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Comment by rsingel | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. Prosecutors now have so much more information left as breadcrumbs; GPS locations, tower pings, metadata, emails, social media posts, etc, than they ever had before the rise of smartphones.

It used to be easy for people to make anonymous phone calls from phone booths - try making an anonymous call today.

Strong on-device encryption of data at-rest has the nice effect of making mobile device theft much less attractive.

Strong encryption of data in transit, including auto-deleting messages, can prevent lots of other crime as well, and protects vulnerable people such as victims of domestic violence who may have to show their phone to their abuser at any time.

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This is really nicely put. It should be hammered home in response to pieces like this. Particularly the bit about people in abusive relationships, and also children of abusive parents. Vulnerable people need privacy much more than the rest of us. Even a shred.

The Austin bomber is a perfect example. They caught him because he brought his cell phone with him when dropping off the bombs. He didn't use it--it was just powered on and with him.

Imagine that happening before cell phones. The criminals carrying a tracker 24x7.

The Unabomber sent mail bombs for 18 years. The austin bomber gets caught in 3 weeks.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2018/03/21/authorities...

I used to work with the local Sheriff's Dept doing IT stuff. The detectives said they were amazed at how much data they could get from phones / cell providers. It's helped solve so many crimes like bomb threats, abuse cases, and even some murders.

They also said that if someone was smart, they would just leave their phone at home, or somewhere else as an alibi and do whatever. Then they would have to go back to the drawing board which they admittedly said they haven't had to do in a long while.

If you’re smart, not impulsive, able to plan and consider other points of view, you tend not to be the murdering, bomb threatening, abusing type. People who can lay plans and carefully follow through with them tend not to rob liquor stores, and deal drugs. If you don’t care about poeple, or hurting them, but can plan and have good impulse control there’s a world white collar crime, politics, business and law for you. In short, the police tend to deal with idiots, or people who have poor planning/impulse control.

In other words, the guy who plans out a careful alibi tends not to be the guy who needs one. The previous post mentioned the Unabomber, who was a rare example of someone who had excellent planning skills, high intelligence, and excellent impulse control. It took almost two decades to catch him, and only because his brother recognized his writing.

Burner phones don't seem to work either. Have seen more than one Dateline where they pinpointed the date/time of the cash sale and pulled store video.

I wish I could find the article but a few years ago I read a story that was every well written the went through in detail all the ways the cops have much more access to our private lives and data then they did even 20 years ago, and how the entire "going dark" excuse is really more accurately stating going back to the level of information they had around year 2000

I used to work with some detectives who told me this exact thing.

The "little tracking devices" helped them solve a lot more crimes than they ever dreamed of, but they said that it also requires a lot more paperwork, desk work, warrants, etc to do anything now. So even though it's easier, they have to jump through a lot more hoops to get the data.

They also said that that work is 90% of their jobs now. The other 10% is "non-it computer work."

It's a small local sheriff's dept (if that makes any difference).

The problem with that is, they continually make the process more convenient and streamlined for them. Warrants? Soon a thing of the past.

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