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.
I worked as a network tech for one of the big providers. I was pulling tower location data for LEO regularly at request of corporate legal only. Though sometimes LEO would try to end run around and go to stores who would contact me.
I socially engineered them to believe I could not access that info without a code generated by corp legal.
Not true, of course. But hell if I was going to risk being mired in a legal fiasco for a possibly immoral investigator.
Tracking of our cellphones has been a thing since well before smartphones. Smartphones just enable it to be real time, and more granular than a tower triangulation.
You can be imprisoned for up to 5 years for lying to a federal investigator. It's up to 8 years for offenses that "involve" international or domestic terrorism.
If you change the subject or redirect when someone asks you a difficult question you're not lying. That sort of thing could be called social engineering.
The requests themselves were probably illegal, sidestepping standard procedure as they were. I don't think one could be charged with perjury for refusing unlawful requests. IANAL!
Remember it's a good thing to have phones be pinging.
1. I want to be billed correctly
2. If my service drops often in a certain geo, I want engineers to be able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is and fix it.
3. If I get attacked by a shark, I want to provide breadcrumbs for rescuers to find me.
4. If my wife accuses me of going to the arcade, it is important that my dog running in the park with my cell phone in his harness is being properly tracked and creating an alibi for me.
If you don't want to leave a trail of geo pings, don't carry around a device that literally could not work if it didn't leave a trail of pings.
IMO the embedding of electronics and tracking in every aspect of our lives becomes too complex for the average non-techie to make informed decisions about the technology they use.
Maybe it should be "obvious" with a phone, but what if your bluetooth headset tried to pair against someone's electronics and got detected? What about the GPS history from your Apple Watch (should that data be available)? How many RFID-tagged devices are in your wallet?
I'm not saying that any of these aren't convenient or worth the tradeoff, but the last assertion (telling people to just be smart about what electronics they bring) is not realistic as the vast majority of THINGS we own become trackable electronics, whether the average consumer knows it or not.
I was wondering if they were going to do this, and I'm on the fence. If they can accurately (90%+) get it to a very tight parameter, ok, but a lot of protesters in the general aread weren't actually involved in entering the building, so if they're getting investigated too, it's a bit of an overreach.
well, tbf it absolutely could work without a trail of pings. But no system is designed that way because metrics are, unsurprisingly, useful. All that said I still agree 100% with you, don't carry an internet connected GPS with you while you're out criming!
No we cant, the US was never to be a democracy, and you can not engineer a better one
We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government, we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society
Attempting to "engineer" a better society is the exact problem we have. That is Authoritarianism not liberty
Liberty is not attempting to engineer a better society or democracy, Liberty is allowing people to live their lives unmolested by government laws and regulations
> the US was never to be a democracy, and you can not engineer a better one
If it wasn't designed to be democracy, it should be trivial to design a better one, just like it's trivial to build a better automobile than a tricycle, which wasn't designed to be an auto.
> We are a constitutional republic with a LIMITED government
That's not incompatible with democracy, and suggesting that they are exclusive alternatives just means you don't understand at least one of “democracy”, “constitutional republic”, or “limited governmemt”.
(And more fully, you want to say “federal republic with constitutionally-limited government and both the federal and state levels, and reserved powers for the states”, but that still isn't exclusive with “democracy”.)
> we as a society has lost respect for those constitutional limits
I don't see any evidence that respect for Constitutional limits has declined, which seems to be a result of combining a cynical view of the present with a rosy view of the past (the First Amendment is a beautiful set of Constitutional limits, but the Alien and Sedition Acts were adopted when the ink on it was barely dry.)
> and instead of taking principled stands to restrict government we have taken unprincipled stands based on the outcome we desire for society
Stands made on different sets of principles than you prefer do not thereby become “unprincipled”.
Actually it is, democracy is 2 wolves and an a lamb voting on what is for dinner.
