FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
wusa9.com
wusa9.com
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 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).
If we wanted to stop this, the time to complain was years ago when the practice was started in the drug war. Or even recently, when the practice was employed during the BLM riots. Any attempt to stop it now brings howls of racism. Causing police departments and other law enforcement agencies to double down on insisting that they use it on everyone in their attempts to prove the people screaming racism wrong.
The people doing the violating are going to double down. They don't want their critics being proved right. They don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. So what are they going to do?
As privacy activists, we need to make it easy for potential partners to cooperate with us. Right now, we're making it very difficult for potential partners to cooperate with us. We're putting potential partners in very difficult positions, and then asking why they won't support us?
It's kind of difficult when the privacy violations in question begin in secret. Consider police trying not to disclose their use of Stingrays, for example.
I somehow doubt police departments and intelligence agencies are going to agree to run all future uses of tech by a privacy watchdog, so how do you suggest getting ahead of the problem?
I don't have strong views on the right policy outcome, but it is not accurate to call this issue well litigated and/or settled law.
Just yesterday, NYTimes ran an article about DIA claiming a "commercial availability" exception to the only Supreme Court case addressing cell phone location data (Carpenter). If that is indeed DIA's rational, they are going to have some problems. For example, it is unlawful for the state to use commercially available thermal optics to surveil the interior of a dwelling without a warrant. I think DIA may be relying on dicta from Kyllo about devices in "common use", but their rational is secret so we won't know until it is... litigated.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveilla...
Presumably, this statement means that litigation will necessarily reveal the rational by presenting it.
Scary times.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-ru...
This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system.
Proving one's innocence once the powers that be have determined one to be guilty will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, will almost certainly mean loss of job, family and friends, etc. And you might still go to prison for the rest of your life anyway.
The sickness is in how the criminal justice system works. Jury trials are a rare edgecase, most detminations of guilt are made by DAs. For most people in this country, being arrested and charged means you will be pushed into a plea deal and those that fight for their innocence face retaliatory harsh charges and sentencing.
- 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.
Currently.
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.
I even wrote about it recently: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
Police do in fact exist to enforce the law. It really is that simple.
Police exist to "keep the peace." The question is whose peace are they keeping. Well I suppose the reaction of police at the Jan. 6 insurrection vs that of the BLM protests tells us a little. Or the union busting police did in the past. Or blocking the polls for minorities.
But it absolutely isn't "that simple."
They shot a woman in the neck. What’s the difference you’re trying to portray?
I've had two illegal stops in the past year because in one I took a swig from a soda bottle going by a speed trap and the cop wanted to see if it was alcohol. The other, a cop in an unmarked car tried to run me out of my lane to follow a speeder.
Some years ago I had to deal with a small town gumshoe in Indiana who had staked out an intersection of IN route 55. This was late at night in pitch black darkness. Indiana highway signs look like speed limit signs from a distance and IN55 in particular is hard to distinguish from the 55MPH speed limit signs. The local cops know this and abuse their power to make illegal stops.
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.2361263,-87.2433936,3a,75y,1...
Indiana requires signals 200 ft from an intersection in rural areas rather than the normal 100 ft. The county couldn't be bothered to have an advance sign for the intersection so I didn't know when to signal for the turn. He and I were the only two people on the road but clearly I was a major threat to public safety.
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.
Do that 10 more times on 10 different bridges, and I’ll be shocked if that happens even one more time.
I should have said that my interaction with the US society has been that people tend to meddle with others' business more often than in other countries that I've been to.
But, yeah, I have many more anecdotes.
Likely it would happen another 8-10 times. Happens all the time, the bigger the bridge, the more likely.
Get away from the wealthy areas on the coasts and "noneya business" quickly becomes the societal norm.
Only places rich and population dense do the police have the spare shits to give about what other people are doing.
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.
Heck, I’ve been stopped in NYC for “walking with a limp” (bike accident, fractured knee)...while wearing a $500 shirt and designer suit.
What you refer to as “cherry picked videos” are just the instances that happen to have been filmed. Seriously, after Central Park Karen and Minnesota, can we at least acknowledge there might be an issue?!
More importantly, parent wasn’t even commenting about race.
Did you try to make a joke ? Both of those are racist to the core. They are the same.
> It’s also important not to generalize across such a diverse set of individuals and jurisdictions.
Pick one.
It's really no different in banks but they are regulated and must provide proper reasoning to denied customers for the models they use in my country. It's not enough to say "your score is too low".
It's very easy to create artificial stupidity!
Becoming a suspect shouldn't be a scary thing to avoid. You should be able to just ignore your status and wait for the police to exclude you. But somehow it's a problem in America that people just accept.
"there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly" Neil Gaiman, American Gods
I don't see how it can work any other way.
If cops can get a warrant on mere hunches, then I agree we have real problems. But a separate problem.
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 knowing how the model works” is definitely true for deep learning, though.
First of all, deep learning absolutely is used in mission critical systems: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/intel-and-ge-healthcare...
Second, simply because designers use systems that are formally interpretable, that doesn't mean that designers know exactly what causes a given response in the model. Formal interpretability means you know what function the model is approximating -- there's a long way from that to a human-readable interpretation.
Finally, even if the designers can tell you what features cause a certain response in the model, they can only tell you that for features that are encoded in the data! There are plenty of features that aren't encoded in your data that can nevertheless affect the outcome of a model!
I don't know much about ML. Are you saying that we don't know how to interpret any ML models at all?
Regarding your final point, isn't that true with or without ML? Any mission-critical design process should scrutinize the solution to see if it's complete enough and correct enough.
Deep learning models are black box models, which means they are not formally interpretable. You can still sometimes get interpretations out of these models using various methods, but they are fairly underdeveloped, and without actual theories of neural network behavior I don't see that improving anytime soon.
