Forensic methods used by police and intelligence go much deeper than just looking at phones near the crime scene.
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).
3 raises a very interesting and somewhat concerning possibility. In the near future as AI develops more in the crime detection arena you may become a suspect for crimes occurring in your geographical area based on things you are not doing or based on some set of states your smart devices have that match a statistical model of a suspicious person. The idea of becoming a suspect because you didn’t touch your smartphone during a particular timeframe is chilling.
The problem is that one is explainable and the other is not. "He was near the scene of the crime and has no convincing alibi," is very different from, "The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant." People being targeted for being anomalous is bad, but centralizing and scaling it up is worse.
I doubt that is something to be much concerned about, as I doubt there would be much use of anything that produces lists of suspects without explanation. What would one do with such a list? It would be like getting a bunch of anonymous tips all saying that a different person did the deed, without any clues to follow up on.
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.
> The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant.
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.
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 think the Intel/GE tool counts as mission critical. There are already radiologists reviewing scans. The tool just flags features they may have missed. Remove the tool, and you're back to business as usual.
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.
That tool has the potential to systematically reduce the likelihood that a certain disease/certain class of people receives extra scrutiny from a radiologist. That's maybe not mission critical on a small scale, but on a large scale it absolutely is.
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".
> The tool just flags features they may have missed.
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."
I'd like to throw a thought out there: It is a problem if the government uses algorithms or ML systems that are secret and/or cannot be independently vetted by the citizenry.
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 it what's happening? I thought "computer says so" triggers an investigation, which in turns produces reasoning for the judge, based on which the judge decides?
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?
The worst I've heard of along these lines currently in practice is predictive policing [0]:
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.
> "The computer said he's a suspect and we don't know why, but we still want a warrant."
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.
Which means there will be 100 suspects where usually there would be maybe 2. Which means the data is useless and therefore won't be used.
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.
That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted.
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.
This. To put it simply, they like Precise data, not Accurate data. They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target, not a bunch of data points saying a bunch of things, one of which is actually right.
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.
Until that other-evidence is just the product of some other hellish surveillance system. What I'm really saying is broadly we need fewer of these systems as they will only be abused, especially in concert. If you have one system that says the suspect had their phone off at the time of the bombing, and another saying they searched for "how do bombs work" on google a few years ago the jury will eat that shit up even though in actuality it provides almost zero evidence of anything.
I recall (likely pre-covid) seeing a story posted here of some unsuspecting schmuck who became a suspect in a crime because his smart watch showed him circling near the area on his usual bike route.
Perhaps this story about a Florida man and his fitness app data that "placed him" at the scene of a burglary because he had the misfortune of having ridden by the crime site three times during his ride?
Being arrested, even if never convicted, even if never charged with a crime and released with a hug and an apology, will have long-lasting negative effects on your life. For example, a citizen of a Visa Waiver Program country cannot travel to the US visa-free for the rest of his or her life if they have ever been arrested. They have to apply for a visitor visa and convince an immigration officer that they deserve a visa. Just a simple mistaken identity arrest can make the rest of your life difficult and there is nothing you can do to fix it, you just have to endure it.
> This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system
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.
For a professional, being arrested for a major crime in America is a life ending event.
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.
That’s already a thing, not a future possibility. Jogging too close to a crime can get your location subpoenaed from Google or whoever has it. Stories crop up on HN occasionally about this.
ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.
What is even scarier is the likelihood of law enforcement agencies buying tech from fly-by-night companies who will use all of the buzzwords in their sales pitches (AI, ML, big data, etc) but who have no real knowledge of such things and are just selling a shit product that will entrap innocents.
You will end up with "Computer says no" situations if there are no knowledgable humans that review the decisions from the models.
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".
This is just wrong on so many levels. You even included the widely debunked (even by her own colleagues!) Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 project lies. Cops do not care if you are “weird”.
Police do in fact exist to enforce the law. It really is that simple.
That's a nice fantasy. They're supposed to enforce broken laws. It isn't unusual for them to abuse their power with mental gymnastics to violate the civil rights of law abiding citizens.
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.
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.
Well that's just blatantly not true. They aren't even required to know the laws and can enforce laws that they think exist even if they do not. See Heien vs North Carolina.
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.
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.
