North Carolina Police Obtained Warrants Demanding All Google Users Near Four Crime Scenes (wral.com) 214
An anonymous reader quotes the public records reporter from North Carolina TV station WRAL:
In at least four investigations last year -- cases of murder, sexual battery and even possible arson at the massive downtown fire in March 2017 -- Raleigh police used search warrants to demand Google accounts not of specific suspects, but from any mobile devices that veered too close to the scene of a crime, according to a WRAL News review of court records... The demands Raleigh police issued for Google data [in two homicide cases] described a 17-acre area that included both homes and businesses... The account IDs aren't limited to electronics running Android. The warrant includes any device running location-enabled Google apps, according to Raleigh Police Department spokeswoman Laura Hourigan...
On March 16, 2017, a five-alarm fire ripped through the unfinished Metropolitan apartment building on West Jones Street... About two months later, Raleigh police obtained a search warrant for Google account IDs that showed up near the block of the Metropolitan between 7:30 and 10 p.m. the night of the fire... In addition to anonymized numerical identifiers, the warrant calls on Google to release time stamped location coordinates for every device that passed through the area. Detectives wrote that they'd narrow down that list and send it back to the company, demanding "contextual data points with points of travel outside of the geographical area" during an expanded timeframe. Another review would further cull the list, which police would use to request user names, birth dates and other identifying information of the phones' owners.
"Do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?" asks a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. And Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also criticized the procedure. "To just say, 'Criminals commit crimes, and we know that most people have cell phones,' that should not be enough to get the geo-location on anyone that happened to be in the vicinity of a particular incident during a particular time." She believes that without probable cause the police department is "trying to use technology as a hack for their job... It does not have to be that we have to give up our privacy rights in order to participate in the digital revolution."
Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly. "At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people."
On March 16, 2017, a five-alarm fire ripped through the unfinished Metropolitan apartment building on West Jones Street... About two months later, Raleigh police obtained a search warrant for Google account IDs that showed up near the block of the Metropolitan between 7:30 and 10 p.m. the night of the fire... In addition to anonymized numerical identifiers, the warrant calls on Google to release time stamped location coordinates for every device that passed through the area. Detectives wrote that they'd narrow down that list and send it back to the company, demanding "contextual data points with points of travel outside of the geographical area" during an expanded timeframe. Another review would further cull the list, which police would use to request user names, birth dates and other identifying information of the phones' owners.
"Do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?" asks a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. And Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also criticized the procedure. "To just say, 'Criminals commit crimes, and we know that most people have cell phones,' that should not be enough to get the geo-location on anyone that happened to be in the vicinity of a particular incident during a particular time." She believes that without probable cause the police department is "trying to use technology as a hack for their job... It does not have to be that we have to give up our privacy rights in order to participate in the digital revolution."
Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly. "At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people."
Some kind of (Score:2)
Easy to use when needed quickly but stay not connected when moving around a city, state?
Make sure a big brand can only see your phone at home and at work.
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Re:Some kind of (Score:4, Insightful)
Trust but verify now works for the faraday cage.
The big telco brands cant be trusted.
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Trust the PRISM brands with their hardware to say off is off?
No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure. And what are the odds that no one would have noticed and blown the whistle if airplane mode didn't actually work?
Sigh. This site used to be populated by people with a clue. This is like all of those people who believe that smart speakers must be sending 24/7 audio to the cloud, but don't bother to simply measure the data the devices send/receive at their routers and do the math.
Paranoia is well and good, but being paranoid about a possibil
Re: Some kind of (Score:5, Insightful)
Could not the device continue to collect location data without emitting ref signals?
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This is indeed the problem. You might be able to detect things like power draw and RF oscillators if the device is receiving RF signals even when in airplane mode, but it is harder to do than measuring transmissions.
There is also a question about what "airplane mode" actually does. Okay, it prevents transmissions, but what about GPS? It appears to turn it off, but why? GPS is receive only, there is no transmission and no danger to aircraft even if it is turned on. Chances are it turns GPS off just to satisf
Re: Some kind of (Score:2)
GPS works fine with airplane mode. I use it to check airspeed when sitting in window seats. There are GPS-only location apps for you to nerd out on individual satellite signal, etc.
Flying in airplanes can get pretty tedious.
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Sure, on my phone you can enable everything in airplane mode if you want to. It's just a fast "disable everything" button.