You're right, it's true with or without ML. In fact, it's true with human-run systems, too. Consider a police officer who is more likely to pull people over in a certain neighborhood, and that neighborhood was 95% AfAm. IF they were asked why they pulled over more people in that neighborhood, they could say they were discriminating against the neighborhood, which, in and of itself is not racial discrimination. Of course, further inspection of that police officer's records could show that they are biased towards neighborhoods with a high AfAm population, which would be racial discrimination.
The same scenario can easily arise in an ML context, but interrogating a machine is a very different context from interrogating a human. First of all, people believe that computers are innately 'unbiased' because they are computers, so making the case that an algorithm is biased is already more difficult. Second, going back to the point I made before -- interpreting a model is not the same as providing a human-readable explanation. Asking a question about racial bias in a model which doesn't even encode for race (as many do, in an ill-conceived attempt to be 'neutral') requires skilled people to understand how to ask the question and how to interpret the answer. There's no plug and play process that one can follow to "scrutinize the solution to see if it's complete enough and correct enough".
This is how it functions at first.
Fast forward a few decades and you'll have doctors saying "The computer model flagged this spot as a concern. Our human review can't find anything, but we know that studies show the computer model has a 95% confidence in locating problems so we recommend surgery anyway. Surgery is lower risk than assuming the model is wrong."
Tool dependency changes over time.
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.
Is there any source that confirms the belief about judges deciding based on computer output in the past or in the future - relevant cases, law, etc?
First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.
Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.
They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.
One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
It seems that police departments are happy to buy tools for stuff like this, and private companies are happy to make a buck. But are these systems vetted by anyone on behalf of the public? Some like sting rays and breathalyzers have been hidden behind non-disclosure agreements, kept out of open court, etc.
Other than the above I've also heard of computer systems in NJ advising judges whether a suspect is a risk of not appearing in court (as they are reforming the bail system). I wondered if the criteria is published, how it reviewed and modified, etc.
I'm just concerned about the increasing influence of hidden algorithms on our society, and very concerned in general that the government is going to hook all of its databases together and do more of this, a la Chinese social scores, etc.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200907/12212945257/flori...
Are you speaking from experience or from intuition?
We are not talking about black box models here. "Phones that pinged near the Capitol" is a very specific query. They want to identify those who trespassed and those who aided the trespassers. I believe it's pretty fair.
Getting a list of suspects is rarely a problem for law enforcement; the difficulty is in winnowing it down to the actual culprits. When a body is found, for example, family and acquaintances are all initially suspects, and experience has shown that summarily dismissing any of them, merely on intuitive grounds, will eliminate some fraction of actual culprits.
If a system did start suspecting the actual culprits with a significantly higher success rate than people achieve, there would be much reason to reverse-engineer the process in order to figure out how this was accomplished, as doing so would provide clues (and, ultimately, evidence) that otherwise could only be found by an independent process.
This assumes that due process exists, such that unsupported accusations are not taken as evidence, but if due process has been abandoned, we would have a much greater problem than that posited here.
No. They will come up with some fancy sounding term to describe these situations. Some experts will agree this is a sound method and it will be used to get warrants.
They will just put the cause as "suspect by unattended abnormalities" (aka phone not used during crime)
Everybody will smile. Warrants will be made. Life's turned up side down. And likely false arrest and convictions.
Even if we program rules into th3 AI to avoid this there is a real chance that the AI could work around and add people to thr list that it suspects is involved in one crime but could not list thr suspect do to rules, but a new crime opened a way for it to allow a suspect of crime one to br listed on crime 2.
Law enforcement doesn't want a system that incorrectly flags hundreds of people, unlike what some people seem to think. They want systems that reliably flag potential suspects, because that reduces work in stead of increasing it.
However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.
Precision data gives them convictions and convictions give them promotions. As they say, any metric that becomes a target... This is why giving the police invasive surveillance tech is a terrible idea, they will only focus on the data that fits their narrative and discard the rest. The defense doesn't even need to know that any other data exists.
If your system produces data points with 8 significant digits of wrong data, we have two problems: the system and whoever approved the purchase.
Any convictions will have to be corroborated by other evidence.
There is a low tech solution to every problem.
For a real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusi...
There you go.
Basically a “phone walking” service that also charges your phone.
Could just be a side gig for Uber drivers, having phone lock boxes in their cars. The infrastructure is already there, phone lock boxes for charging exist in airports and nightclubs. This would be one that moves.
I found flaws with a lot of models, whether it was greater vulnerability of not getting your phone back, or having too many other phones in the same place.
I decided that more phones in the same and route was more tolerable.
But any model I didnt think of I’d like to read it.
To protect against a tyrannical government.
It seems the idea is to make (extended) phone tracking unviable and therefore stop the practice; not to enable criminals, but to avoid the side effect, which are perceived not worth the risk (in GPs opinion).
Obviously people doing tracking with warrants will have useless data too and stop asking for that kind of dataset.
There are plenty of times I wish I was connected but not tracked all the time because I get distracted with my device easily while Im just not used to being with no connectivity any more. Hiking, running errands, you name it.
Might as well pollute the data set for everyone else while you’re at.
While everyone is worried about criminals, everyone else that wants to disconnect and has benign data is doing just fine.
on edit: wait, with proper marketing maybe great for celebrities. might need some extra services.
Service just needs to exist.
Its not economically “unviable” its also not economically “worth my time to make”, but for someone else that gets one idea in their life, maybe its worthwhile for them
Interesting. My phone uses WiFi for everything by default. I wonder if they'd be able to tell (probably via Google?) If I were to leave it home for a day. On the weekend of course, since daily commute will hit the towers except for an atypical occurrence.
With such capability I feel like it's obvious they don't want to stop certain things.
Won't most phones being left at home generate no traffic because it's connected to wifi? AFAIK most phones turn off their mobile data connection if connected to wifi. It's also not too unreasonable to have very little baseline voice traffic, since everyone's texting these days. As for texts, it might be suspicious if you have a high baseline amount of texts, but it's also not too unreasonable for someone to communicate almost exclusively using chat apps (eg. signal, imessage).