There are many other countries where I have experienced more societal meddling with neighbors' business. Ignoring the obvious authoritarian countries, many western european countries have a culture of making sure you are doing the normal or right thing. Germany is the easiest example.
Broken windows policing believes that abnormal behavior creates disorder, so all minor infractions must be heavily punished and "problematic" neighborhoods have to have heavy police presence
Haha, having spent time above and below 49, I would say you couldn’t be more wrong with that perception. In any American city, especially big liberal ones (which is most of them) you can forget about societal norms. There are weird and crazy people everywhere. Nothing is “weird” to anybody who has spent any amount of time in them. Everyone walks right past a circus on their way to work. Cops pay no attention. Ask a New Yorker about their favorite subway stories. It’s hard enough to get a response to actual crime, let alone a cop waste their time on someone acting weird. North of 49, there is way less for them to focus on. Traffic enforcement as a means of revenue generation is huge up there.
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.
Have you considered that your viewpoint might be so wildly opposing to other opinions because you’re part of an “accepted group” that gets their way...while others like me [an individual of color] get the brunt of enforcement — with or without cause?
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?!
Do you not understand the problem with extrapolating trends from cherry picked anecdotes? And no, those videos are absolutely not evidence of problems. They aren’t even evidence of isolated cases of racism. But it wouldn’t change the situation if they were.
More importantly, parent wasn’t even commenting about race.
>In any American city, especially big liberal ones (which is most of them) you can forget about societal norms. There are weird and crazy people everywhere. Nothing is “weird” to anybody who has spent any amount of time in them. Everyone walks right past a circus on their way to work.
> It’s also important not to generalize across such a diverse set of individuals and jurisdictions.
We have had the RCMP racially profiling native Americans and picking on people of color. The exact reason they are not supposed to pull you over for offenses as you mentioned but need a reason such as speeding or failure to follow traffic laws. It's NOT OKAY and should not be considered normal for them to do.
How do you train for anomalies, given that the data is widely different every time? Or in other words, how do you obtain a dataset that is representative?
I'd argue that it is often difficult to impossible, but that doesn't stop companies from making AI/ML products for law enforcement. I'm someone who regularly trips up my bank's weird behavior detection system, and have my debit card frozen more often than it should be because of my purchasing patterns and travel.
This already happens, most of us just don't live in the neighborhoods where it happens. That's the unfortunate reality of today's America. It's also the reason that these techniques will be employed in a ubiquitous fashion in tomorrow's America.
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.
Thats his point this was being done years ago but white americans were not part of the demographic surveilled this way so didn't care now that they are and it gets stopped because of it then people accusing the police and government of racism are correct.
Point is, the time to stop that particular practice was in its infancy. Waiting until the practice is both widespread and normalized is a losing strategy. The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. To come along and unwind all that now is sisyphaean. We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. And certainly not allowing privacy violations that affect others, then trying to prevent the very same privacy violation from affecting our own.
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?
We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time.
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?
Well maybe we need to go over their heads then. That's supposed to be the purpose of the legislative branch - make rules about how the government is allowed to operate.
> The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law.
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.
The US isn't Europe, and in the US, law enforcement has undue influence in government and significant lobbying power. PBAs successfully lobbied to keep marijuana illegal all over the country, and it took public referendums to get it legalized in states that it is legal in. Even then, PBAs had undue influence in crafting legislation so that municipal police could still ticket and jail people in order to still generate revenue from marijuana possession and sale violations.
There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent. We do want to catch criminals. That's the whole point of having law enforcement. It's funny that in America, people seem to have so given up on the idea of the police being honest and competent that all they want is to reduce their power. They don't seem to want reform and instead would rather suffer from crime than be investigated by the police.
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.
It's generally well accepted in the criminology field that you can reduce crime and that actually the most effective way to reduce crime happen well before and are not related to policing anyone. No one wants to suffer from crime by inaction.
Because basing the system on the assumption that police will always be honest and competent is what got us into the situation we're in. Once bitten, twice shy.
>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).
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).
Maybe the data connection, but not the radio that's listening for incoming calls (and it's periodically pinging the closest cell tower so that the cell network knows which cell tower to send that call to)
I was more thinking of data collection by cellphone companies, but what you've described can conceivably be done if you had cooperation from os vendors (apple/google).
Yikes, I don't know if I'd call it "forensics" using a negative to suggest a positive. That actually sounds pretty dystopian to me.
