Comment by throwawy4rzn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawy4rzn | Hacker News Reader

LEO using cellphone triangulation is not new.

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.

> I socially engineered them to believe

You lied, which is totally fine, but trying to obfuscate that behind word salad is just silly.

If you change the subject or redirect when someone asks you a difficult question you're not lying. That sort of thing could be called social engineering.

Obscuring information from Law Enforcement is still probably perjury if they find out and can prove you knew

The requests themselves were probably illegal, sidestepping standard procedure as they were. I don't think one could be charged with perjury for refusing unlawful requests. IANAL!

Perjury is for courtrooms after you take an oath. Lying to law enforcement is categorically not perjury.

OK - I'm not sure what the word is, but I think they'd get you for Perverting the Course of Justice in the UK at least

OP said the store contacted him, not LE.

You can be imprisoned for up to 5 years for lying to a federal investigator. It's up to 8 years for offenses that "involve" international or domestic terrorism.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

You want to be careful about that.

> LEO using cellphone triangulation is not new.

Everyone was listening to Serial in 2014, and it went into depth on how it was done in the early 2000's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com