It’s amazing how efficient the FBI has suddenly become, practically overnight.
I wonder if there’s any value to putting a phone in airplane mode and saying you were watching a movie or having a date night with a partner. Probably only useful if someone pulled logs off a phone within a short window of time.
What happens if you just happen to be in the area of random nefarious deeds and your phone runs out of battery? Or maybe you accidentally left your phone at home? Now you're caught up in some drag net you had nothing to do with? Cities are large and a lot of things are going on all around us all the time...
Another recent example is how the FBI was asking people to help identify people who entered the White House on Jan 6 by their pictures. I'm sure the FBI has some of the best facial recognition software on the planet at their disposal and they knew who those people were in real time during the event. Asking the public to help identify people serves two purposes. First, it doesn't reveal their full facial recognition capabilities to other threat actors. Secondly, it trains the population to snitch on each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Gait_as_biometri...
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
Although it does leave you in a sticky situation if you can't find an open network.
Here's a great example of a lawyer in need of a refresher https://youtu.be/_rVsRmcE-u8
Everywhere on YouTube it seems comments are being disabled on new and old videos :/
It's a well known issue.
Unless you have time to devote to deleting offensive comments (and many comments are just swear words copied and pasted a few hundred times), just disable comments.
Why don't you come in to clear the air about these JavaScript muders? Just a friendly chat...
You know what... Nevermind.
I found him a good advocate of "don't talk to police", a lot of things he describes as standard police practice I would have hoped are illegal, and probably are in some EU countries (police can lie in interview??)
Both are equally stupid, but in different ways
It is possible that European police is more racist than US police, yes, but that wasn't what we were talking about. I'm pretty sure that US police is more violent against white people than European police is against gypsies, meaning that even with the racism European police is still much better.
Just looking at Western Europe (arbitrarily defined, granted, and leaving out some really small countries) in the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen..., the US has fewer police per capita than (in increasing per-capita order) Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain. More police than (in decreasing per-capita order) England+Wales, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway.
The US has about 25% more police per capita than Norway. Germany has 63% more police per capita than the US does.
That is not to say that we don't have problems with police brutality or cover-ups here, they are just less deadly usually.
It's pretty weak evidence, as the officer in the video is talking about violence during interview, not about killing civilians and I'll agree that these are different things. But it's more than enough to make me skeptical that you should be grateful that you're being interrogated by an american officer rather than an european one...
Very anecdotally, I've watched/read a lot of american news during the elections and the idea that they are "more robust" or more impartial than european news makes me chuckle (at least western europe as it's what I know, and not pretending that our journalism is laudable either)
One basic interrogation technique involves lying to you about what you're suspected of. The interrogator might accuse you of something they KNOW you didn't do. He then notes your reaction.... typically you will be outraged and confused.
Later when he accuses you of other crimes, he studies your reaction and compares it to the earlier reaction. He already knows what you look like when you truthfully deny a crime. Is your denial different this time? Yes? Then that gives him a hint that his current accusation might be accurate.
What's notable about the capitol mob is the fact that, while yeah, they knew they were attacking congress technically, they figured that doing it in service to a sitting president made it legal somehow.
Needless to say, one of those motivations is a lot scarier than the other.
now they have mountains of pictures and video evidence and are only making a few dozen arrests
People are waiting for the day when you have zero privacy and anonymity. It's already here. Everyone should assume they can or are being tracked all the time.
There will be no "good AI" (aka "The Machine" in the show) to combat it.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lapd-precision-pol...
and
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-21/lapd-end...
Sci Fi is fun, but crime is a social phenomenon of the type that tech is deeply unsuited to actually solve. Privacy is a legit consideration in the short and long term, but AI taking over isn't really.
The city has tried various interventions - social workers, police visits, calling the kid’s school/parents (a lot of the people aren’t 18) - but the things that work are the same as always: social support plus significant police presence in the neighborhood.
Which leads me back to my original point... they recently stopped maintaining the list IIRC because it just doesn’t provide any actionable info beyond what we already have.
All that said, I'm not planning on trying to overthrow the government or anything stupid. I just don't like being spied on. I'm glad these treasonous idiots carried their ankle bracelets (cell phones) while they committed their crimes.
I'm not too surprised at the spatial resolution that basestation multi-lateration gave either. The low noise and synchronization of clocks in modern cell phone basestations are getting really good. GPS is not required.
Do we know if there are any security cameras in the US Capitol building? Were they all working? Has the footage from the insurrection attempt been saved?
I ask because the capitol seems like one of those places that would resist internal security cameras because congresspersons wouldn't want their meetings potentially being recorded. Plus the general incompetence of security leadership before and on that day makes me wonder if any cameras were actually in working order and saving footage.
That's wording that made me think, and I had to actually look up the definition of insurrection. I think it was complete insurrection, not a just an attempt at it. But, maybe there's a legal definition or duration of success matters?
Last year the police were begging for help to solve some of the gun store robberies that happened during the BLM unrest. Why did they need the public's help? They could have checked cell phone records, stitched together traffic camera video, and likely tracked down the suspects within weeks.
I think the most likely scenario is that we gave all these tools to create a surveillance state, but the bureaucracy is too lazy to use them.
NSA has full access such data. The police does not.
The police cares about murders and bank robberies. NSA does not.
The data is already being used by domestic law enforcement in a technique called parallel construction.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/22/22244848/us-intelligence-...
They will mysteriously remember that they can do that in the next spate of unrest, now that it serves no useful purpose.
What is your purpose in posting this kind of extreme message claiming privacy is dead? Do you want people to give up on privacy and surrender themselves? Or, do you want people to be inspired to fight for more privacy? I would like to know what you intend for me as the reader to take away from this message, if you wouldn't mind clarifying.
For me, it makes the “going dark” claims that the FBI likes to drum up about encryption particularly ridiculous.
