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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

#311

Post by lawnchair_larry »

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...

This is just wrong on so many levels. You even included the widely debunked (even by her own colleagues!) Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 project lies. Cops do not care if you are “weird”.

Police do in fact exist to enforce the law. It really is that simple.

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

#312

Post by Dylan16807 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #216
Gibbon1 wrote: post #197

Earlier 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.

Technically it's not triangulation, it's trilateration.

But the math is not significantly harder. The only meaningful quirk is that without a perfect clock you don't know the exact distances to each satellite, instead you have distances a+n, b+n, c+n, etc. Still though, you're just looking for the spot where your numbers line up. There's no wizardry in the "compute a position" part of GPS.

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

#313

Post by lawnchair_larry »

powersnail wrote: post #295
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.

Not just policing. I've found that in USA, the society in general wants to meddle with people's business. Me and my buddy were standing on the sidewalk of a bridge, making a time lapse. Within one hour, someone called the police on us twice.

How can anyone possibly draw conclusions about the USA based on this? Like, really stop and think about all of the fallacies here.

Do that 10 more times on 10 different bridges, and I’ll be shocked if that happens even one more time.

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

#314

Post by stevespang »

Lying to a Gov't agent is by far the most common way they put charges on you. Don't talk to them at all, other than uttering: "with all due respect, my attorney speaks for me on all matters".

Refuse to say anything else. You go to the bottom of the heap because you are the hardest to gather evidence on, so they twist you around in a conversation to get a lie, then they arrest and prosecute.

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

#315

Post by mschuster91 »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #212
Raed667 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is standard practice at large companies with proper data controls. Usually they have a "break glass" feature for emergencies and don't let any humans access PII without a damn good reason.

99% of "marketing" companies are shady fly-by-night ops, are you expecting any standard procedures from there?

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

#316

Post by lawnchair_larry »

ficklepickle wrote: post #252
exporectomy wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do that with their human brains. I've been stopped by the police for: - Sitting in a parked car in a suburban street for too long. - Going shopping at 2am. - Walking under a bridge at night. It's OK as long as they quickly realize you're harmless and leave you alone.

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.

Haha, having spent time above and below 49, I would say you couldn’t be more wrong with that perception. In any American city, especially big liberal ones (which is most of them) you can forget about societal norms. There are weird and crazy people everywhere. Nothing is “weird” to anybody who has spent any amount of time in them. Everyone walks right past a circus on their way to work. Cops pay no attention. Ask a New Yorker about their favorite subway stories. It’s hard enough to get a response to actual crime, let alone a cop waste their time on someone acting weird. North of 49, there is way less for them to focus on. Traffic enforcement as a means of revenue generation is huge up there.

It’s important not to confuse media narratives and cherry picked videos with trends. It’s also important not to generalize across such a diverse set of individuals and jurisdictions. You’ve got everything from LAPD to an elected backwoodsy county Sheriff.

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

#317

Post by roywiggins »

For what it's worth, the FBI isn't the only entity keeping tabs on cellphones around the Capitol. The place is probably one of the more heavily surveilled spots on the planet:

https://gizmodo.com/israel-allegedly-installed-stingray-devi...

It will be interesting to learn how the FBI got this information, if the story is true. The government has been brushed back on requests for geofence warrants before:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/new-federal-court-ruli...

That said, if a phone pinged from inside the Capitol during the riot, that seems like it could be probable cause in and of itself. Most phones that pinged that day inside the Capitol were being carried by people committing criminal trespass sort of by definition. It's almost a perfect argument for a geofence warrant.

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

#319

Post by AtlasBarfed »

SQL2219 wrote: post #318

I watched the summer riots on youtube live streams, I don't recall the FBI using this technique for the tens of thousands of man-hours spent looting, burning and rioting in Portland, LA, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC or Atlanta.

In Minneapolis for the George Floyd riots they tracked down the right-wing agitator "umbrella man":

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/us/umbrella-man-associated-wh...

Maybe they used the same techniques there. Does that make you feel better?

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

#320

Post by joefife »

SQL2219 wrote: post #318

I watched the summer riots on youtube live streams, I don't recall the FBI using this technique for the tens of thousands of man-hours spent looting, burning and rioting in Portland, LA, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC or Atlanta.

Yes, that's because they weren't trying to stage a coup.
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