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GPS works fine with airplane mode. I use it to check airspeed when sitting in window seats.
You cannot check airspeed using GPS. Airspeed is measured by measuring the difference in airpressure from the pitot port and the static port.
What you're measuring is groundspeed. If you have both (that is, groundspeed from GPS and airspeed from the pitot-static system), you can calculate with and wind direction, and a compass heading.
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GPS is receive only, there is no transmission and no danger to aircraft even if it is turned on. Chances are it turns GPS off just to satisfy clueless airline staff and consumers.
Radio receivers aren't generally allowed. I assume this dates back from the era whne cheapass radios would piss out the IF and its considerable harmonics (linear? ha!) all over the spectrum to the point where it could interfere with the pilot's radio, so receivers got banned and this rule has been cargo-culted ever since.
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Interesting. I've had the whole spectrum depending on the aircraft. Some as okay with WiFi and anything else, others wanted all electronics turned off completely.
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GPS is GPS is GPS ... ... how often the position is recalculated. ...
Every GPS handles altitude. It us basically impossible not to handle it.
Speed and direction depends in the sample rate
There is on receiving side no difference between consumer or other GPS, it is just a receiver
Re: Some kind of (Score:4, Informative)
The GPS chipsets in phones are far and away the biggest sellers of GPS chipsets. With additional specialisations for reducing power (compared to the Garmin GPS which I had in the early 2000s). But why would a phone track fewer satellites than (say) 15kg of suveyor's GPS with a differential base station and another 5kg of battery for each station? Partly for power use - each received signal and decoding cost miliwatt-seconds of battery power - and partly for speed of response.
Three satellites will give you a ground position. Actually, three satellites will give you the crossing point of three arcs of position solutions. Which almost certainly will not cross, but will define a triangle (*) on the ground. What is the probability of the true ground position being inside that triangle ? 12.5% - 1 in 8.
That is why GPS systems are more accurate with more satellites, and why they strive to acquire as many satellites as the system can handle.
The same problem applies to getting an altitude, for which you need a 4th satellite. It's actually a bit worse, since the system is optimised for ground positions not altitudes, so the uncertainty in altitude is almost always bigger than for ground position. (*) triangle - with arc of a conic section edges, not straight lines. But it doesn't change the argument, just makes the geometry much more complex.
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You mean the M7 motion-detection chip?
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
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Could not the device continue to collect location data without emitting ref signals?
Airplane mode disables transmitters, not receivers, so obviously it could. The comment I replied to was implying that airplane mode didn't do what it claims to, not that it didn't do things it doesn't claim to.
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Sure, GPS is likely blocked, but an accelerometer can be used to do a pretty good extrapolation from a starting point, more so when you have accurate plans of the target. Of course, something need to report that data, but I expect applications that do this are already available and will become more common if people start blocking GPS and phone signals.
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I only phrase it that way because millennials simply can't be without their precious phone for long enough to commit even the simplest of crimes, so the suggestion might actually reduce the crime rate a bit.
Re: Some kind of (Score:4, Insightful)
I could constantly monitor and analyse my network traffic or I could just save myself time and money and not buy something I don't trust.
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I could constantly monitor and analyse my network traffic or I could just save myself time and money and not buy something I don't trust.
And which mobile phone can you trust?
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No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure.
It can - so long as they aren't turning on the transmitters in the phone in short bursts once every minute or so. In that case you need something that can log those short bursts of RF over a specified band or bands. You might be able to put something together around SDR that would do that, but it would take some time and effort. AFAIK the only off-the-shelf solution would be one of the more sophisticated, (read "expen$ive"), spectrum analyzers.
Even then, your phone might be receiving in stealth mode, in whi
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No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure.
It can - so long as they aren't turning on the transmitters in the phone in short bursts once every minute or so. In that case you need something that can log those short bursts of RF over a specified band or bands.
The goal was to detect whether it was transmitting, not to log the transmissions. You can detect short bursts with a cheap RF signal meter, you just need to watch it. In fact, phones do transmit short bursts quite a bit, to avoid having to keep the transmitters powered up unnecessarily. They suck a lot of power, which drains your battery.
Even then, your phone might be receiving in stealth mode, in which case there might be provisions for making it 'phone home' on demand.
Perhaps, but now you're into stratospheric levels of paranoia. Actually, this sort of behavior would be pretty easy to detect just by watching battery levels while airplane
Re: Some kind of (Score:2)
There is no need for the data to be transmitted in real time. It can be quietly collected and burst transmit once a day, once a week or whatever parameter you want to set.
