‘Locate X’ allows federal law enforcement to track phones without warrants | Hacker News Reader

‘Locate X’ allows federal law enforcement to track phones without warrants

protocol.com

154 pointsspking45 comments

> Locate X must be "used for internal research purposes only," according to terms of use distributed to agencies, and law enforcement authorities are forbidden from using the technology as evidence — or mentioning it at all — in legal proceedings.

So it's obviously useless to law enforcement, right? Since parallel construction and evidence laundering are illegal and not something that they would engage in…

The Bechtel of parallel construction.

"I'm a construction worker"

More seriously, I think real criminals will just leave their phone at home.

Criminals are unlikely to be better with computers than the general population. The general population is worse than most people on this site realise: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

There is strong selective pressure on criminals to become good at computers though, more so than the general population.

For some perhaps, but crime is hard work and criminals are lazy almost by definition.

Depends on the type, dealing drugs is like any other sales job, except way higher risk. Distributing cocaine is as complex as any other distribution job but you're not allowed to use established transportation methods and people might shoot at you. You've got to be a real self starter and creative thinker if you want to be good at it.

Then there's the contract negotiation where nothing is legally enforceable and personnel management where your employees could become addicted to stealing from you. It sounds way harder than my job.

I submit that is it lazy, because you are taking very high risks in order to achieve extraordinary margins. It's a shortcut taken by people who don't want to put the work into a dedicated career in legal sales. Obviously there are exceptions, but the majority of people who become drug dealers are doing it for quick cash.

More often it is because the person belongs to a community that is excluded from traditional carriers.

There's a big difference between "people who commit crimes" and professional criminals. If you make your living committing crimes it pays to do it properly, but most "people who commit crimes" aren't professionals.

Yo mean like those in the sinaloa cartel who built submarines, drones and erected their own cell towers?

Are you claiming the most competent 0.1% is representative of the entire category?

I must say from my observations the past few years - they are pretty quick to share with each other and change things based on things.. eg - the proliferation of video cameras everywhere - I now see much more petty crimes being done with hoodies / hoods up, hair, ear, and face covering is a thing today that was not so much a few years ago from the surveillance photos I've been seeing.

There was a time when you could say that seniors cant use tech or smart phones.. I've seen really old people using iPads better then me recently.

Streetwise wisdom changes faster today I think than it did in the 90s.

I think the biggest story was the Aron Hernandez(?) to show them that leaving a phone behind is the way to go.. and 'the wire' exposed the groups using burners only forever ago.

So there will always be dumb criminals, it does not mean as a whole they will refuse to learn.

'criminals' have been paying for extra-private versions of phones for years ( https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/fbi-u... )

and some connected folks are even making their own phones now https://www.insider.com/pablo-escobars-brother-roberto-escob...

change is certainly faster today then I ever remember.

That's possible until somebody links surveillance cameras and phone tracking. In a world where 99% of people have a mobile phone, I would pay special attention to everybody who has left his 'comfort area' without a phone. We are heading into a future without blue-collar crimes.

>>> We are heading into a future without blue-collar crimes.

and to a future where white-collar "legal-but-not-ethical" actions will be many...

Flames apart, I don't think blue collar crime is deterred by surveillance. You can't put everybody in prison, you can't fine people who have no money, you can't punish people who have not learned social life...

You make inverted prisions, aka gated communities.

That works right up until the point someone turns off their cellphone and goes hunting.

The problem with leaving all this data around is eventually the proletariat will begin prefering to share it all with each other. When they start doing that, they will begin to co-ordinate instead of compete. For awhile the information advantage will be with people who have money, but that can change.

Then they begin realizing things like Uber is owned by the Saudi Oil Fund and all the soulless corporations are really vampires owned by foreigners who only care to garden in their backyard but sh!t in yours...

I have a very optimistic viewpoint of this discovery; right now law enforcement uses it for an information advantage, but, that won't last forever.

My argument was

>That's possible until somebody links surveillance cameras and phone tracking.

Turning off the mobile phone doesn't prevent surveillance.

In an information society, intelligence will be paid handsomely. Whoever remains in the proletariat doesn't have the brainpower to circumvent surveillance, if it is possible at all.

Even if you did engage in acts of parallel construction, why would you risk exposing your methods for executing it on bypassing an irrelevant ToS? As quoted, you can still use the service for everything until the point of actually generating the evidence to be presented in court. Just use it to provide useful information to guide your actual evidence collection. The restriction on mentioning it in court is similarly silly, this is basically just a longwinded "We totally tried to stop abuse of our service" sticker.

>>So it's obviously useless to law enforcement, right? Since parallel construction and evidence laundering are illegal and not something that they would engage in…

You are a funny guy, as if cops and prosecutors don't play dirty. In this case they even feel like they're doing a great thing: he's guilty, who cares how we got him?

Whoosh.

Now that you mentioned it to be illegal, I suddenly have lost all my reservation against tracking random citizens. Why declare it for being for research though? It would be even nicer if they tracked citizens so that they do not have to feel alone.

