Virginia Police Routinely Use Secret GPS Pings To Track People's Cell Phones (insidenova.com) 59
The nonprofit online news site Virginia Mercury investigated their state police departments' "real-time location warrants," which are "addressed to telephone companies, ordering them to regularly ping a customers' phone for its GPS location and share the results with police."
Public records requests submitted to a sampling of 18 police departments around the state found officers used the technique to conduct more than 7,000 days worth of surveillance in 2020. Court records show the tracking efforts spanned cases ranging from high-profile murders to minor larcenies.... Seven departments responded that they did not have any relevant billing records, indicating they don't use the technique. Only one of the departments surveyed, Alexandria, indicated it had an internal policy governing how their officers use cellphone tracking, but a copy of the document provided by the city was entirely redacted....
Drug investigations accounted for more than 60 percent of the search warrants taken out in the two jurisdictions. Larcenies were the second most frequent category. Major crimes like murders, rapes and abductions made up a fraction of the tracking requests, accounting for just under 25 of the nearly 400 warrants filed in the jurisdictions that year.
America's Supreme Court "ruled that warrantless cellphone tracking is unconstitutional back in 2012," the article points out — but in practice those warrants aren't hard to get. "Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is 'relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed'.... There's been limited public discussion or awareness of the kinds of tracking warrants the judiciary is approving." "I don't think people know that their cell phones can be converted to tracking devices by police with no notice," said Steve Benjamin, a criminal defense lawyer in Richmond who said he's recently noticed an uptick in cases in which officers employed the technique. "And the reality of modern life is everyone has their phone on them during the day and on their nightstand at night. ... It's as if the police tagged them with a chip under their skin, and people have no idea how easily this is accomplished."
The case for these phone-tracking warrants?
Drug investigations accounted for more than 60 percent of the search warrants taken out in the two jurisdictions. Larcenies were the second most frequent category. Major crimes like murders, rapes and abductions made up a fraction of the tracking requests, accounting for just under 25 of the nearly 400 warrants filed in the jurisdictions that year.
America's Supreme Court "ruled that warrantless cellphone tracking is unconstitutional back in 2012," the article points out — but in practice those warrants aren't hard to get. "Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is 'relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed'.... There's been limited public discussion or awareness of the kinds of tracking warrants the judiciary is approving." "I don't think people know that their cell phones can be converted to tracking devices by police with no notice," said Steve Benjamin, a criminal defense lawyer in Richmond who said he's recently noticed an uptick in cases in which officers employed the technique. "And the reality of modern life is everyone has their phone on them during the day and on their nightstand at night. ... It's as if the police tagged them with a chip under their skin, and people have no idea how easily this is accomplished."
The case for these phone-tracking warrants?
- The executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police tells the site that physical surveillance ofen requires too many resources — and that cellphone tracking is safer. "It may be considered an intrusive way of gathering data on someone, but it's certainly less dangerous than physical tracking."
- A spokesperson for the Chesterfield County police department [responsible for 64% of the state's tracking] argued that "We exist to preserve human life and protect the vulnerable, and we will use all lawful tools at our disposal to do so." And they added that such "continued robust enforcement efforts" were a part of the reason that the county's still-rising number of fatal drug overdoses had not risen more.
The site also obtained bills from four major US cellphone carriers, and reported how much they were charging police for providing their cellphone-tracking services:
- "T-Mobile charged $30 per day, which comes to $900 per month of tracking."
- "AT&T charged a monthly service fee of $100 and an additional $25 per day the service is utilized, which comes to $850 per 30 days of tracking..."
- "Verizon calls the service 'periodic location updates,' charging $5 per day on top of a monthly service fee of $100, which comes to $200 per 30 days of tracking."
- "Sprint offered the cheapest prices to report locations back to law enforcement, charging a flat fee of $100 per month."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Beerismydad for sharing the article!
Need a notification date. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, if the police have good reason to secretly track someone, fine. Let them.
But if they fail to find any criminal activity after a set amount of time - say 1 year, they should be required to either renew the warrant, convincing a judge that more time will result in an arrest, or end the investigation and NOTIFY THE TARGET.
This will a) discourage low evidence searches, b) allow for the discovery of illegal warrants on say police officer's girlfriends or ex-spouses, c) allow the people to decide if judges are being too lenient or not lenient enough on approving warrants.
Yes this will result in law suits. Sometime the government does wrong things and we should sue them. That is what happens in a free society when we realize the government has been engaged in wrong-doing. Those law suits are the cost of liberty.
