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Comment by slavik81 | Hacker News Reader

Turning off your phone leaves a hole in the data, but that hole can say a lot. The start and end times and locations are known, and can be correlated with other events to suggest why the hole exists and what might have happened during that gap. That sort of circumstantial evidence was a part of the recent Laura Babcock murder case.

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The US military has used phones’ on/off state in the Middle Eastern war theaters as an indication of potential terrorist activity. Based on other meta data like the number of hops to a known terrorist phone number (phone number A contacted phone number B which contacted phone number C which has contact with a terrorist’s phone number) and the temporal proximity to (assumed) terrorists switching their phones off and on, you got a terrorist rating. If you were unlucky, you got drone-murdered. I can’t find the exact source but this article[1] describes the practice of drone-murdering potential terrorists, and the Talibans counter-strategy.

[1] https://www.rt.com/news/nsa-drones-civilian-casualties-383/

That evidence also speaks to premeditation, and mens rea.

Or it could just mean that your battery died.

Sure, unless like most people you’re obsessive about not letting that happen. If your phone dies just long enough to hide your location during a crime there’s other evidence of you committing...

...let’s just say you’d better be perfect in every other aspect of that crime.

I'm not. My battery died yesterday and I managed not to kill anybody.

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