[1] https://time.com/5922082/2020-gun-violence-homicides-record-...
It’s not hard to discover why some departments have APCs (which are used extremely rarely) and how much they actually spend on them (almost nothing, they’re free). By and large, Police budgets go almost entirely to personnel costs.
LAPD spends 94.4% on salaries. That remaining 6.6% covers everything including equipment, helicopters, cars, body cams, firearms, IT infrastructure, forensics labs, and supporting services. They spent more on servers, radios, and body and dash cams alone than they did on ground vehicles.
http://www.lapdpolicecom.lacity.org/112415/BUDGET.pdf
You’re correct that a lot doesn’t have anything to do with stopping crimes though, but since that is not their primary responsibility (nor should we want it to be), this is expected. They are not psychic, so they cannot really act on a crime until the crime happens. As you can see from this thread, doing anything proactively is not something that the public wants. Most prefer to be left alone until they have done something wrong.
Nearly all of that gear was distributed by the DOD after the war and it was already paid for. Nearly all of it is never used. When it is used, it is in fact used for public safety. It’s not like they use the SWAT team to get groceries.
And as far as the LAPD budget goes, I have two words in response: overtime fraud. Saying that you spend 90+% of your budget on salary is not equivalent to saying that it’s well spent, especially since how cops manage to game the overtime rules is a well studied subject.
Furthermore, with the massive disruption of the Covid-19 crisis it'd going to take a lot of analysis before we can draw any useful conclusions.
But to your main point, I'd agree that surveillance doesn't really buy you safety. Crime has a lot of facets and just increasing the number of security cams and license plate readers is no substitute for problems with the criminal justice system and socioeconomic woes.
Could it be there is something else peculiar to 2020?
And they also need me to print it so that they can scan it back in their computer system !
What a world we live in.
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.
This is straight up classic police legwork...
Now they show up to your house telling you they “pinged” your phone near a suspected crime “but your not a suspect, we just want to see the pictures on your phone”. Refuse to show them, and they already know you posted one or more (maybe subsequently deleted it) and maybe it’s obstruction of justice. Deny you have any, and it’s lying to law enforcement.
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.
You don't get that level of granularity by merely triangulating cell tower pings. Sounds like they got GPS location data from people's Google accounts.
Also consider that more than 3 stations probably were nearby.
It's an awesome, deep and nuanced topic certainly not suited to a political HN comments section. "Timing Advance" is the probably the jumpoff keyword for anyone interested.
Mobile towers also use beam-forming in two directions and have a few other techniques to get better signals, the metadata involved with these things (if kept) essentially drops the error range down to GPS levels if not better.
Lower cost prepaid carriers are also pushing 5G phones heavily (albeit somewhat crappy ones), and offering them for free.
[1] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach
[2] https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/cell-tower-lease-news/...
[1] Give it a few minutes and it'll pin point where my desk is inside my office.
It does some real dark arts physics wizardry to compute a position. Nothing like that can be done for cell phone signals.
LOL
The only substantial difference is that in case of GPS the calculation happens on the receiver side (GPS signals only go in one direction), while cellular service providers calculate time advance on the tower side.
Maybe there is an element of triangulation in that, but it's far less precise and ambitious than GPS.
Once you know which tower the phone is connected to, coordinates of that tower, antenna pattern, and distance (from timing advance and speed of light), you can calculate approximate cell phone location.
You get more data if the phone moves or propagation changes and phone changes towers. In urban environment with many towers location obtained this way can be very precise. Not as good as GPS, but good enough to within a block.
This is a simplification. Real systems also use signal strength, take into account multipath propagation, and apply some filtering from physical constraints (how fast a cell phone can move).
Your link is for GSM and states a 550 meter resolution, but I tried looking up LTE and I think it said 10 meters there.
I also understand modern (maybe next generation) towers will use directional transmission to avoid sending signals in all directions. Even if that's a 20° beam, that narrows don't the location by a lot.
You need to lock with multiple satellites, I assumed this was for triangulation.
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.
In the end the math is indeed similar, but how it gets there is quite different.
For one thing, each satellite carries an atomic clock to make things work. And the receiver locates itself by listening to signals, while triangulation is several receivers working together to locate a transmitter.
Notice that all of this is entirely legal, above board, and you agreed to it as part of your service agreement.
Source: I worked for AT&T and Carrier IQ
"Agree" implies willful consent and being in harmony with the implied outcome.
People accept because they have no meaningfully acceptable choice - which is the exact target that carriers aim for.
But even using timing advances, if the cells aren't too big, you get a pretty reasonable accuracy.
>Multilateration should not be confused with triangulation, which uses distances or absolute measurements of time-of-flight from three or more sites, or with triangulation, which uses a baseline and at least two angles measured e.g. with receiver antenna diversity and phase comparison.
select * from mobile_location where latitude between 38.88778433380732 and 38.891917997746894 and longitude between -77.01269830654866 and -77.00613225870377 and epoch_timestamp between 1609954200 and 1610067600
Returned quite a number of mobile devices accurate to the meter. Was fun to see which phone was in which room or blade of grass of the building. I'm not even American.
I hope your employers keeps track of stuff like this.
I'm genuinely asking, I have never seen such a setup.
1. Absolutely yes for ad hoc queries and there's a wealth of logging and privacy features built into all of our tools.
2. Absolutely yes and those queries are audited. For any query that matches some heuristics it'll warn us with a big scary message to make sure the query is legitimate work.
For the query linked above about checking who was around a location at a given time I'd probably be fired before the query completed. It's a pretty comfortable job but they don't mess around with user data, it's zero tolerance if it's abused and even if there was never a warning message your ass is still out the door when they catch you.
For all the flak tech giants get around PII I think it's horrifying that smaller players can still get hordes of sensitive data and yet have basically no safeguards to prevent misuse like querying whatever some internal engineer wants to look at.
[1] https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i...