Democracy is incompatible with limited governance, and individual liberty as the majority (or even a vocal but powerful minority that controls the media) will always use the power of democracy to oppress those that do not have said power
Constitutionally limited governance that is immune to the will of the majority is the only way to ensure individual liberty, the founders understood this. This is why the ONLY democratic part of the US government at its founding was the House of Representatives. Over time we have made more and more parts of the federal government "democratic" like the Senate, and most recently the push to change the election of the President to be pure democratic as well.
Liberty is allowing people to live their lives
unmolested by government laws and regulations
You live in a society.
Presumably you would like some legal remedy if somebody tries to harm you, or poison your drinking water upstream, or violates a written contract, sexually assaults your loved ones, or so forth.
A life "unmolested by laws and regulations" is the most naive kind of fantasy imaginable. If history has taught us anything via failed states, lassiez-faire governments, and the like it's that power consolidates. Soon people would band together, form factions/tribes, and you'd be subject to their power.
Democracy kind of sucks in all of the obvious ways, but at least it's actually possible and sort of works. This can't be said for the delusional notion of living in your own little self-sufficient kingdom (in a world of over seven billion people, lol) where somehow you magically don't have anybody exerting influence on you, ever.
>>A life "unmolested by laws and regulations" is the most naive kind of fantasy imaginable.
Not really, the fundemntal foundation of a libertarian law would be best highlighted from Frederic Bastiat's The Law
"The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. "
The problem with modern society today is the law goes far far far beyond what individuals have the ethical right to do, namely self defense. Today the law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.
The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.
Your post is thoughtful and well-written. I upvoted your post even though I disagree. I dislike the HN tradition of "dislike = downvote." We need more posts like yours, not less.
And this common force is to do only what the
individual forces have a natural and lawful
right to do: to protect persons, liberties,
and properties;
Progressives/liberals/etc wouldn't disagree much with this premise, but we'd differ mightily on what this premise means in practical terms.
- The FDA is far from perfect, but it generally does a good job of protecting my person from snake oil medicine and adulterated foods.
- A federal healthcare mandate/provider protects my person against dying of curable diseases because if I have no job/insurance at the moment
- Taxpayer-funded education gives me the liberty to become literate and obtain a basic level of education so that I may become employable and so forth even if my parents are unwilling or unable to educate me
And so on. There are a lot of ways for your person, properties, and liberties to be threatened, most of which are indirect.
It has converted plunder into a right, in order to
protect plunder
Sounds like unfettered capitalism to me. I would strongly argue history tells us this is precisely what happens when government has too little influence and corporations therefore become centers of power.
We would agree, at least, that equally bad things happen when governments have too much power. We would disagree on what "too much" means, obviously.
>>Sounds like unfettered capitalism to me. I would strongly argue history tells us this is precisely what happens when government has too little influence and corporations therefore become centers of power.
My argument is not about the intensity of the influence but rather about the type of influence, and what influence the government is allowed.
I agree with most "progressives" on the nature of the problems we face as society, where I differ is on what should or can be done to solve them. History as shown that leaning on Authoritarian government regulations do not work out very well either, and leads to all kinds of unintended consequences. As the libertarian saying goes "Government: If you think you have problems now, what until you see our solutions"
The ironic thing as well is when people paint "unfettered capitalism" with "corporations" A Corporation is a government created liability shield that does not exist in a "unfettered capitalist" system or rather a true free market. Corporations are part of the government regulatory apparatus system.
One of the key problems we have is the regulatory capture, because we have allowed government to create corporations, which in turn become powerful and desire to capture the regulations that created them so they can make themselves more powerful, vicious circle
>>We would disagree on what "too much" means, obviously.
I dont know that we would disagree with "too much power", currently it is not how powerful the government is that I have the most problem with, it is the centralization of power that more concerning. The US for all its flaws did get one thing right. Power is best when it distributed. Power wants to consolidate, and centralize, it is up the the people to resist this and we the people have been very poor at that, especially since the Great Depression. We now look to the Federal government to solve all of our problems this is not how our system was to be.
A Corporation is a government created liability
shield that does not exist in a "unfettered capitalist"
system or rather a true free market. Corporations are
part of the government regulatory apparatus system.