Is how certain bugs go undetected by sniffer gear, they don't transmit full time. ( Bonus, it also saves battery )
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It's all sciencey, true enough (Score:3)
1) A smartphone is a general purpose computer. At this point, it might be a multicore, >1 GHz computer with lots of memory and storage.
2) There are many things you can do with a general purpose computer that isn't connected to the network. Especially one that is replete with useful sensors like cameras, motion, iris, fingerprint, microphone and so forth, as well as audio and visual output and handy data input mechanisms such as keyboards and touc
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The cell phone is just not going to a map of movement and location until it is used by its owner.
Consider not carrying a tracking device (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this is the way crimes get prosecuted in the US. The DA will threaten you with a bunch of charges that will put you away for a long time if you don't plea bargin. It will cost a very large amount of money to defend yourself. So if you happen to be some random person in the area who LE or the DA thinks might have done it, even if you are innocent your life could be wrecked. Perople need to realize carrying tracking devices around with you incurs a small chance of having your life ruined and it might not be something you want to do.
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Exactly - the US sentencing system is terminally fucked up, in a way that pushes people to plead guilty to crimes they're INNOCENT of. This serves nobody -- the real criminal is still out on the street, innocent lives are ruined, and the states pay to incarcerate innocent victims of the US injustice system.
Better solution would be to erase a whole bunch of victimless crimes from the books (i.e. non-violent drug possession by adults, prostitution between consenting adults, gambling offenses) and require tha
Re:Consider not carrying a tracking device (Score:5, Insightful)
This serves nobody
It serves the politicians, which in the USA often includes the Judges, prosecutors and heads of police departments. For a politician, it is more important to be seen as doing something, even if it is totally the wrong something and throwing someone in jail is doing something.
No mod points, but... (Score:2)
++insightful
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Perople [sic] need to realize carrying tracking devices around with you incurs a small chance of having your life ruined and it might not be something you want to do.
What's funny is that criminals will start to realize this as well and will turn off their cellphones. So all you'll have is innocent people who happened to be in the area.
Probable cause? (Score:5, Interesting)
What judge signed the warrant? They're a clear and present danger to the Constitution.
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"...no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, ..."
It's right there for you in the TFS:
from any mobile devices that veered too close to the scene of a crime
"Hey, there was a murder in New York City last weekend. Google's records show that you were also in NYC, along with millions of other potential suspects. That is enough probable cause for the police to beat you to a pulp."
This is going to end like the former East Germany secret police, the Stasi. They were collecting so much information . . . that they couldn't even seriously analyze it all.
Now if the police could broadcast the locations of crime scenes, we could al
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"Hey, there was a murder in New York City last weekend. Google's records show that you were also in NYC, along with millions of other potential suspects. That is enough probable cause for the police to beat you to a pulp."
I feel like, personally at least, how objectionable this is depends on how wide of an area they're targeting. "All of NYC" would obviously be, literally, too broad, but "within 20 yards at the time the murder occurred" seems reasonable. I don't know how small of a resolution the data can get here.
I feel like objections to this need to focus on how it differs from things like a camera or witness seeing your car in the area and reporting the license plate.
It does seem like it needs some specific rules aroun
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Standing (Score:2)
Google should have standing, because complying with the warrant would make them accessories to a crime.
At the very least, they can not comply, which (might) get them charged with something, and at which point they can take it upstream.
Of course, SCOTUS is utterly corrupt WRT actually obeying the constitution, so that might not work, but as for Google having standing, it's entirely within reach.
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This search warrant is likely far too broad to pass Constitutional muster
really why? cell tower records, credit card transactions have been used for years in exactly the same way, as are CCTV, red light cameras etc etc.
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The thing is, there WAS probable cause.
This is like police getting a warrant for video surveillance recordings from a business next door to where a crime occurred. There is no presumption that the neighboring business did something wrong, or that the owner or any patron of that business did something wrong. The point of the warrant is to gather evidence relating to the crime that occurred.
This kind of warrant seems reasonable to me, provided that due process is followed. There is no presumption of guilt of
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Well, if they see any evidence that you knew what he was up to, that would be probable cause. If they saw you walk by oblivious, they could ask if you might have seen anything but it would not be reasonable to search you. Best bet would be to broadcast that they were looking for witnesses who were around X at Y time and see if you contact them.