I guess this part answers the questions of "why", "what" and "does the employer care". Well, at least these people now know what they did "not" have to hide the whole time.
I worked as a network tech for one of the big providers. I was pulling tower location data for LEO regularly at request of corporate legal only. Though sometimes LEO would try to end run around and go to stores who would contact me.
I socially engineered them to believe I could not access that info without a code generated by corp legal.
Not true, of course. But hell if I was going to risk being mired in a legal fiasco for a possibly immoral investigator.
Tracking of our cellphones has been a thing since well before smartphones. Smartphones just enable it to be real time, and more granular than a tower triangulation.
You lied, which is totally fine, but trying to obfuscate that behind word salad is just silly.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
You want to be careful about that.
Everyone was listening to Serial in 2014, and it went into depth on how it was done in the early 2000's.
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210120062149/http://www.wusa9....
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 running in the park with my cell phone in his harness is being properly tracked and creating an alibi for me.
If you don't want to leave a trail of geo pings, don't carry around a device that literally could not work if it didn't leave a trail of pings.
Maybe it should be "obvious" with a phone, but what if your bluetooth headset tried to pair against someone's electronics and got detected? What about the GPS history from your Apple Watch (should that data be available)? How many RFID-tagged devices are in your wallet?
I'm not saying that any of these aren't convenient or worth the tradeoff, but the last assertion (telling people to just be smart about what electronics they bring) is not realistic as the vast majority of THINGS we own become trackable electronics, whether the average consumer knows it or not.
Ideally we can build ways to make it easier to learn how tech works.
God knows it took me decades to figure it out.
[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Identity-Privacy-and-Tru...
[2] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-...
[3] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/you-may-...
Could it be abused? Sure. But that's why we need to continue to engineer a better democracy as well.
We can do both.
We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government, we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society
Attempting to "engineer" a better society is the exact problem we have. That is Authoritarianism not liberty
Liberty is not attempting to engineer a better society or democracy, Liberty is allowing people to live their lives unmolested by government laws and regulations
If it wasn't designed to be democracy, it should be trivial to design a better one, just like it's trivial to build a better automobile than a tricycle, which wasn't designed to be an auto.
> We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government
That's not incompatible with democracy, and suggesting that they are exclusive alternatives just means you don't understand at least one of “democracy”, “constitutional republic”, or “limited governmemt”.
(And more fully, you want to say “federal republic with constitutionally-limited government and both the federal and state levels, and reserved powers for the states”, but that still isn't exclusive with “democracy”.)
> we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits
I don't see any evidence that respect for Constitutional limits has declined, which seems to be a result of combining a cynical view of the present with a rosy view of the past (the First Amendment is a beautiful set of Constitutional limits, but the Alien and Sedition Acts were adopted when the ink on it was barely dry.)
> and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society
Stands made on different sets of principles than you prefer do not thereby become “unprincipled”.
Actually it is, democracy is 2 wolves and an a lamb voting on what is for dinner.
Democracy is incompatible with limited governance, and individual liberty as the majority (or even a vocal but powerful minority that controls the media) will always use the power of democracy to oppress those that do not have said power
Constitutionally limited governance that is immune to the will of the majority is the only way to ensure individual liberty, the founders understood this. This is why the ONLY democratic part of the US government at its founding was the House of Representatives. Over time we have made more and more parts of the federal government "democratic" like the Senate, and most recently the push to change the election of the President to be pure democratic as well.
This has been a DISASTER for individual liberty
Liberty is allowing people to live their lives
unmolested by government laws and regulations
Presumably you would like some legal remedy if somebody tries to harm you, or poison your drinking water upstream, or violates a written contract, sexually assaults your loved ones, or so forth.
A life "unmolested by laws and regulations" is the most naive kind of fantasy imaginable. If history has taught us anything via failed states, lassiez-faire governments, and the like it's that power consolidates. Soon people would band together, form factions/tribes, and you'd be subject to their power.
Democracy kind of sucks in all of the obvious ways, but at least it's actually possible and sort of works. This can't be said for the delusional notion of living in your own little self-sufficient kingdom (in a world of over seven billion people, lol) where somehow you magically don't have anybody exerting influence on you, ever.
Not really, the fundemntal foundation of a libertarian law would be best highlighted from Frederic Bastiat's The Law
"The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. "
The problem with modern society today is the law goes far far far beyond what individuals have the ethical right to do, namely self defense. Today the law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.
The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.
And this common force is to do only what the
individual forces have a natural and lawful
right to do: to protect persons, liberties,
and properties;
- The FDA is far from perfect, but it generally does a good job of protecting my person from snake oil medicine and adulterated foods.
- A federal healthcare mandate/provider protects my person against dying of curable diseases because if I have no job/insurance at the moment
- Taxpayer-funded education gives me the liberty to become literate and obtain a basic level of education so that I may become employable and so forth even if my parents are unwilling or unable to educate me
And so on. There are a lot of ways for your person, properties, and liberties to be threatened, most of which are indirect.
It has converted plunder into a right, in order to
protect plunder
We would agree, at least, that equally bad things happen when governments have too much power. We would disagree on what "too much" means, obviously.
My argument is not about the intensity of the influence but rather about the type of influence, and what influence the government is allowed.
I agree with most "progressives" on the nature of the problems we face as society, where I differ is on what should or can be done to solve them. History as shown that leaning on Authoritarian government regulations do not work out very well either, and leads to all kinds of unintended consequences. As the libertarian saying goes "Government: If you think you have problems now, what until you see our solutions"
The ironic thing as well is when people paint "unfettered capitalism" with "corporations" A Corporation is a government created liability shield that does not exist in a "unfettered capitalist" system or rather a true free market. Corporations are part of the government regulatory apparatus system.
One of the key problems we have is the regulatory capture, because we have allowed government to create corporations, which in turn become powerful and desire to capture the regulations that created them so they can make themselves more powerful, vicious circle
>>We would disagree on what "too much" means, obviously.
