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FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
441–450 of 516 posts
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#442People make a big deal about cell phone tower ping data, but compared to the "anonymized" meter-accurate GPS and sensor traces that GLS uploads 10 times an hour and the massive datacenter power that Google has dedicated to storing this location data, this is complete chumpchange. They can track your footsteps and know which room and which floor you are on. They have been quietly building indoor maps of millions of buildings.
If you use Android, turn off "high accuracy location" and do not agree to any setting that prompts for sharing "anonymized" data. If you can, just uninstall Google Play Services.
If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly the same techniques are applied to the fishing industry to monitor for illegal fishing in protected areas.
Looking at AIS dropping out I assume?
Check out HawkEye 360. They use a cluster of three satellites to triangulate AIS and radio transmissions (CB/UHF/etc) and do a bunch of ML to detect people where they shouldn't be.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
These folks weren't smart enough to leave their tracking devices at home and a ton of them filmed their crimes. Everyone has a right to remain silent, but it's not going to help in most of these cases where the evidence is so abundant.
I wonder if these same techniques will be used to track down all the rioters and looters from this past summer. Or is it just used against particular groups?
Remember when police used an etsy purchase to make an arrest of a blm protestor
now they have mountains of pictures and video evidence and are only making a few dozen arrests
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#445People make a big deal about cell phone tower ping data, but compared to the "anonymized" meter-accurate GPS and sensor traces that GLS uploads 10 times an hour and the massive datacenter power that Google has dedicated to storing this location data, this is complete chumpchange. They can track your footsteps and know which room and which floor you are on. They have been quietly building indoor maps of millions of bu…
>If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.
People who challenge google policy seem to have a bad habit of being fired
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#446Forensic 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…
> 3. 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).
solution: always leave it at home
but then they will use the sensors from phones[1] in your vicinity to detect your particular brain waves... /s
1. super spying device
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#447A lot of comments here about ‘overreach’ ‘privacy violations’ and such as if the FBI is showing up and accusing these people of crimes. If you actually read the story, the one person who they quote explains they weren’t suspected of anything but the agents asked for any photos they had of the events. This is straight up classic police legwork...
> This is straight up classic police legwork...
Which may be built on the back of a massive privacy violation. Should location data be made available to the government when they don't have a warrant? Should they be allowed to "go fishing" with our data?
> they weren’t suspected of anything but the agents asked for any photos they had of the events.
There are plenty of other methods available to the FBI to achieve this goal.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I’d rather take the word of a random HN’er versus some guy who has actually worked with those European police forces.
I'd need a real study and not just a quote from a US police officer to believe that the US police is less violent than southern European police. There is so much statistics that they are more violent already, he need evidence to back that up.
He didn’t say European police were more violent (in general). He said they are more violent during interrogations.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. 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. We need to be able to trust this stuff.
Re: FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
#450This is cool! Good job on the FBI. Remember it's a good thing to have phones be pinging. 1. I want to be billed correctly 2. If my service drops often in a certain geo, I want engineers to be able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is and fix it. 3. If I get attacked by a shark, I want to provide breadcrumbs for rescuers to find me. 4. If my wife accuses me of going to the arcade, it is important that my dog runni…
There's nothing about this that's cool! Not even close.