The only reason that wouldn't work is that they have cultivated an atmosphere of distrust over the years.
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Captured on camera. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nathan Freed Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, put it succinctly. "At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people."
Same could be said about public CCTVs.
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You are so backwards. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, I'd rather not give that data to law-enforcement either, but it's a lot less bad than google and friends having it.
How are you okay sharing it with google and hundreds of "partner" companies, but somehow not okay with "guvurnment" getting access?
Re:You are so backwards. (Score:5, Insightful)
How are you okay sharing it with google and hundreds of "partner" companies, but somehow not okay with "guvurnment" getting access?
One group may throw an advertisement at you for 30 seconds even if you don't want the product. The other group may throw you in jail for 30 years even if you didn't do the crime.
Magnitudes of impact matter.
Re:You are so backwards. (Score:5, Insightful)
The advert group requires your cooperation. The government can arrest you regardless.
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The advert group requires your cooperation. The government can arrest you regardless.
Do they? Google seems to have trackers almost everywhere on the web and even being somewhat technically literate, it is hard to block them all, especially on a closed system like a cell phone and I don't know about Google but Facebook, which is also in the advertising business, seems to have shadow profiles of most everyone, whether they ever cooperated by signing up or not.
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From a web browser it can be done from the "activity controls" settings, This is the easiest way since each android release seems to be burying the settings deeper and deeper
Re: You are so backwards. (Score:2)
Hahahahahaha!
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It scares me that google, a greedy for-profit company, has all that personal data.
Then you should turn off location history, so they won't have it. With history off but location on, location data is only uploaded as needed to satisfy app requests and is not retained.
Personally, I find location history to be very useful. I like being able to see where I was on any given day and time. I like it enough that I periodically go in and correct any errors in Google's guesses as to where I was while I still remember (there are a fair number of errors because for power efficiency GPS is used as
Wait a minute (Score:2)
What if the person was using a Windows phone? /s
Seriously, Just Google apps?
Is it easier to serve a warrant to google than the local cellular companies?
Because even if you have your location information turned off/disabled, your location can easily be tracked by the cell towers...
People who commit murder ... (Score:2)
The future has arrived (Score:2)
The future has arrived - and it's totalitarian. Congratulations!
Sure! (Score:2)
"Do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?"
Sure! We always remove the battery of our devices when we go on a crime spree.
It's just like ... (Score:2)
... confiscating all the surveillance footage, both residential and commercial, in the area, so I don't have a problem with it.
Smart devices behave in predictable ways. Owners are aware of those ways and can take actions to mitigate.
It's a choice.
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And this would enhance the business' revenue in what ways?
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Every face and license plate is getting kept for years thanks to networked public private partnerships in city areas.
That 24/7 CCTV capture is going to the city and police and is only limited by how much storage the police can budget for with a third party to keep the data.
2 years for faces was the best guess years ago.
Outside a city? The FBI will put a hidden camera on a
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Not if they're not aware of what they're choosing. It's called informed consent.
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Ownership is called, RTFM.
Dim (Score:2)
The really sad part is that anyone who isn't pretty dim KNOWS they are being tracked and will turn off location history, shield it, turn off the phone, or leave it behind when committing a planned crime. So such unconstitutional warrants in those cases are not only ineffective, they target the people most likely to NOT be involved.
Of course, there are a lot of dim criminals out there, and unplanned crimes of passion for which it might work. But where do you draw the line? If it is OK to do in a murder or
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I would actually go so far as to say that the majority of criminals are dim. We just don't hear about many of those cases (unless they are particularly funny or the stupidity is particularly egregious) since they are usually dead easy to solve. Things like criminal poses for the security camera on the way in to rob a place, with his face in full view. That sort of dim.
But, to be fair, most people don't have a clue about location services, or the fact that their location is stored in the pictures they take,
There will be no end to this unless WE end it (Score:2)
Most of the cops I know/have known are just about bright enough to figure out early in life that they're never going to make a lot of money in fields requiring a lot of brain power. So they go for the one where they get power and a pretty good salary without spending a lot of money on schooling.
An unfortunate corollary is that (as we've seen repeatedly), the people in charge of solving crimes generally aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
So this leaves us in a situation where the police are constantly
The Great Debate (Score:2)
Careful there, Officer. (Score:3)
Not all is at it seems. Not long ago, I was discussing this with some colleagues, the fact Google Maps has a timeline of everywhere I go, how long I was there, how long I drive to get from place to place etc.