I'm intrigued. (That's not sarcasm)
What's the libertarian alternative? What are examples of situations where removing the liability shields would encourage more beneficial behaviors from corporations?
It seems to me that corporations, minus the liability shield, would still be nearly as potentially dangerous. They are more or less sociopathic entities by necessity; ceasing to exist if they cease to turn profits, a thing they can only do if they compete successfully against their equally sociopathic rivals. Corporations can of course behave responsibly and generously, but this is always going to be at odds with their fundamental mission.
(While all of this sounds anti-corporation, I'm not. Private enterprise is and should be the backbone of society. It's just that it's awfully destructive, unchecked.)
Private Enterprise should not be confused with corporations. Especially not modern corporations and all the legal structures that encapsulate them.
Libertarian Private enterprise is more like LLC's, and partnerships than Corporations.
As to where removing the liability shields would encourage more beneficial behaviors from corporations?
You see hints of it all the time, anytime you see a situation where someone comments "if a person would have done X they would be in jail" well the Corporation is shielding the people that actually did the harm to society from consequences from their actions. Most of the time the actual bad actors simply move from one corporation to another continuing to inflict manage on society with no accountability because of those liability shield
you view it as "sociopathic", but viewing it that way is part of the problem, we have anthropomorphized corporations to were we treat them like people, punish them (the corporations) with fines and other actions but never punish the actual human actors responsible for the activity
I understand the need for some kind of limited liability in business, Strict Liability would likely cause very poor investment into private enterprise the problem is with corporations, especially publicly traded corporations we have created such a impenetrable liability shield around them that the incentive curve has shift so far towards "profit by any means" that the people in corporations are only punished when they DO NOT do bad things (i.e Pollute the environment, screw workers, etc) in chasing of more profit, and NEVER when they do those thing at most the corporation may pay a fine for doing it but the actual people responsible are never liable
Anyway, we're now going to see what happens when the huge post-Patriot act homeland security machinery is turned on people who thought they were untouchable, and all of a sudden a lot of powers that everyone was OK being used against nebulous "enemies" are going to end up in the news.
> And it also makes sense why Apple doesn’t want you to be able to fully disable wifi on your phone.
If you're referring to the lack of a hardware kill switch, that's true for 99.9% of Androids too.
If you're referring to the temporary WiFi off toggle in the Control Center, the reasoning is that most people don't remember they turned off WiFi (my parents for example) and won't remember to turn it back on. But you absolutely can disable it by going into the Settings app.
Maybe that’s new in iOS14. I remember last year seeing a Shortcut for turning off wifi completely. But even then I thought it turned itself back on randomly.
You've always been able to ask Siri or go into settings to disable wifi since the first beta of that feature; I ran it.
I think it's nice since I frequently need to tell my phone to hop to mobile data while walking around campus since it's hopping from AP to AP and the control center switch is geofenced, so when I stop walking I'm almost always outside the geofence and wifi is back on like I wanted it to be.
Kill switches seem a bit silly against the US government. If you're doing something that drastic, it's probably better to take pains to organize without any electronics on you at all.
You’re probably right. But we’re also at the point where software is so tightly controlled by the hardware manufacturers that the devices simply don’t do what you expect them to do.
If I can flip a switch to disable wifi instead of tap three times, that’s a UX improvement to me.
Most common use case of disabling Wifi is when you're at a range where wifi traffic is so degraded that you're better off using the cell network. Thats why it is temporary from the control center but you can disable permanently in settings.
People make a big deal about cell phone tower ping data, but compared to the "anonymized" meter-accurate GPS and sensor traces that GLS uploads 10 times an hour and the massive datacenter power that Google has dedicated to storing this location data, this is complete chumpchange. They can track your footsteps and know which room and which floor you are on. They have been quietly building indoor maps of millions of buildings.
If you use Android, turn off "high accuracy location" and do not agree to any setting that prompts for sharing "anonymized" data. If you can, just uninstall Google Play Services.
If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.
>If you work for Google, read the GLS privacy design doc and lobby them to improve anonymization and/or shut down this completely dystopian data collection.