The idea that we should hide our actions to prevent legal action is that of a GUILTY person, not an innocent one.
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And if they don't find anything that could be taken to court, the cash goes to the target along with the notification and a comprehensive and un-redacted report on everything the cops saw.
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But if they fail to find any criminal activity after a set amount of time - say 1 year, they should be required to either renew the warrant, convincing a judge that more time will result in an arrest, or end the investigation and NOTIFY THE TARGET.
I mostly agree except with "any criminal activity". It needs to be limited to criminal activity that were a suspect of or some kind of felony.
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Yes, otherwise they'll make a bullshit claim of littering just to dodge the notification.
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True intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
An indicator of real intelligence is the ability to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously, and find a way to reconcile or balance them.
Such thought is sadly rare in online discussions, particularly in the mass social media.
Bravo
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But if they fail to find any criminal activity after a set amount of time - say 1 year, they should be required to either renew the warrant, convincing a judge that more time will result in an arrest, or end the investigation and NOTIFY THE TARGET.
That's a great idea. Especially the notifying the target that they were spied on. Though I'd further restrict it to say that if they don't find a evidence of SPECIFIC criminal activity (named in the warrant) then it's up for renewal or cancellation and disclosure, and that criminal activity outside the scope of the warrant can't be used as evidence, unless the criminal activity is demonstrably worse than what the warrant was for.
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And the policy governing use of wireless GPS warrants needs to be public. There is no legitimate reason to redact a public release of departmental policies.
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end the investigation and NOTIFY THE TARGET
Not just notify them, but cut them in on the cash that the telco is making off their data.
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Nonsense. The illegal acts will not be reported, and not prosecuted. As occurs now for the patriot act, and as occurred for the Carnivore email monitoring program or the AT&T hosted fiber optic backbone monitoring station, FOIA requests concerning such uses and abuses will be ignored.
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I thought a year was way too long, but a day is probably too short. Something like a week or (maybe) a month by default, but require the length of time to be specified in the warrant so that a judge gets to weigh in on it.
After all, warrants must be particular with respect to the location to be searched and the evidence to be seized, so it is obvious that the time limit for the data collection must be part of the warrant, because the time limit is a location in time. No police department would get away w
So the slogan sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
We militarized the police and then heavily overfunded them, using them for things they shouldn't be. This turned them into, well, a military. And with a military comes a secret service.
What we ought to be doing is putting them back in the role of public safety (e.g. the guys that show up when a loon is waving a gun or knife around).
But good luck with that. It's not just that the left wing are bad at coming up with slogans (it's not like we've got millions for focus group testing), but that when we *do* fuck up messaging the right wing is right there, with a huge, well funded media apparatus, to exploit that fuck up.
So defund the police took off real quick.
One of the things I saw repeatedly during the BLM protests was cops ignoring violent protesters while arresting the ones who calmed and organized. This is nothing new. They're always ready to exploit the left wing's mistakes [duckduckgo.com]
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> One of the things I saw repeatedly during the BLM protests was cops ignoring violent protesters
OK, so you did notice that.
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The police weren't just in on that, it was the DAs too. Of the few that were brought in they left (1) almost immediately and (2) with little to no charges.
So it was a coordinated effort.
Yeah I know (Score:3)
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And even with all that the protests were 96% free of violence. You can find while resea
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| I never said there were very many of them but the few that there were were ignored by the police and were usually right wing.
The black right wingers looting in California, or the white right wingers out with Mayor Ted Wheeler? Or are you talking about the CHAS/CHOP group that took over blocks to create their new society? All those were pretty much left alone.
Exigent circumstances (Score:2, Informative)
Before you go off the deep end, you should realize that there are very good uses for this. As a 15-year member of search & rescue, we (meaning the Sheriff's Office) use cell pings regularly to narrow down a search area. Not only does it save lives but it also helps put murderers behind bars where they belong.
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No shit dumb dumb. Of course it can have value in the right hands. It can also be a tool of destruction in the wrong hands.
Nuclear technology is impressive too. It can be used to power household with clean energy or it can be used to exterminate Japanese cities.
Can you think of how the police could abuse this? Is there any oversight?
Re: Exigent circumstances (Score:2)
How does it catch Murderers? Or is it a log of pings going backwards in time that they are getting?
Re: Exigent circumstances (Score:3)
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And there's the problem. In spite of the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, few detectives today seem to be all that well acquainted with logic. Riding past the scene of a crime on a bicycle doesn't mean you saw anything or had anything to do with it.
