a meter[1]. Seems obvious that G4 which uses roughly same frequencies but with cell towers vastly closer than a GPS satellite could get 1M. [1] Give it a few minutes and it'll pin point where my desk is inside my office.
GPS does not use triangulation. It does some real dark arts physics wizardry to compute a position. Nothing like that can be done for cell phone signals.
> GPS does not use triangulation.
LOL
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#244Earlier 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…
ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.
How do you train for anomalies, given that the data is widely different every time? Or in other words, how do you obtain a dataset that is representative?
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Insane? The capitol was assaulted in order to prevent the democratically elected president. An actual insurrection which maybe had some attempted assassination and theft/sale of national security secrets mixed in. Seems like a pretty reasonable response.
>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
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
No we cant, the US was never to be a democracy, and you can not engineer a better one We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government, we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society Attempting to "engineer" a better society is the exact problem we hav…
> the US was never to be a democracy, and you can not engineer a better one If it wasn't designed to be democracy, it should be trivial to design a better one, just like it's trivial to build a better automobile than a tricycle, which wasn't designed to be an auto. > We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government That's not incompatible with democracy, and suggesting that they are exclusive alternatives j…
>>That's not incompatible with democracy
Actually it is, democracy is 2 wolves and an a lamb voting on what is for dinner.
Democracy is incompatible with limited governance, and individual liberty as the majority (or even a vocal but powerful minority that controls the media) will always use the power of democracy to oppress those that do not have said power
Constitutionally limited governance that is immune to the will of the majority is the only way to ensure individual liberty, the founders understood this. This is why the ONLY democratic part of the US government at its founding was the House of Representatives. Over time we have made more and more parts of the federal government "democratic" like the Senate, and most recently the push to change the election of the President to be pure democratic as well.
This has been a DISASTER for individual liberty
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a use for this that isn’t to enable criminals?
Maybe... phone walkers who scrape your data while charging and hand it over to the cops?
The innovation that the gig economy needs.
While everyone is worried about criminals, everyone else that wants to disconnect and has benign data is doing just fine.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#248Presumably this also includes journalists and other people the government has no business tracking. At what point will people say enough is enough to these kinds of insane overreaches?
The same people complaining about the Patriot Act and cheering on Snowden for publicizing NSA PRISM are the same people cheering on govt mass triangulating civilians.
yep, and in the other half I know people who made their entire careers in surveillance and cooperating with the sort of organizations implementing these things, but it was "good actually".
Either way, no sympathy for these hypocrites.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.
it's inherently scary if one is somewhat anomalous in behavior.
Indeed. Witness all the folks who insisted Amanda Knox was guilty because she didn't act and look as they thought she should were she innocent.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#250The 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…
> Most of the people who went to DC did so peacefully and lawfully. 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…
There's a great YouTube video that collects a ton of footage taken through the day you can review to see the behavior of the protestors on that day.[1]
As an aside, since you appear to feel that breaching a threshold is grounds to review the behavior of all parties in the vicinity—regardless of their involvement—do you feel similarly about breaching country border thresholds?
The reason I ask is simple: nobody disputes that people who illegally entered the capitol should be held responsible. What is under dispute are the methods used to determine who that was. The particular method outlined in the article implicates a number of completely innocent protestors. Further, it leaves ample room for things like "lists" used to monitor protestors—even if they haven't committed a crime.
I'm trying to understand your principled threshold for engaging in law enforcement tactics that involve people who haven't committed a crime.