People who challenge google policy seem to have a bad habit of being fired
If it matters that someone, anyone, knows you were at this or that location at this or that point in time, don't bring your phone with you at all. We're at a juncture where you cannot trust your smartphone (I'm looking at Android specifically) to not have its cellular transceiver running even when the phone is supposedly powered off.
> If it matters that someone, anyone, knows you were at this or that location at this or that point in time, don't bring your phone with you at all.
This hardly matters if your appearance is captured by no less than 4 live streams, an additional 6 videos and 21 pictures posted by third parties to social media. Not bringing your phone is the bare minimum, but not close to being enough to cover your tracks. Once someone with wide-enough information sources suspects you were at a location of interest, you are toast: it's the attack/defense scenario where defender has to get every step right. Any mistake by the defender (or their ally or even an npc), no matter how small, means the attacker wins.
It amazes me that 6.5 years after Snowden, people aren't aware of this stuff. The police, the FBI, and everyone down to your local scout leader have a shit tonne of information about where you are, where you've been, who you've been with and talked to, what you've searched etc.
I find it resembles the techniques we find ourselves doing in software engineering. Given good practice clear logs of events for traceability. As in a mass outage which everyone sees, which can be tracked backwards for root cause analysis and well as interviews with anyone connected to systems or vicinity at the time of event.
As in cases of anyone possibly interacting with a production server, there may be interviews with those who may have "logged in" or accessed to such systems to help find a root cause.
every few seconds your phone (if not in airplane mode) will contact all base stations whiting in range and send a globally unique identifier to it. it doesn’t matter if the base station is for your company or if it’s fake (stingray). even if the tower does not give you access, maybe it’s not the company you’re a subscriber for, they still know you were in that area
It is true that your phone listens to control channel on currently selected base station. It is also true that your phone scans other channels relatively frequently to see if a better signal is available, but unless the phone decides (based on data received from the network) to switch to another base station, it will only talk to the network about once or twice per hour.
The network can ping the phone if it wants (and does so whenever there is something to be signalled, or if law enforcement decides to).
That's a very interesting and more refined insight then people usually get (everything thinks it's ever few seconds etc). I'd love to know more about how the process works
The same people complaining about the Patriot Act and cheering on Snowden for publicizing NSA PRISM are the same people cheering on govt mass triangulating civilians.
That's quite a generalization, and not really the case going off people I know. Most aren't cheering on the surveillance state. Many are mocking the people who attacked the Capitol with their phones in hand, but that's not the same as approval of the big electric cage we're in.
And some of the same people who cheered on the Patriot Act and called Snowden a traitor are now getting swept up by government surveillance, after they committed serious crimes.
Actually no. You cannot believe in curbing privacy-invading legislation and also cheer on warantless mass cell phone location tracking at the same time. You need to pick one.
Not so great: surveillance on everyone and catching criminals with it, but within a democratic framework
Disastrous: surveillance on everyone, while giving a pass to insurgents attempting to overthrow democratic governance, because if they take over the surveillance infrastructure you're doomed
yep, and in the other half I know people who made their entire careers in surveillance and cooperating with the sort of organizations implementing these things, but it was "good actually".
If the technical capability exists, it is going to be abused. And there is no better catalyst for (ab)use than attacking congresscritters' personal safety.
These latest techno-authoritarian actions are best seen as effects from having lost the battle, rather than another front. For decades, clued in people have been droning on about the insecurity of cell phones allowing them to be persistently tracked by the network, the MITM-idiocy of webapps, etc. The best time to get people to care is before there is some real tangible threat that will make them seek the comfort of authoritarianism, but yet crickets. I blame the sheer amount of money behind big tech, making tech people turn a blind eye to the faults of centralized technology while pushing shiny-but-flawed technologies to the masses.
After something happens? Well of course the power structure wants to unlock phones, track phones, censor speech, etc. At this point, buckle up - political activism on the subject is done, or at least on pause for quite some time.
Huh? Insane? The capitol was assaulted in order to prevent the democratically elected president. An actual insurrection which maybe had some attempted assassination and theft/sale of national security secrets mixed in. Seems like a pretty reasonable response.