I dont know that we would disagree with "too much power", currently it is not how powerful the government is that I have the most problem with, it is the centralization of power that more concerning. The US for all its flaws did get one thing right. Power is best when it distributed. Power wants to consolidate, and centralize, it is up the the people to resist this and we the people have been very poor at that, especially since the Great Depression. We now look to the Federal government to solve all of our problems this is not how our system was to be.
A Corporation is a government created liability
shield that does not exist in a "unfettered capitalist"
system or rather a true free market. Corporations are
part of the government regulatory apparatus system.
What's the libertarian alternative? What are examples of situations where removing the liability shields would encourage more beneficial behaviors from corporations?
It seems to me that corporations, minus the liability shield, would still be nearly as potentially dangerous. They are more or less sociopathic entities by necessity; ceasing to exist if they cease to turn profits, a thing they can only do if they compete successfully against their equally sociopathic rivals. Corporations can of course behave responsibly and generously, but this is always going to be at odds with their fundamental mission.
(While all of this sounds anti-corporation, I'm not. Private enterprise is and should be the backbone of society. It's just that it's awfully destructive, unchecked.)
Libertarian Private enterprise is more like LLC's, and partnerships than Corporations.
As to where removing the liability shields would encourage more beneficial behaviors from corporations?
You see hints of it all the time, anytime you see a situation where someone comments "if a person would have done X they would be in jail" well the Corporation is shielding the people that actually did the harm to society from consequences from their actions. Most of the time the actual bad actors simply move from one corporation to another continuing to inflict manage on society with no accountability because of those liability shield
you view it as "sociopathic", but viewing it that way is part of the problem, we have anthropomorphized corporations to were we treat them like people, punish them (the corporations) with fines and other actions but never punish the actual human actors responsible for the activity
I understand the need for some kind of limited liability in business, Strict Liability would likely cause very poor investment into private enterprise the problem is with corporations, especially publicly traded corporations we have created such a impenetrable liability shield around them that the incentive curve has shift so far towards "profit by any means" that the people in corporations are only punished when they DO NOT do bad things (i.e Pollute the environment, screw workers, etc) in chasing of more profit, and NEVER when they do those thing at most the corporation may pay a fine for doing it but the actual people responsible are never liable
I do certainly agree that corporations ought to be less of a liability shield for things that would send a citizen to prison!
Anyway, we're now going to see what happens when the huge post-Patriot act homeland security machinery is turned on people who thought they were untouchable, and all of a sudden a lot of powers that everyone was OK being used against nebulous "enemies" are going to end up in the news.
This seems to me like a dragnet and I would hope the ACLU takes this up and hopefully the press can start to make some noise about it.
And it also makes sense why Apple doesn’t want you to be able to fully disable wifi on your phone.
If you're referring to the lack of a hardware kill switch, that's true for 99.9% of Androids too.
If you're referring to the temporary WiFi off toggle in the Control Center, the reasoning is that most people don't remember they turned off WiFi (my parents for example) and won't remember to turn it back on. But you absolutely can disable it by going into the Settings app.
I think it's nice since I frequently need to tell my phone to hop to mobile data while walking around campus since it's hopping from AP to AP and the control center switch is geofenced, so when I stop walking I'm almost always outside the geofence and wifi is back on like I wanted it to be.
If I can flip a switch to disable wifi instead of tap three times, that’s a UX improvement to me.
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.
People who challenge google policy seem to have a bad habit of being fired
This hardly matters if your appearance is captured by no less than 4 live streams, an additional 6 videos and 21 pictures posted by third parties to social media. Not bringing your phone is the bare minimum, but not close to being enough to cover your tracks. Once someone with wide-enough information sources suspects you were at a location of interest, you are toast: it's the attack/defense scenario where defender has to get every step right. Any mistake by the defender (or their ally or even an npc), no matter how small, means the attacker wins.
As in cases of anyone possibly interacting with a production server, there may be interviews with those who may have "logged in" or accessed to such systems to help find a root cause.
It is true that your phone listens to control channel on currently selected base station. It is also true that your phone scans other channels relatively frequently to see if a better signal is available, but unless the phone decides (based on data received from the network) to switch to another base station, it will only talk to the network about once or twice per hour.
The network can ping the phone if it wants (and does so whenever there is something to be signalled, or if law enforcement decides to).
https://media.ccc.de/v/ARMP3D https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11406-spot_the_surveillance
At what point will people say enough is enough to these kinds of insane overreaches?
I watched it live and then dug through the videos, selfies, etc after and inside the Capitol, I found one guy who might have had a gun. The other weapons appear to have been convenient - a fire extinguisher, flags, etc. It looks less and less like an "insurrection" and more like jackasses doing jackass things.
This article quotes the police chief saying as much:
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/protests/march-for-t...
I would also expect anyone coming from the rally had been through some security screening.
- Open Carry is always illegal in DC.
- DC does issue concealed carry permits but doesn't honor them from other states (called reciprocity).
- This was talked about far and wide in advance on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere framed as "don't bring guns to DC! You will go to jail!" and supported by flyers posted throughout DC. (You can still find pictures of them online.)
Remind me not to get in your way when you're jaywalking.
Premeditating a felony firearms offense is one thing. I think the majority who entered the Capitol were probably thinking that most of the rhetoric they were hearing beforehand was hyperbole and were probably expecting to just protest outside the capital, and then got swept up in the moment and committed misdemeanor/felony breaking-and-entering.
I once met somebody who wears a lightning link as a pedant around their neck. Probably it wouldn't be compatible with their rifle's receiver, but who knows.
Then again, just because it's not smart doesn't mean people don't do it.
There's a subtle but extremely important difference. Perhaps they are entirely equivalent to you, but they were not at all to the rioters/attackers.
What they did was crime, not war.
They didn't bring guns because their goal wasn't to overthrow the government.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35214244/cap...
If they didn't go into the Capitol, we're clearly talking about different groups. The unasked questions are: Why not? What were they there to do?