I concluded this tracking could be turned right around into a fantastic alibi. Since it tracks everything, every day, establish a normal pattern, for quite a bit of a time (a few years is preferable!), now, one day, leave your phone somewhere it's expected to be for a certain duration of time, while you go without it to commit a heinous crime. Return to collect phone and carry on. You could easily point to this data and say "I didn't do it, phone proves I'm innocent."
The moral of the story? Don't trust that data. It is vastly easy for the common idiot to falsify. If I thought of it, millions of others did too, I'm not exceptionally clever.
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So before committing arson (Score:2)
The problem with this is that if a convicted arsonist happened to be in the area with their smartphone prior to the fire, police will come up with SOME story to "prove" the convicted arsonist did it. Juries are people and easy to fool especially when you've already fooled yourself. Looking for possible suspects prior to developing a strong theory with evidence you can use to verify the suspect afterhand is a recipe for convicting an innocent person. Once a suspect is found, there will be no effort to do any
DuckDuckGo (Score:2)
One more reason NOT to use Google.
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So if location data of every person using google on their phone in a 7 city block area over a period of 2.5 hours is "limited", where exactly would you draw the line?
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So that's the blocks to each side of the crime site, around the time of the crime. Since they aren't asking for info not near the crime site, and not around the time of the crime, I think that is where you will find a line.
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That's not much of a line, especially considering that location information isn't pinpoint accurate. They are getting information about people who did not even know the victim of the crime existed or that a crime happened. People who have probably never even been inside the building where the crime took place.
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I'm not - which is why I leave location services off on my phone, as would any non-stupid criminal.
My objection is that a warrant for information about "every person who was in a 7 city block area in a 2.5 hour window" is ridiculously over-broad, and will almost certainly put dozens if not hundreds of innocent people under suspicion, while not giving any clue whatsoever about the actual criminal unless they were bone-headedly stupid.
It's only a stone's throw from outright government mass surveillance (which
Location services... there's more (Score:3)
Location services create a circumstance where (presumably) the phone does not give location data to apps running on it.
Turning them off does not prevent you from being tracked, either in realtime or after the fact. The cellphone is constantly talking to the towers, and the towers, taken several at a time, constantly locate you fairly precisely - they actually have to in order to hand you off from tower to towe
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any non-stupid criminal.
Probably a _lot_ more stupid petty criminals than smart, educated ones.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
What Google is doing is not really as bad. They can't detain me and ask questions about what I was doing. They can ask and I can dismiss the question unanswered. They cannot put me on trial and they cannot jail me. They cannot cause me to need to spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer while they try to convince a jury that I should be locked in a cage for many years.
Re: This is not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
WHOOSH! The Stasi would be the part where judges are issuing warrants they shouldn't. The only reason what Google is doing is a problem is because it might enable police and judges to violate the Constitution.
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Google tries to keep all your info to itself and uses it to target ads at you. They screw up and send you the wrong ads, not exactly life altering though it is shitty that they have so much data, which is a weakness that the government can use.
The government is run by politicians who want to be seen doing something like jailing criminals. Doesn't really matter to them if they actually jail innocents as long as no one notices and they have the power to ruin lives really quick. Just takes being wrongly arrest
Re:This is not a problem (Score:5, Informative)
The 4th Amendment is pretty clear that warrants should only be issued on having probable cause. What they asked for sounds very much like the general warrants that are explicitly banned by the same amendment.
Re: This is not a problem (Score:2)
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Do you know how small 17 acres is? That's a radius of 485 feet. Do you know how small 17 acres is? That's a radius of 485 feet.
I know that in an urban setting like Raleigh it is not just the area but the amount of people with the area. It's called population density. From the article: "The demands Raleigh police issued for Google data described a 17-acre area that included both homes and businesses. In the Efobi homicide case, the cordon included dozens of units in the Washington Terrace complex near St. Augustine's University." I also know looking at footage of one of the fires, that it is not in the middle of nowhere. Again. Drag
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This isn't any different from pulling over all the people driving red cars because a red car was used to rob a convenience store. Unless there's more than just a car color, there's no legal cause for pulling them over.