If that was an actual insurrection or attempted assassination, it was the weakest effort imaginable. That doesn’t necessarily change the thrust of your comment (that enforcement is appropriate) but the breathless hyperbole around what happened has really surprised me. An actual insurrection would have looked very different. More guns and C4, fewer selfies.
I watched it live and then dug through the videos, selfies, etc after and inside the Capitol, I found one guy who might have had a gun. The other weapons appear to have been convenient - a fire extinguisher, flags, etc. It looks less and less like an "insurrection" and more like jackasses doing jackass things.
That’s what made it appear fake. Every republican protest recently has dozens of people carrying rifles. Why would it make sense for them not to do this when they are invading the capitol? It doesn’t add up. It’s almost as if they were not planning to really do anything except cause a diversion.
I agree with most of your reasoning but intrigued by the diversion bit. Any theories on what this was a distraction from? What got less/no attention as a result of this?
I'm not sure about distraction, but the whole exercise called to mind similar exercises in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ukraine, Hong Kong, etc. Those were run by CIA, so even though I don't have a good theory for why they (or parties within the organization; it's not a monolith) would do this, it does make one wonder... Keep in mind that even if a particular party staged this exercise, it might not have gone as they planned.
It’s difficult to narrow it down as there are dozens of potential answers that question. It’s possible even that whatever it was planned as a diversion for is not yet discovered.
This is a good point - this is the same group that is very gun rights focused and has been wandering around the streets armed with automatic weapons. It's kind of weird to see them without guns.
- DC does issue concealed carry permits but doesn't honor them from other states (called reciprocity).
- This was talked about far and wide in advance on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere framed as "don't bring guns to DC! You will go to jail!" and supported by flyers posted throughout DC. (You can still find pictures of them online.)
> why people who are already breaking one law would care about the others
Remind me not to get in your way when you're jaywalking.
Premeditating a felony firearms offense is one thing. I think the majority who entered the Capitol were probably thinking that most of the rhetoric they were hearing beforehand was hyperbole and were probably expecting to just protest outside the capital, and then got swept up in the moment and committed misdemeanor/felony breaking-and-entering.
Protests are big drinking events. For some reason people don't talk about this. Angry people go out planning to peacefully protest for George Floyd or Trump, they drink some liquor, their inhibitions go down, they decide to throw a couple bottles, break a couple windows. It's hard to miss the number of red faces in the videos of the capital riot.
Almost no civilian in the country has "automatic weapons" this is what people are saying when they mention theres a lot of hyperbole around this topic.
Slight correction: Legal automatic weapons. It is hard to estimate how many people have or could retrofit semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons illegally. There are public plans for such modifications floating around the net, and at least some of them actually work, with some guns. And that's not counting the quasi-automatic stuff like bumpstocks or gimmicky 'trigger cranks.'
I once met somebody who wears a lightning link as a pedant around their neck. Probably it wouldn't be compatible with their rifle's receiver, but who knows.
I think the risk-to-reward ratio is pretty low for having an illegal automatic weapon. It takes a lot of trigger discipline even for average trained soldiers to not to quickly waste most of their ammo with fully automatic weapons.
Then again, just because it's not smart doesn't mean people don't do it.
It really depends on what their objectives are; what they think they might accomplish by having an automatic rifle. There are a wide array of tactical objectives, some better served by automatic weapons than others. Consider particularly the different tactical objectives terrorists and soldiers might have. Particularly, soldiers need more discipline because they're likely to be fighting people who can fight back. Having bullets come back at you would surely fray the nerves.
Point taken, but I think most people tempted to have illegal automatic weapons are the paranoid home defense crowd, not the massacring unarmed civilians crowd. They're probably imagining having to use them against SWAT and military.
Walking around with a gun in DC is an automatic felony with potentially years in jail, especially if it's in connection with a violent act which this insurrection was. DC is not a gun-friendly place. These people were stupid, but not that stupid.
To make sure I understand you: Your claim is that a bunch of people showed up to violently overthrow the government but didn't bring guns because that would be illegal?