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...
Check out HawkEye 360. They use a cluster of three satellites to triangulate AIS and radio transmissions (CB/UHF/etc) and do a bunch of ML to detect people where they shouldn't be.
Regarding 3 I’ve been thinking of launching a courier service for this that would pollute data on a wide scale.
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.
It sounds to me like something that it would be basically impossible to get enough clients for that you could charge a small amount to make it worthwhile, so if you can't get a lot of clients you have to charge a large amount, but if you charge a large amount you shut even more people out that just are a little paranoid and care about the polluting data as a privacy thing, so basically at the point where your pricing could work would have to be for criminals, and then you have to have clever criminals who are organized.
on edit: wait, with proper marketing maybe great for celebrities. might need some extra services.
Subscription service like everything else whether the subscribers use it often enough for themselves, drop a couple lockboxes in uber driver’s cars. Free advertising to other uber riders, no ongoing overhead costs for operation.
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
The question is what the non-crime use case is. I can't think of such a thing. In any event, having your phone in an uber with a bunch of other phones and not following "normal" uber ride patterns would be yet another detectable pattern.
Yes, that model would be detectable, what does that get anyone though?
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.
In the case of a tyrannical government, it would be easy to detect use of this service and the tyrannical government would have an easy way of identifying "enemies of the state."
I like to think of it as phantom cloning. You physically could be where you normally are at home, or out somewhere else with no phone, or out somewhere else with a burner. All while what people normally use to identify you is moving around randomly.
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.
I remember a former-NSA penetration tester telling me, a naive college hire, that for us to be successful developing BitLocker Drive Encryption, we’d have to make it good enough for terrorists to be willing to use it. It was a few years after 9/11 and that was a sobering conversation.
Yes. Protecting innocent people from getting caught in the fallout.
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).
Law enforcement isn't going to tell you their capabilities or what behaviors put a red flag on you. This "cell phone pinged near the capitol" is the kind of language I expect them to use in a press release. It's generic enough and close enough to true that it conveys the basic idea without revealing secrets.
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.
>> 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).
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.
> 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).
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.
I read books about spatial techniques used in forensic investigations and listened some lectures. The company I worked for used to have law enforcement customers needing GIS and data mining consultants.
I think with open WiFi networks and city mesh networks, using a WiFi-only tablet (probably iPad given their treatment of unique device ID's and privacy to prevent tracking by commercial device catchers) with a VPN is probably the best way to avoid this type of surveillance.
Although it does leave you in a sticky situation if you can't find an open network.
I know of a murder case where the suspect is trying to use a web page refresh in the middle of the night as evidence he did not kill his lover. The prosecution thinks it was an automatic refresh but have difficulties proving it.
You don't have to browse all the time, if it's a pattern just being alongside friends phone, and your phone is locked - it'd make sense. You're enjoying conversation, he's doing the spotify playlist..
Gaits, like fingerprints, would do a pretty good job of matching a suspect to evidence, but if they have a gait (or fingerprint) and there is no match in the system, then what?
> 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).
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
Good thing I rarely answer calls and my phone creates traffic on its own. Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if I could just spoof my phone's traffic with simple scripts.
basically leaving you phone or going dark is by itself already suspicious behavior warranting a quick interview with the police AI-based precognition screener and/or dispatch of a police welfare check drone.
If you've never seen it, it's worth your time to watch
"Don't Talk to The Police",
a lecture by a law professor, in case the FBI, etc. come knocking on your door.
These folks weren't smart enough to leave their tracking devices at home and a ton of them filmed their crimes. Everyone has a right to remain silent, but it's not going to help in most of these cases where the evidence is so abundant.
I wonder if these same techniques will be used to track down all the rioters and looters from this past summer. Or is it just used against particular groups?
That’s some next-level reality distortion to frame this as “against particular groups.” Unless you define the “particular group” as people that directly attack the heart of the government.
The actually violent leftie anarchists knew all this stuff ahead of time and didn't leave digital trails. Their whole gig was opposition to the police, which means they knew what they were facing and how the system worked.
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.
Literally thousands of protestors were arrested over the summer, violent and nonviolent alike. Hundreds had the shit kicked out of them by police and have no recourse, please take a few hours and watch some of the videos. It seems heavy handed policing, brutality and large numbers of arrests are certainly happening to only one group, just not the way you are implying.
