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Comment by kasabali | Hacker News Reader

So drug lords throwing mobile phones out of the car window after each call is just a movie trope?

I am a reporter, and I cover crime. Occasionally, I cover a story whose publication might endanger people. Think cases involving gang violence and/or individuals cooperating with law enforcement. Before I publish those stories, I contact the lead detective on the case to ask whether that concern has merit, and whether certain people’s names, for example, should be anonymized.

In one of those conversations, I was asked to not publish details about the extensive cellular tracking data that had helped to make the case. According to the detective, despite the ubiquitousness of cellular tracking data in prosecutions, your everyday criminal is not doing anything remotely like ‘throwing mobile phones out of the car window after each call.’ Quite the opposite, they are posting pictures of themselves with contraband to Instagram, and using their phones to facilitate crime as if they were untouchable.

Perhaps drug lords are more careful than lower-level dealers, but I’m not so sure. Total conjecture here, but I suspect the money gets to their heads, which leads to a feeling of invincibility — with consequent opsec failures.

If you keep an eye on major arrests, criminals routinely get taken down in essentially the same ways as the criminals who were caught before them. Despite their belief that they had been taking precautions against those failure modes.

I suspect this is survivorship bias: you're more likely to catch criminals who have bad opsec.

You'd think the criminals would at least watch The Wire for some basic OpSec.

A big part of The Wire is the uniqueness of the discipline the criminals have, and ultimately how it stems from 1-2 people at the top.

Also, public telephones are no longer an option.

> Perhaps drug lords are more careful than lower-level dealers

At a certain level you stop buying burner phones and simply buy the whole phone company.

https://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143442365/mexico-busts-drug-c...

The problem with any defensive strategy is that the opponent only has to win once.

Street level criminals are like Fast food employees - replaceable. The guys up the chain can be invisible indefinitely, but hooking up with the wrong girl, pissing off the wrong guy, being too impulsive or too deliberate with a decision etc can be the one mistake.

Each phone takes time to be detected, identified, and tampered with. So it may make sense to activate a new burner phone, talk about something sensitive, and destroy it right afterwards, before the law enforcement understands what phone was that.

Call me paranoid but I would assume that intelligence services keep a special eye on newly activated non-smartphones.

Ability to detect and correlate these switches has been documented in Snowden leaks years ago.

Sure, but can they get a warrant and tap it in <24 hours? IDK, but that sure raises the barrier to entry.

When have intelligence services used warrants? They gather evidence illegally and pass it to law enforcement who then do parallel construction.

Whenever they don't want Congress up their ass. Four things can simultaneously be true, despite seeming contradictory:

1) Prudent opsec against nation-state adversaries dictates that you assume 0 time for them to have a tap on a device.

2) In reality, it takes >0 time, because people processes aren't instantaneous.

3) Intelligence services sometimes break the letter of the law.

4) Intelligence services usually follow the law, because it's less hassle.

> Whenever they don't want Congress up their ass.

That's not really a problem when intelligence services can just "remind" any would-be annoying congress person that they have endless amounts of data showing exactly what they and their family members have been doing and could plant whatever they want into the data they already have.

One of the things that finally convinced Snowden to give up everything he had in order to tell the American people that the NSA was violating their constitutional rights was when he watched NSA director James Clapper outright lie right to the faces of congress. After the truth came to light, do you think Mr. Clapper faced any meaningful consequences for that? Nope. Can you guess why not?

Intelligence services are too powerful to be held accountable by anyone. They'll do whatever they want.

I guess Clapper needs to see consequences.

I think I got hacked for trying to run for Congress.

"If video games have taught me anything, it's that if you encounter enemies then you're going the right way." - Ali G

lol

When I worked in a wireless repair shop in early 2000's, we handled the local FBI field office account. Field agents would come in and I'd chat them up as they sat and waited for me to fix their phones.

This was also around the time remote meth labs were getting really common out in rural areas. Multiple agents were talking about how frustrated they were with getting access to burner phones since most of the companies were resellers. They said by the time they got a warrant to start recording the devices, they were already dead.

I guess the bad guys knew their burner phones were only good for about two to three months tops. That was usually the timeframe from when the FBI got a read on a line, saw a judge and got the warrant processed, to contacting the carrier and getting access.

Sounds like whatever was hampering them in the past has been fixed.

In The Wire, Lester sells Bernard tapped burners. It's the only way they could get up on the burners before they were thrown away.

There are a tonne of reddit links on this one so I'll leave it to the Interested Reader.

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