I did work in law enforcement in DC. One of the first things you learn is how to separate facts from conjecture from imagination. Mixing up the three isn't helpful to anyone and often taints you as an investigator.
Or protect themselves from counter-protesters? Are you saying anyone with a gun at the event had the mens rea for murder? There are probably more guns at the average baseball game.
And I think you should probably read more about what actually happened. The initial photos were of idiots in horns and face paint and that has colored the public perception of what happened, but the clownshow gave cover to a smaller number of organized militia types compromised of former and active duty military and law enforcement. Those people were armed, came prepared, had intelligence about the layout of the building, and received updates on the location of MOC. They were there to kill and take hostages, and they came within minutes of achieving that goal.
Nothing about this was laughable, and the concern is not overblown.
Not saying that is good either, just that there were many things going on that day that aren't necessary related via any sort of coordinated operation.
I don't think it is reasonable to think that everyone on the Capitol grounds had that same ill intent. More likely that the organized minority instigated the crowd and used them as cover for their shameful and ridiculous efforts.
Needless to say, the predominent narrative seems to be that anyone in the crowd was an "insurrectionist". That goes too far IMHO.
I haven't seen anything about this. Can you share a link - especially pictures or video? I'd love to learn more. Thanks.
BIG red flag from this article: No weapons charges. If they were armed, they were not armed lawfully either in DC as a whole or in the Capitol specifically. Therefore, we have to ask: were they armed?
Regardless, this line is scary at first glance: "All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas." but I've been trying to figure out what it means.
I worked on the Hill for years and used some of the tunnels frequently. If they mean the "tunnels" in general, they're huge and expansive so it'd take a huge amount of effort across numerous entry points in almost a dozen buildings to "seal them in."
Alternatively, if they mean one of the secure areas (think: bunkers), they're designed to be buttoned up but "turn on gas" still doesn't make sense.
Regardless, thanks for the link. It will be interesting to see how the trials play out.
It's not like there weren't homemade explosives found on the site:
> Coffman, 70, told police he had mason jars filled with "melted Styrofoam and gasoline." Federal investigators believe that combination, if exploded, would have the effect of napalm "insofar as it causes the flammable liquid to better stick to objects that it hits upon detonation," according to the court record. [0]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/us-capitol-riots...
How else are we going to get bi-partisan support for the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021
I used "explosive" because that was how it appeared in the court filings. Without knowing the precise mixture, it could result as either something to cause a conflagration, or a detonation.
Calling it misinformation is somewhat disingenuous when not all the information is publicly available.
Calling this "misinformation" is an accurate characterization. You are not responsible for what CNN reports but it should lead you to question the credibility of that news source.
It seems like a massive overreaction. If we're truly interested in democracy and the rule of law, we'd do well to not shred our standard democratic and legal procedures (such as the presumption of innocence, and the fourth amendment's prohibition on searches without probable cause) the instant a few thousand angry, unarmed yahoos show up with pitchforks and banners and achieve precisely nothing.
We shouldn't even do that if a few thousand armed, trained people show up, with the express intent of doing battle, taking control, and holding territory (which, again, to be clear, is not what happened). We absolutely should not do it when a bunch of idiot yahoos break windows and set off fire extinguishers and steal shit.
Even had the building burned to the ground, universal surveillance such as this would not be a proportionate reaction.
Is it just too scary of a slope to stand on or something?
To me it seems to fit under 'reasonable' for the government to issue a warrant for presence information in the locality of the capitol. Given the 3rd party doctrine that probably isn't what happened, but the objection there would be more procedural than about control over data stored on servers.
https://www.justsecurity.org/10318/video-clip-director-nsa-c...
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
The state collecting this information is a public hazard, especially considering the relatively recent development of the assassination of US citizens without trial.
Huh?
Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you on overreach. But this action is completely reasonable because it's standard operating procedure for many law enforcement departments around the nation. Most of us simply do not reside in the neighborhoods where these tactics are employed. None of what we are discussing today is even Patriot Act type stuff. It's just standard law enforcement investigative technique. Worse, our law enforcement infrastructure already took the exact same actions during the BLM riots. None of the people complaining now, uttered a peep at the time.
I said all of that to say this, as a privacy activist, I learned decades ago that the best method of protecting my rights is to protect the rights of others. The issue today, is that most who complain are called out as hypocritical. With good reason. We can't go back now. Law enforcement would be accused of racism. Whatever tactics we used on others, we have to use now. And law enforcement gets to use them because people were not forward thinking enough to protest these methods when they were designed and employed during the latest stages of the drug war. Or even just a few scant weeks ago during the BLM riots.
I'd just encourage everyone to be more forward thinking on these issues. Sometimes complaining only when the issue affects you creates more problems than it solves. It makes it more difficult to get legislative changes made because certain key organizations, and people, whose cooperation we need have to double down on their positions so as not be called out as hypocritical themselves. AS a consequence, we come into headwinds trying to get the changes necessary to outlaw these practices.
Now, addressing the actual proposition (short of an argument): Where was the "actual insurrection" and where is the evidence for "attempted assassinations" and "theft/sale of national secrets". I'm not a lawyer and certainly not in your jurisdiction, but it is apparent that you possess evidence of these three things. Hence, I urge you to contact the appropriate law enforcement and share your findings.
I just want to point out the two problems with the rhetoric that mass-media and you are using to describe this event:
1. These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life. In using these words, you are conjuring extremely violent images within the minds of your listeners. When your listeners discover the truth of the event, that the images you've associated with the event do not match what actually happened, your listeners feel manipulated, they feel you're trying to deceive them, and you lose credibility.
2. If enough people keep parroting these particular words to describe this event, the meanings of these words become diluted. For example, prior to this event at the capitol, if you said "terrorist attack", my mind would imagine men wearing balaclavas, wielding AK's, beheading people on video, gassing villages filled with innocent families, scattering them as refugees across the globe. But now, if we accept this event at the capitol as a "terrorist attack", now I don't know if you're talking about a guy smiling and waving as he holds a podium, or if you mean a Wahabbi extremist raping a Yazidi woman after putting a bullet in her son's head.