I've never been in law enforcement, but I think as in any other resource-constrained endeavour, effort and resources have to be prioritized after triaging tasks. I'm guessing in this case, it would be by the severity of the alleged crime). Also, it has become apparent to everyone - not all "protests" are equal, hence not all responses will be similar.
Yeah, I was going to react to that. I'm not from Italy or Spain but definitely could be in "so forth", I found that somewhat offensive. Especially coming from an American policeman, where police brutality is no small problem...
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??)
Just because there's a lot of news of US police brutality and little or no news from [insert country]'s police brutality, that data point could just as well mean that the news are more robust in the US than that there's less of it in other countries.
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)
The US isn't better or worse than Europe, it's different. Having lived in both the hypocrisy of Europeans when it comes to police brutality to gypsies is astonishing, doubly so since I'm half gypsy but white enough to get a free pass and get told how bad 'they' are.
Usually it's around this time that some European chimes in with some bullshit about how it's not racism when it's against gypsies. Hopefully this time they spare us.
How many gypsies gets killed per year by police in Europe? Compare that to how many people police kills in USA? There is pretty hard data that European police is drastically less violent overall.
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 63% number for Germany fits very well with the fact that police in Germany it's always patrolling in groups of at least 3. I could imagine that that lessens the pressure on any single officer. In the US, if you are overwhelmed, you might be done, while in Germany there is always another officer ready to help.
In case of vehicle stops, one officer can interact with the driver comparatively relaxed, which helps to deescalate, while the second officer is covering their colleague.
That is not to say that we don't have problems with police brutality or cover-ups here, they are just less deadly usually.
Oh yeah. They're allowed to say pretty much anything they want.
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.
I'd need a real study and not just a quote from a US police officer to believe that the US police is less violent than southern European police. There is so much statistics that they are more violent already, he need evidence to back that up.
It's because leaving comments enabled invites the worst of humanity to post excrement on your 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.
Can you think of a way that talking to the police might be different from posting on HN when it comes to self-incrimination? If you truly can't just let me know and I'll give you a hand, but you should try the exercise yourself first.
Thanks for the clarifying question, instead of an attack. I mean that anything you say that is publicly accessible can be used against you. Consider that you are charged with, I don't know, theft of a Coke. And you have a twitter account where you say you love Coke so much, but hate that its so expensive. This could very well be used against you, as it goes to a general motive. In the same way, HN discussions are wide ranging and could be used by a prosecutor in a similar way. And indeed, just posting here at all on a site with "hacker" in its title is inherently risky.
Unless you use your real name and really start mouthing off, this isn't really the kind of network the DA is going to start shooting off subpoenas to....unless you Enron...
All cells phones, at all times, are tracked everywhere. I'm sure there are 1000's of cameras that are also used to capture visual data (in DC area). Every person flying (domestic/international) is already tracked. MC/VISA/Bank/ATM records are tracked. Every txt, post, voice call, letter you send, package you receive, is tracked (OCR's). Your vehicle is tracked via programs like Onstar, etc, even if you don't sign up for the service.
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.
And yet, violent crime this year is at a multi-decade high[1]. It's one thing to suffer the indignity of a surveillance, but it's quite another when the surveillance doesn't even deliver its purported benefits.
The “multi-decade high” here is the highest in 20 years, which is two decades - a time of historically low crime. “Multi-decade” sounds like a much longer range than two decades.
That article throws out a bunch of numbers without really putting things in a proper historical context. Violent crime has fallen dramatically since the 90's and the murder rate is about as low as it was in the 60's in 2019 (according to the FBI). While a ~35% spike is alarming, one should look at what the full 2020 stats end up being.
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.
It’s pretty clear that a huge percentage of police budgets have nothing to do with public safety. All one needs to do is point out how many small towns have APCs for some inexplicable reason. It’s not a huge jump to assume that a non trivial percentage of police techniques don’t have anything to do with stopping crimes either.
This is only “clear” if you are completely unqualified to make such assertions but do so anyway to fit some narrative.
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.
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.
I always find it funny how many people seem to think that vehicle maintenance is free. Especially large military vehicles. Even if the vehicle is free, you’re not going to take that to the jiffy lube every 3,000 miles.
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.
