Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...
As in, GPS being off by 33 feet?
> leads to people getting reincarcerated
I'm reading your article and it seems to be about police coming to check and realizing that the reporting of being miles away was in error, not people getting reincarcerted because of GPS incorrectly reporting they moved ~30 feet too far? One of these is much more insane than the other.
Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/
> Harkins said that since last October, she has seen 30-40 people ordered back into custody based on these progress reports. When asked what can be done to improve CCSO’s EM program, Harkins said that the sheriff’s office needs to “properly and fully” investigate alleged violations before writing reports or taking actions.
To be explicit: yes, many, many, many people were reinarcerated because of faulty GPS.
I'm talking about the class of problem. It happens in normal weather conditions and things like this exacerbate the problem.
Really not sure what the hostility's about.
But maybe you posted the wrong one to begin with.
Let’s all be friends and nice to each other.
Problem is though that this feeling type of empathy makes you not the best advocate for them - as you can see here, where (on a platform with worse rules than HN) a flamewar would've broken out over not everyone being as emotionally involved.
We definitely need people like you, but we also need people like you to not be everywhere and scare/annoy people into not caring. Though, I also agree that scaring/annoying _into_ caring is also often required.
Idk. Activism is weird and hard and all.
A single 33 foot anomaly is already within the geofence buffer zones used. In dense urban areas the geofence buffer allowance may be 10X that already.
If people were getting arrested every time their GPS tracker was recording a ping 33 feet from the center of their house, nobody would ever survive house arrest.
This is a basic reality of using GPS.
Yes, yes I am. You really need to realize just how unbelievably fucking arbitrary the criminal courts are. At every level. They're not tech people.
To answer your question, I have examples of motions by prosecutors to suspend people from the EM program where they specifically cite specific data points just barely out of their homes, where video footage provably shows they were inside the whole time. They're not mine to share.
Btw, the courts are public and you should try some criminal courts watching. Pick a random day and just go.
So you could find an example easily but you don't want to? Or you're suggesting court watching in general and not to find an example?
"I have an example I won't share" is better than nothing, I guess. But you were being snarky before you even said that much, when you were just linking your article and not saying if examples existed at all.
I'm curious why they're not yours to share, though. Did someone give them to you under private circumstances, or can people get there from public information but you think you shouldn't spread the word?
He does a ton of really great journalism, a lot of FOIA work, to try and keep governments honest. Here's one of his struggles:
https://mchap.io/losing-a-5yr-long-illinois-foia-lawsuit-for...
A lot of this stuff is hard to talk about because it's about real people in real pending (at the time) cases.. and I'm also not a criminal defense attorney by any means. There's a reason the first article I posted had their identity completely removed. There's weird liability and believe me I want to say more.
Very honestly, I wish I could have done more reporting on how fucked up those devices were. I put a lot of time and effort into reporting that couldn't make it to print, largely because I was doing freelance work at the time. The first offer I got for that piece was $50. Wasn't sustainable.
Do you have any questions about these EM programs?
If you can’t show evidence, then it’s probably best not to cite that evidence. At that point it seems to me that you’re asking people to just trust your claim. You seem like a nice person, but what sort of rational reader trusts an internet stranger.
This is an important issue and you seem interested in the topic.
But yes, these documents should be FOIA'able and I shouldn't have to redact them. It's one of the reasons why I'm involved in advocating for masking the judicial branch FOIA'able in Illinois.
Looking forward!
> motions by prosecutors
Motion ≠ incarceration. So, not an answer (yet?)...
Did defendants get incarcerated as a result of these motions, or no?
Throughout this entire chain of comments, there has not been one shred of evidence that this has actually even happened once, never mind that it is a repeating phenomenon as they claimed. All we have been given is repeated attempts to make us believe those claims were true, supported by claims of existence of (not actual) evidence that - even if existent - would not remotely imply the claim is true. If we want to believe things without evidence and damn other who disagree to hell based purely on beliefs, we certainly can - that's what freedom of religion is for. However, I hope the irony isn't lost on anyone that it's quite literally the diametric opposite of what we're expecting from the justice system.
Whether the claim is ultimately accurate or not, that is what what should be spoiling your day before anything I wrote. It certainly did mine. It should absolutely spoil your day to watch the integrity of huge swathes of people running your society get smeared without clear evidence, with more nails being hammered into the coffin that is the trust holding your society together. Either you're watching something unjustified, in which case that should make you upset on its own, or it's justified, in which case it's even sadder. Either way, I would think that seeing evidence should be at the bedrock of it all, not the last straw whose demand finally spoils your day.
And no, I'm not here to "own" anyone, whether left or right or up or down. I'm here to figure out what is true and what is false, and what is a rumor. Hence my question. If you had actually provided solid evidence for your claims in the beginning, I would have spread your words in support of your cause. I don't want innocent people being harmed any more than you do, whether they're wearing ankle monitors or robes.