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Sherlock Holmes was fiction, and often fantasy. The master detective was often proven lethally wrong in interpreting the evidence, in ignoring alternative explanations for the same evidence.
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We had a case a few years ago where the ex-husband of a woman abducted her from her home and drove her out into BFE, killed her, and buried her body in a wash. The perp had his cellphone on him at the time. LEO was able to track his location to the wilderness area where SAR volunteers searched and eventually found an area in a sandy wash that had been raked. Since no rain had fallen in a long time in that area, it didn't look natural. This location was about 20 miles from the woman's house.
More recently
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Cue complaints from Verizon & Sprint sharehold (Score:2)
that they should charge the police more as AT&T and T-Mobile do.
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No warrent, No judge, No oversight? (Score:2)
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TFS mentioned these require a warrant, meaning they are approved and signed by a judge.
And, with a warrant, I think this practice is entirely reasonable. One caveat: Assuming this doesn't already exist - I would like see regular independent reviews/oversight of the process, being done to make sure the granted warrants really were based on reasonable suspicion (checking to make sure particular judges aren't just rubber-stamping the things, in other words).
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Add to that, real consequences if the request is in any way exaggerated to get the judge to sign it. It's all too common for a judge to approve a warrant that looks appropriate on it's face only to discover that everything in the request was a lie.
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The police found out something that criminals have known all along.
It's cheaper and easier to just break the law.
What is a GPS Ping? (Score:1)
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LOL, are you talking about software disabling in the user menu?
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Yes. (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah, I think this is the journalist/author of TFA just abusing 'GPS' to mean "any form of location tracking".
This will have nothing to do with actual GPS location determination. It's just using the cell phone towers' idea of a phone's location (trilaterate on the distance, derviced from signal delay, versus 3+ nearby towers).
And yet another term gets abused into being nonsense.
Also, for anyone else in the EU not able to RTFA because of a geoblock: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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The location on/off setting on an Android phone only affects non-Google apps. Google stated this in congressional testimony.
If the cell phone is on its location is know via the cell tower is locked onto.
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Which is why, if that setting matters to you, you shouldn't be running any Google apps.
Of course, that has nothing to do with what TFA is about. The location data isn't coming from Google, but from the cell provider.
Leave the phone at home (Score:3)
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Here's some advice for you criminals: Always leave your cell phone with a confidant friend or bartender when you are out to commit crimes. Every city has a bar called The Alibi; use it. This is standard procedure, along with the face-ID-proof makeup, wrong size shoes and other normal means of tracking avoidance. Or you could, you know, just not do crimes.
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I survived 60 years without a cell phone. Yes I know many young people today may find that miraculous. But the fact is that I have never received a phone call that required my immediate attention. And I have never been in a situation where I really needed to make an emergency phone call. And so I usually leave my phone at home.
I sort of understand the social attraction and the need for amusement in times of boredom. People feel desperately lonely after minutes from a meaningless conversation. If they are st
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How am I supposed to make selfies of myself doing evil deeds?
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Seems Misleading (Score:3)
Drug investigations accounted for more than 60 percent of the search warrants taken out in the two jurisdictions. Larcenies were the second most frequent category. Major crimes like murders, rapes and abductions made up a fraction of the tracking requests, accounting for just under 25 of the nearly 400 warrants filed in the jurisdictions that year.
There were an estimated 5 million larceny-thefts in 2019, and around 16.7 thousand murders. So out of 400 warrants involving just murders and larcenies, it wouldn't be too surprised if less than 1% of them were for murders. The quote above seems to imply police overuse this technique for smaller offenses, but it seems far more likely that minor offences are simply more common.
TFA is geblocked in the EU (and UK) (Score:2)
TWA (Score:1)
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The GPS tracking is not used to investigate crimes. It is used to track potential clients and people belonging to marketing target groups in order to redirect the astroturfer population flows towards them.
The data is collected, warehoused, and probably indexed for later search-ability. The data can be used both to sell shit, but also to drive a case for incrimination. It is silly to believe it would not be used in such a way, especially when there is amble evidence to the contrary, e.g. TFA
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It is silly to believe it would not be used in such a way, especially when there is amble evidence to the contrary, e.g. TFA
Rule #1 of the mass media: Just because you saw it on a screen, doesn't mean it's true. It might contain a small bit of truth to make it interesting (just like the travelling salesperson's "me too" approach tactic) but the rest is just fluff to get your attention, money, trade secrets, shopping habits, erotic preferences, body fluids, etc.
Quick question to the world (Score:2)
What the fuck did y'all expect? Seriously?