This isn’t a counterargument that you want to use. These don’t have 3,000 mile service intervals (nor does any fleet vehicle besides perhaps motorcycles) and oil is extremely inexpensive at this frequency and quantity. They spend more on toilet paper.
Not particularly, no. The nature of having caught a "criminal" means the crime has already occurred. Crime prevention is less a cause of justice and more a cause of social work.
I would imagine that past offences correlate quite strongly with a proclivity for future offences. Hence reformation and/or incarceration should reduce the number of opportunities for repeated offence.
Surveillance is hardly the only variable in play, though. Unemployment is also at a multi-decade high, due to covid. Seems like the second option passes the Occam test a bit better to my eyes.
Yeah but the funny thing is that these surveillance networks never actually seem to be used to solve normal crimes. Is it laziness on the part of the police? Are they trying to reserve these systems for more serious crimes so we forget they exist? Is it just a matter of time before police culture catches up and we see license plate readers, cell phone records, CCTV networks, etc used to track down petty thieves and robbers?
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.
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.
They will mysteriously remember that they can do that in the next spate of unrest, now that it serves no useful purpose.
Putting my tin foil hat on real quick. Just wait until they implement AI into all these sensors to "predict crimes", turning life into Minority Report. The interesting part is its the common people who will naively go along with it to feel more safe while at the same time further imprisoning themselves.
They've been doing this for years. Chicago has a list of everyone that will get shot (or shoot someone) over the next year or so. It's like 2k people with 90%+ recall. St Louis has something similar. But it hasn't exactly stopped crime.
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.
If you’re on the list, you know. You’re part of a gang (or clique, as they’re apparently called now), probably beefing with another, and almost definitely carrying a gun on you for protection. You’re well aware.
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.
This is kind of what Musk has been constantly warning about. Also important in another scenario is that legislators, police heads, and civilians simply have no idea how task specific AI (rather than general purpose) that governs them works so its a tiny unelected shadow club mass governing people.
Musk is embodiment of 'Hegelian Dialectic' in action. Tesla is normalising surveillance, Space X and StarLink are building the network capabilities of the future AI and Neural Link is the end point of human connection. What a hero, a real Tony Stark for the masses:)
Yeah; on one hand, we're tracked everywhere. On the other, since the systems are so disparate, it takes a lot of leg work to put the data together, even without a warrant. It's better than nothing.
Accuracy is generally not great compared to gps. When towers are more dense accuracy is increased. However, an LTE phone generally pings a tower every few minutes on average so you can track people pretty well. Telecom operators have tools (generally 3rd party) that indexes and geolocate this log data from the towers in order to solve network issues. It can obviously also be used for law enforcement purposes but probably require a warrant
Just don't use services that track you. It's possible to live a fairly normal life despite all this. I do it. Don't carry a cell phone, turn off javascript everywhere, use a non-onstar/etc car, don't fly commercially, use cash for in person transactions and bitcoin (or monero) online where you can.
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.
No. At this point you become a standout anomaly, or you will become one, in the not too distant future. The progress of society is becoming increasingly collective. Individual choices are becoming less important. I'm not saying we're there yet, but already we're at a point where meaningful societal change needs at least a considerable group of people all acting together, and even then, fundamental changes have been taken out of people's hands altogether, unless "we" are prepared to go to extremes, which is simply not a characteristic of large groups, unless the situation has deteriorated severely, but be sure, our overlords will keep us minimally complacent enough.
/rant
The point about cameras blanketing DC reminded me:
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?
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 what it's worth, the FBI isn't the only entity keeping tabs on cellphones around the Capitol. The place is probably one of the more heavily surveilled spots on the planet:
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:
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.
A lot of comments here about ‘overreach’ ‘privacy violations’ and such as if the FBI is showing up and accusing these people of crimes. If you actually read the story, the one person who they quote explains they weren’t suspected of anything but the agents asked for any photos they had of the events.
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.
classic police work...always starts with contacting a person of interest and saying “your not a suspect, we just want you to come down and answer a few questions.” If you don’t, it’s suspicious and they will continuing investigating you as a person of interest. If you do, they will conclude you were suspiciously nervous and begin building by their case.
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.
Worth noting that the headline refers to "DC residents get visits", but the story is based solely on one person's account (so far). It's not unbelievable that the FBI would overreach in an investigation, but if the interviewee's account is true, we should in the next few days see more people come out.