I mean, I know some good people who work in the US justice system in order to make the world better. But I can list even more US prosecutors who have been caught lying to convict someone who was innocent. Cops who faked evidence, or destroyed it. The judges who convicted kids in order to get kickbacks from the private children's prison, that was pretty bad. It's pretty shocking to be reminded that there are people who believe that the US justice system is made up of well-meaning, well-informed people who do not attempt to ruin anyone's life. Or that it is not a collection of rules that are sometimes designed to ruin many people's lives, or best case simply happen to do that because they were written without any interest in their effect on people's lives or by people with actively incorrect understanding of what their actual impact would be. There is enough information to contradict this naive faith in the justice system, just in the national headlines over the past few decades; people who have gone to the effort of reading entire articles and follow up research, or ever gotten involved personally, can simply forget the level of mistaken trust that half the country grows up with. Like ...you're asking "what is water? How dare you mention water without lab evidence!"
Source please
Biden commuting one of the judges' sentences in 2020 is batshit insane to me.
Something about this just doesn't seem very plausible, especially if this kind of thing is happening more than once in a blue moon. Either the video evidence is not as convincing as we're being led to assume (thus leaving more doubt in the judge's mind than ours, even if the person is innocent), or there should be some other explanation.
Lawyers began telling their clients to film themselves in their homes at all times so that they could prove to judges that they were in their homes when the devices went off. That's advice they give because the risks of not doing that are going back into jail. And to prove all that, you still have to go through all that process, filming yourself, etc. It's truly bad.
What’s funny here is that you are displaying misplaced trust in the justice system that exactly parallels my hypothetical judge’s misplaced trust in technology.
Everyone also knows GPS can be spoofed.
Your point?
LOL!
Everybody who has played Pokemon Go knows it can be spoofed!
Because judges are nearly always the kind of people who instinctively trust authority. They wouldn't be judges otherwise.
Hope that helps.
You're cherry-picking a single word to start a pointless internet argument? Calm down. Nobody claimed this exact event lead to problems for anyone.
This is what OP actually said:
>>This is exactly the sort of thing
Yes, this absolutely is the sort of thing. No, 33 feet isn't "the thing" but GPS glitching is the sort of thing at a different increment.
So yes, it absolutely sucks that this technology is so inconvenient and bad but at the same time, the author and GP claims are not proved or truthful in totality (even in the article they posted).
We can agree GPS tracking sucks but also question claims that are not true. Also telling people to "calm down" over text when they are not even talking to you is very passive aggresive for no reason.
That's why there's no data for someone getting rearrested due to GPS, and why the few instances where someone do prove an error is concerning.
Your "This" quote was the least genuine comment I've seen on HN in a very long time. You took a comment and removed all context to complain about how it's wrong, when it wasn't wrong at all. There should be no doubt that GPS glitches can cause people with ankle monitors a lot of needless trouble, and "the system" likely won't believe it, and simply won't care.
If you had an ankle monitor, and someone wanted to fuck with you, it would be trivially easy to block or spoof GPS signals to put you back in jail. All it takes is an SDR and some software you can find on github. Think about that before you quip "This" again.
This time the glitch was 33 feet, who's to say next time it couldn't be 3300 feet?
People who study this. This glitch was caused by unusual, structured, widespread distortions in the ionosphere. There's no known mechanism that would cause enough distortion to make the errors 100 times as large. There would also be other symptoms of any unknown cause.
https://claude.ai/share/5cc4163e-9cbf-47cd-9749-4bb55bca42fe if you don't mind discursions into safety of aviation navigation systems. Caution: Do not take the error bounds in the second half as relevant to errors for unaugmented single-frequency users; those users will see much bigger errors.
33 feet is well within the allowances IIRC. Varies by state.
At the very least, it's not enough evidence provided to claim the scenario is inherently impossible based on undefined "allowances" without any actual numbers for something completely dependent on the jurisdiction, monitoring software implementation, and attitude of the police officer/judge.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o0sPXL9C53g
I also found Reddit anecdotes of getting alert texts stepping outside onto the street from their yard, or false alarms while still inside but not enough details were provided to be sure they were actually GPS and not RF so not as helpful.
The story you linked has examples about false alerts triggering in a different state.
Do you have any actual examples of 33 feet getting someone arrested? I’ve worked enough with GPS that I could tell you that any system with thresholds that low would result in everyone getting false triggers
I fought tooth and nail to get access to the data showing how often devices reported "invalid" status (where the device's specs said it was something like, within 150 feet of inaccuracy it reported "invalid"). They initially told me they couldn't get me that data because it'd crash their database running that query. Basically threatened to sue them and over the next 6mo or so I got two 100GB MSSQL dumps. Hundreds of millions of rows of devices reporting back that their GPS signal was invalid. It would take a lot of time to make it sharable because they included the actual GPS location infos.