Imagine this woman recounting her rape and the murder of her family, "I experienced a horrific terrorist attack." And then there's you, in referring to some guy taking a selfie at a politician's desk, "I witnessed a horrific terrorist attack."
Please, choose more precise, more honest words.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/01/11/guns-brass-knuckles...
“Insurrection” is a violent attack on a government.
“Assassination” is murdering a prominent person for political reasons.
> In charging papers, the FBI said that during the Capitol riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said. Some messages, according to the FBI, included, “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.” Another message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/conspiracy...
There were bombs planted at both Democratic and Republican party headquarters. One man was arrested with a pickup truck full of napalm.
At least some subset of the Capitol rioters absolutely intended to cause "explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life". I think you're being dishonest pretending this was only a bunch of goons posing for instagram.
This is similar to the way people remember Columbine as a school shooting, but the two murderers actually built a large number of IEDs including propane tank bombs. If they hadn't been such incompetent bomb-builders, hundreds would have died and the event would be remembered as a bombing akin to Oklahoma City instead of mere mass-shooting.
As a complete aside, I was amused that that photo even existed (he looks so happy with Nancy Pelosi's podium) and also completely unsurprised that he got arrested two days later.
Agreed, though the hyperbole and shifting definitions seems intentional and effective in many cases, you see with this with terms "hate", "racism", "white supremacy", etc as well.
When I was younger these had much more specific groups and frightening meanings! Makes me feel many using these terms so loosely today may have never run in to actual people these used to describe.
(No this is not a defense of hatred/racism/white supremacy or other bad behavior).
There were pipe bombs found. A guy had a car full of molotov cocktails. People were carrying guns and wearing body armor. Five people died. Its pretty surprising it didn't go much worse
The fact that some were found, and basically none were used (none of the deaths were a result of people being shot by the rioters) indicates the level of seriousness we're dealing with here.
This is not to say that they shouldn't face consequences: they should; what they did is seriously illegal and, more generally, bad and wrong.
But it's terribly important to remember that what happened here was crime, not war.
These latest techno-authoritarian actions are best seen as effects from having lost the battle, rather than another front. For decades, clued in people have been droning on about the insecurity of cell phones allowing them to be persistently tracked by the network, the MITM-idiocy of webapps, etc. The best time to get people to care is before there is some real tangible threat that will make them seek the comfort of authoritarianism, but yet crickets. I blame the sheer amount of money behind big tech, making tech people turn a blind eye to the faults of centralized technology while pushing shiny-but-flawed technologies to the masses.
After something happens? Well of course the power structure wants to unlock phones, track phones, censor speech, etc. At this point, buckle up - political activism on the subject is done, or at least on pause for quite some time.
Not so great: surveillance on everyone and catching criminals with it, but within a democratic framework
Disastrous: surveillance on everyone, while giving a pass to insurgents attempting to overthrow democratic governance, because if they take over the surveillance infrastructure you're doomed
Either way, no sympathy for these hypocrites.
Turning your phone off or leaving it at home is already used to identify suspects.
Honestly, what did they think was going to happen? As the saying goes, "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." You don't get to fail miserably at your coup and then go back home to your regular lives.
They thought they would succeed. The Democrats would be marched en masse to the gallows and revealed to the world to be the satanic blood drinking pedophiles the faithful always knew they were. The world would see the insurrectionists as patriots and heroes for stopping the CCP in league with the Democratic Party from stealing the election and denying Donald Trump his rightful second term .
Many of these people literally believe they're involved in a holy war and that Trump was sent by God, so for them, victory was a metaphysical certainty. The rest were certain Trump would pardon them in any case. Why bother with OPSEC when the Lord will prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies and your leader has infinite "get out of jail free" cards to hand out?
The biggest act of violence was a policeman shooting a protester point blank in the neck, after being let through by 6 other policeman.
I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?
I have no idea! As I stated above, it seems like it was mostly a dumb angry mob that didn't think this through! That group in Michigan thought they could kidnap the governor and hold her hostage to remove covid restrictions, so maybe they were hoping to do something like that.
The fact remains, that they did use violence against people and property, and they might have done worse if they had managed to get their hands on politicians, or if the IEDs planted at GOP/Dem party headquarters had gone off.
If you want to call it a "mostly peaceful protest that featured one attempted violent coup" then knock yourself out.
The reality is that the actual insurrectionists were a small fringe group (Qanon) that managed to convince the rest of the useful idiots to join in. If you watch the videos of the siege you can see that it was mostly Qanon people leading the charge in while the other people simply walked into the building.
Of course comments like mine are not welcome because it paints a different picture compared to the narrative being presented in the media but the facts are still there. I encourage everyone to go online and do your own research. Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information. Same with the siege videos, you can watch the livestreams and reach your own conclusions yourself.
Don't take it personally, but this is nonsense. TheDonald.win (now patriots.win) was full of all sorts of violent rhetoric in the run-up to January 6. Maybe they've scrubbed a lot of those posts now, trying to avoid FBI scrutiny, but the general online mood was absolutely apocalyptic[0] in the lead up to that riot. If anyone wants to go digging, look for contemporaneous archives or screenshots, and keep in mind that mods have sanitized already sanitized some of the most obvious incitiment.
You don't have permission to access "http://www.wusa9.com/article/features/producers-picks/fbi-tr..." on this server."
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?
Its definitely the FBI's job to figure out who breached a federal building, let alone the seat of our legislative branch during an active session.
That being said... the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and state agencies definitely do shady stuff and track people via their devices at protests. I'm remembering surveillance planes over Baltimore that were traced back to feds.
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twitter-dataminr-police-...
Know where I recalled I read this? Here.