They were deluded by their political puppet masters into thinking they were actually showing up to defend the constitution by intimidating corrupt politicians who knew they were corrupt.
They didn't bring guns because their goal wasn't to overthrow the government.
Luckily, you're not a police investigator, because you can't be more wrong. All manner of weapons were confiscated - guns, ammo, explosives, crossbows, brass knuckles, etc. These were people who came to kill.
Read your article. None of those things were found inside the Capitol.
If they didn't go into the Capitol, we're clearly talking about different groups. The unasked questions are: Why not? What were they there to do?
I did work in law enforcement in DC. One of the first things you learn is how to separate facts from conjecture from imagination. Mixing up the three isn't helpful to anyone and often taints you as an investigator.
Or protect themselves from counter-protesters? Are you saying anyone with a gun at the event had the mens rea for murder? There are probably more guns at the average baseball game.
I'm not sure about baseball, but the last time I went to a basketball game I had to walk through a metal detector, got my bag searched, and was patted down.
Just because you failed at crime doesn’t mean you didn’t commit a crime. Attempted murder is still a thing.
And I think you should probably read more about what actually happened. The initial photos were of idiots in horns and face paint and that has colored the public perception of what happened, but the clownshow gave cover to a smaller number of organized militia types compromised of former and active duty military and law enforcement. Those people were armed, came prepared, had intelligence about the layout of the building, and received updates on the location of MOC. They were there to kill and take hostages, and they came within minutes of achieving that goal.
Nothing about this was laughable, and the concern is not overblown.
I think it is reasonable to argue that there were a number of people in the crowd that had ill intent. Not sure which crime fits the facts though (sedition, attempted murder, etc.) That will depend on actual facts, which is why we have trials, etc.
I don't think it is reasonable to think that everyone on the Capitol grounds had that same ill intent. More likely that the organized minority instigated the crowd and used them as cover for their shameful and ridiculous efforts.
Needless to say, the predominent narrative seems to be that anyone in the crowd was an "insurrectionist". That goes too far IMHO.
BIG red flag from this article: No weapons charges. If they were armed, they were not armed lawfully either in DC as a whole or in the Capitol specifically. Therefore, we have to ask: were they armed?
Regardless, this line is scary at first glance: "All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas." but I've been trying to figure out what it means.
I worked on the Hill for years and used some of the tunnels frequently. If they mean the "tunnels" in general, they're huge and expansive so it'd take a huge amount of effort across numerous entry points in almost a dozen buildings to "seal them in."
Alternatively, if they mean one of the secure areas (think: bunkers), they're designed to be buttoned up but "turn on gas" still doesn't make sense.
Regardless, thanks for the link. It will be interesting to see how the trials play out.
My understanding was that the explosives were not at the capitol (DNC headquarters I think), but maybe I'm just out of date on additional information?
Not saying that is good either, just that there were many things going on that day that aren't necessary related via any sort of coordinated operation.
It's not like there weren't homemade explosives found on the site:
> Coffman, 70, told police he had mason jars filled with "melted Styrofoam and gasoline." Federal investigators believe that combination, if exploded, would have the effect of napalm "insofar as it causes the flammable liquid to better stick to objects that it hits upon detonation," according to the court record. [0]
> The court documents said that those items and the explosive-filled mason jars "in close proximity to one another constitute a combination of parts" that could be used as a "destructive device."
I used "explosive" because that was how it appeared in the court filings. Without knowing the precise mixture, it could result as either something to cause a conflagration, or a detonation.
Calling it misinformation is somewhat disingenuous when not all the information is publicly available.
Your quote literally calls it a "destructive device", not an explosive, which is a term of art including mostly non-explosive things. The material in question is specified in the article. It is not explosive in any configuration as an incontrovertible matter of elementary chemistry. It does meet the criteria for being a destructive device in law.
Calling this "misinformation" is an accurate characterization. You are not responsible for what CNN reports but it should lead you to question the credibility of that news source.
Look into Mussolini and Hitler's early attempts. They looked really amateur and ridiculous too. The Munich Beer Hall Putsch was almost as much of a clown show. You even had some volkisch occult wackos who would have felt quite at home with the Q shaman.