No parallel construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction is exactly what stuff like this is used for.

Like Better Call Saul except its the cops doing the cobbler squatting - https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_hilarious_squat_cobb...

These law enforcement people are going against judges orders (i.e. the warrant requirement). The people in charge should lose their jobs.

A couple older links on Babel Street from Vice and TWP (2017):

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gv7g3m/meet-babel-street-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-this-com...

Babel Street's first customer was the Pentagon, according to TWP. It appears to have since spread with virulence to nearly all branches of government.

I wonder how viable they'd be (in cellphone location tracking) if permissions actually meant something in Android. I missed any mention of iphones in the Protocol article, but would default to equal cynicism.

Even if permissions are enforced, there will be enough apps that most users will be willing to allow to track them, and those apps can participate in this program without being exactly explicit about it to the user. The apps' privacy policies will essentially be a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo amounting to "and you have no privacy", and users won't even bother to read that.

Just because an uninformed user granted some app permission to track them, which app implied it could share that with LEOs, doesn't mean that the courts will consider warrant-less tracking this way constitutional. I don't know and can't predict whether the courts will or won't, but they well might not. There will be interesting cases arising out of this technology eventually. The SCOTUS has already said that police can warrantlessly use surveillance technology that is widely available to the public, but I doubt this tech will so become.

I (further) wonder what percentage of Fdroid apps lend themselves to Locate-X. Certainly qualifies for the "Anti-features" honor.

Regarding that which might arise; very interesting for sure, and almost certainly for the worse. I'll never embrace it, but do accept it - it's here to stay along with endless other innovations, or so I fear.

I've started using my smartphone as a landline receiver. I keep it plugged into the same power outlet all the time, check the messages and answer them through the PC if possible. We've come full circle.

In Soviet Russia, government tell phone network operator to spy on you.

In Capitalist America, phone network operator spy on you to tell government.

I'm amazed any self-respecting criminal would carry a smartphone (or arguably even a dumb phone) while committing a crime. You might as well spray-paint "I'm a criminal, come and arrest me at [address]" on a bedsheet and hang it off a motorway bridge.

It's not criminals who need to be worried about this tech.

Citation needed.

History books supply ample citations and experience. Authorities need a regular check. This fact was established in all modern democracies. That these checks don't work for modern technology is because of lacking competency from people responsible. And the fact too many people trying to publish wrongdoing end up in solitary confinement or need to flee the country.

Case in point: Julian Assange and Snowden

Plenty of criminals post their exploits on social media. And the police in the UK complain about it. The retardation on all sides is deep and pervasive.

Because bragging online about doing something is not really a confession? Probably not enough to get a warrant for phone tracking data?

The US use of it isn't the concern, we can regulate it and I do not see a reason for many agencies to have the tool or its like. What people should understand is once this tool exists then oppressive governments can either get hold of it and create their own. So go pick your favorite country known for oppressing people and you can guarantee this or similar is in use.

So what this leads to is further work on not allowing information of any sort off a phone unless approved by the user and features that let them know which apps have sent data and how much. Kind of like how tracking is being defeated on the desktop.

Pretty much the end run is burner phones/prepaid but any organized individual or group of who does not want to be tracked would or should already have gone down that route. Of course that only works to a point, where a large number of them congregate can provide agencies a lot of information as well.

> We can regulate it

Oh yes, you've been very successful in regulating the US government not to spy on people without warrants. You might want to read Snowden's book about the extent of this great success.

>So what this leads to is further work on not allowing information of any sort off a phone unless approved by the user and features that let them know which apps have sent data and how much.

This is the part of what you said that I agree with. Personal devices such as phones are far too much under the control of their manufacturers and not the owners of the devices.

Pretty unpleasant seeing the term open source applied like this.

This is why, despite the Stallman-type connotations, I have started exclusively using the term “free software” to call what I used to refer to as “open source”.

Lesser reason: Lots of software is source-available, but isn’t free-as-in-freedom in my view (including the AGPL!) and distinguishing that is very important for anyone involved in a business that uses software. The last thing an entrepreneur (who already deals with tons of existential risks) needs is an additional risk uncertainty. Free software is (in most cases, Oracle’s fuckery excepted) a bright line there.

(Sorry for veering off of the direct topic of TFA.)

Ironic that you say "despite the Stallman-type connotations" when that's exactly why Stallman advocates the term. For guy who's right all the time he really gets some unfair press.

Nobody is "right all the time", least of all Richard Stallman. He's a creepy asshole who doesn't respect boundaries.

This is the original meaning of the term ‘open source’, long before software. The software people shouldn’t have tried to repurpose an existing term. This is why they couldn't trademark it!

One of the requirements for Open Source Software according to the Open Source Definition is that you can use it for any purpose: "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". It makes sense to interpret "open-source data" the same way. The problem here as I see it is not the way the term "open-source" is used, it's that there should be legal safeguards preventing personal information of others from being shared as "open-source data" without their consent.

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