>"And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on my cell phone ping."
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.
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.
Yeah, that raises a whole bunch of other ethical questions though, like why you’re able to do this, what access to PII you have and why you’re able to run queries like this on a Saturday.
I hope your employers keeps track of stuff like this.
What do you think, most such data comes from Apps, they just ask for permission and give you no rights at all. Location data is a such business, for traffic or business. Look at this example from Thasos. The look many hours and shifts are in companys and sell the data to traders.
http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla-wsj/
I did not say, I think it's a good thing or it's ethical. It's just the truth. But we all accept it somehow, so Google or wherever can make us good traffic warnings. Here in Switzerland the location data is also sold by the telco companys, you have to opt out by yourself (at least by Swisscom).
As someone who works for a tech giant I'd like to provide some input here.
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.
It does not. Maybe it should though. I know a company I worked at logged everything that was done or accessed within our Salesforce instance, maybe something needs to be done like that rather than allowing folks to run arbitrary sql queries against the database.
This is standard practice at large companies with proper data controls. Usually they have a "break glass" feature for emergencies and don't let any humans access PII without a damn good reason.
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.
It's not triangulation, it's multi-lateration and the spatial resolution depends on just how good the basestation clocks are. And they've become very good. Every telco in the USA stores multi-lateration for cell handsets location for 2-5 years by default. They both sell this commercially and provide/sell it to authorities on request.
>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.
5G significantly increases granularity by a metric shit ton, and if they were continually pinging in the same area, eventually you end up with roughly one zone.
Here's Verizon's explainer [1] about how 5G works. Basically, since the frequencies needed to transmit large amounts of data are so high (28 - 39 GHz millimeter wavelength bands), the signal does not reach as far as a 4G tower. Therefore, a higher density of towers is needed (500 feet apart to effectively penetrate buildings [2]), allowing for higher granularity cell-phone triangulation/tracking as a by-product.
Well GPS is 1.2 to 1.5GZ and you can get accuracy to a few meters easily. I have a higher end module that gets down to a meter[1]. Seems obvious that G4 which uses roughly same frequencies but with cell towers vastly closer than a GPS satellite could get 1M.
[1] Give it a few minutes and it'll pin point where my desk is inside my office.
Technically it's not triangulation, it's trilateration.
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.
OK, I looked it up, and the GPS system is a different and simpler from what I thought I heard.
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.
I will note that you could make the system work fine without an atomic clock on the satellites. There are circuits that can keep a good enough sync to a ground-based reference. It would just be annoying.
Both GPS receivers and cell phone towers use the same basic approach based on the time it takes for the signal to travel between transmitter and receiver.
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.
Cell tower needs to know timing advance [1] (how long it takes for the signal to travel between the tower and the handset) to make sure signals from different handsets do not overlap.
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).
OK, I didn't know about "timing advance". Obviously that gives at least a radius from the tower.
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.
Is this....a serious question? All new iPhones are 5G compatible for the start and they sell millions, and loads of other manufacturers have released 5G compatible phones. In fact I'd risk a guess that if you bought a phone in the last 12 months it's likely to be a 5G compatible phone.
You don't even need iPhones - most of the cheap prepaid brands that you'd see next to a payday loan shop are offering Samsung's lower grade phones or OnePlus 5G phones for free if you set up autopay (it's locked to that carrier). Of course it comes with even more privacy-violating bloatware than ever, but still - 5G is no longer a rarity or expensive.
I’m guessing people who flew into DC on a weekday are more likely than average to own a decent smartphone. QAnon folk don’t seem to avoid mainstream technology in the quantity HN users do.
AT&T is still installing Carrier IQ on almost all Androids. That application is collecting info like GPS and barometric readings to estimate floor location in a highrise, etc.
Absolutely. In addition all carriers use multi-lateration and sectorization to fine tune location. The better the location the more valuable it is for commercial resale and CALEA sales.
Notice that all of this is entirely legal, above board, and you agreed to it as part of your service agreement.
You don't get that level of granularity from a single ping, but you theoretically could from hundreds, the noise will tend to center around the true location.
Also consider that more than 3 stations probably were nearby.
Modern mobile networks choose the best 7 for the client but the number of towers within physical range getting pinged is quite substantial.
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.
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).