A coupe years back, a guy robbed a bank. He took off just before the cops got there, but stopped at a red light. The police realized he was in one of the cars waiting for the red light, but with 25 cars, they had no idea which one. Should they just let all of them go because there's no legal cause to stop the innocent people in the other two dozen cars?
No, the cops did not let them go. They blocked the traffic, got dozens of officers on site, and then proceeded to search each car one at a time. Each driver
Re:This is not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the absolutely should let them go until they have more evidence. At a certain point, it's just not worth it to society to have the police pulling over random people without cause.
And what happens if in the course of one of these illegal fishing expeditions they find evidence of an unrelated crime or get frustrated that they haven't made a collar and decide to plant some evidence? Is it still OK?
The courts regularly make incompetent rulings like that. The whole point of the 4th amendment is that we have the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. If they didn't know which car had the thieves in it and had no evidence to suggest which one it was, then they were completely wrong in searching all those people illegally.
People like you that make excuses for this kind of blatantly unconstitutional activity by the cops are why we've lost so many of our rights already. Allowing the police to perform speculative searches without having probable cause is barely any different from allowing them to search random houses for contraband and if people keep making excuses, it's hard to say that it won't go that far.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Even that was far more tightly constrained. The people they looked at were within a 1 minute window, not 2 hours. They were at the exact spot the criminals were known to be in, not within a several block area.
Still, they should not have been cuffed, and they should not have even been asked for their names unless or until the money or weapons were found in their car. Everyone else should have received a heartfelt apology. Anything seen that was not related to the specific crime should have been ignored.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The one big difference is that they have reasonable evidence to believe it's one of those 25 people. Arguably, all of those people are suspects.
In this case, they're using Google to find suspects. "We have no suspects, so let's demand that Google tell us all of the people who were in the area around that time and we'll make them suspects."
It's one thing to investigate suspects. It's another thing to investigate whether someone is a suspect.
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Are you seriously implying that it is OK for the cops to handcuff and do a search on 25+ (I'll assume some of those cars had more then one person in it) people, especially in a country where it is routine for cops to shoot suspects for not complying quick enough? What a fucked up country when it comes to the rights of the people.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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This isn't about technology, it's about the fact that the police shouldn't be handed that kind of information without a warrant drawn on probable cause. They don't have probable cause here to say that most of those cellphones belong to a suspect. This is a dragnet, arresting everybody that was present without any specific reason for believing that they did anything wrong.
Except that normally when they do that, there's a police officer present and the people being arrested are usually interviewed before bein
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A fix is to remove the battery as the soft power buttons and OS GUI settings offered by the big brands don't do much to stop a phone from getting tracked.
Buy a phone that can have its battery power removed by the owner.
A faraday cage.
Take back your cell phone from the networks and brands.
Become an owner again not just a cell phone user.
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You still wooshed. The technology is not what is being objected to. The objection is turning the location information over to police with no probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.
If the doctor is doing a CAT scan on me, he already has probable cause. Nobody goes to the doctor reporting they feel fine and have no history of serious illness and then gets a CAT scan. Also, even if the doctor wants you to get a CAT scan, you are free to decline. You probably shouldn't, but you can refuse.
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Of, you can just pull the battery out, assuming you've gone one of the last 3 models of phone that allows you to do it. Within a very short period of time, any capacitors in the phone will be discharged as well, making it impossible for the phone to tattle.
The real problem here though is that we have two globalist leftist parties in the US that think it's OK to ignore the entire US Constitution.
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Ignoring the 4th (and the rest, too) (Score:2)
It's not that they are right-wing. It's that they are criminal.
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Not regarding "the law", because they can change that as needed. But in spirit, most certainly.
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Yes, regarding the law. The highest law in the land. The US constitution.
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Using the same methodology as truffle-sniffing pigs.
Truffle-sniffing pigs issue search warrants to Google for user data in an effort to target criminals? I had no idea.
I must say, I've always been impressed with Anonymous Coward. An odd fellow, yes, but a real eclectic pedagogue, with eccentric wit and extraordinary vision. If I didn't know any better, I would say a good bit of A.C.'s invaluable post is froth with subterfuge. But what could possibly be the point?
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Yea, the previous Conservative government as part of their tough on crime agenda really weakened civil rights. It did take them 3 tries as the people did scream but they were patient and finally implemented it to "save the children" after accusing everyone of being a pervert didn't go over well. And of course the current government finds it a handy tool and is not going to revoke it.