>assault on the capitol; insurrection; attempted assassination
I just want to point out the two problems with the rhetoric that mass-media and you are using to describe this event:
1. These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life. In using these words, you are conjuring extremely violent images within the minds of your listeners. When your listeners discover the truth of the event, that the images you've associated with the event do not match what actually happened, your listeners feel manipulated, they feel you're trying to deceive them, and you lose credibility.
2. If enough people keep parroting these particular words to describe this event, the meanings of these words become diluted. For example, prior to this event at the capitol, if you said "terrorist attack", my mind would imagine men wearing balaclavas, wielding AK's, beheading people on video, gassing villages filled with innocent families, scattering them as refugees across the globe. But now, if we accept this event at the capitol as a "terrorist attack", now I don't know if you're talking about a guy smiling and waving as he holds a podium, or if you mean a Wahabbi extremist raping a Yazidi woman after putting a bullet in her son's head.
Imagine this woman recounting her rape and the murder of her family, "I experienced a horrific terrorist attack." And then there's you, in referring to some guy taking a selfie at a politician's desk, "I witnessed a horrific terrorist attack."
Just because it sounds extreme doesn’t mean I am using the wrong words. Guns are not required for violence or murder to occur. Just because some people there were not trying to do either doesn’t mean that didn’t happen. Why do you feel the need to defend them by focusing on selfies?
“Insurrection” is a violent attack on a government.
“Assassination” is murdering a prominent person for political reasons.
> In charging papers, the FBI said that during the Capitol riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said. Some messages, according to the FBI, included, “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.” Another message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added.
> These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life.
There were pipe bombs found. A guy had a car full of molotov cocktails. People were carrying guns and wearing body armor. Five people died. Its pretty surprising it didn't go much worse
I guess what they're trying to say is that if this had been a real insurrection, the bombs, incendiary devices, and guns would have been used, and in volume.
The fact that some were found, and basically none were used (none of the deaths were a result of people being shot by the rioters) indicates the level of seriousness we're dealing with here.
This is not to say that they shouldn't face consequences: they should; what they did is seriously illegal and, more generally, bad and wrong.
But it's terribly important to remember that what happened here was crime, not war.
Insurrection is not war. Insurrection is a violent uprising against a government, which is exactly what happened. The fact that explosive devices were not used, but were present, was likely a matter of luck, not intent. Besides these things are not required for something to be an insurrection. They could have been armed with screwdrivers and hammers and it would still be an insurrection, albeit a less extreme insurrection.
As a complete aside, I was amused that that photo even existed (he looks so happy with Nancy Pelosi's podium) and also completely unsurprised that he got arrested two days later.
I don't disagree with your overall point. But you're not making a very fair comparison. The guy holding the podium was not the worst part of the attack on the capitol.
> These words confer explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life
There were bombs planted at both Democratic and Republican party headquarters. One man was arrested with a pickup truck full of napalm.
At least some subset of the Capitol rioters absolutely intended to cause "explosions, gunfire, and mass loss of life". I think you're being dishonest pretending this was only a bunch of goons posing for instagram.
This is similar to the way people remember Columbine as a school shooting, but the two murderers actually built a large number of IEDs including propane tank bombs. If they hadn't been such incompetent bomb-builders, hundreds would have died and the event would be remembered as a bombing akin to Oklahoma City instead of mere mass-shooting.
> If enough people keep parroting these particular words to describe this event, the meanings of these words become diluted.
Agreed, though the hyperbole and shifting definitions seems intentional and effective in many cases, you see with this with terms "hate", "racism", "white supremacy", etc as well.
When I was younger these had much more specific groups and frightening meanings! Makes me feel many using these terms so loosely today may have never run in to actual people these used to describe.
(No this is not a defense of hatred/racism/white supremacy or other bad behavior).
I don't see how putting everyone in a huge radius, journalists and those otherwise uninvolved included, under investigative suspicion and location surveillance to respond to what is only charitably described as an insurrection (the group was almost entirely unarmed) is in any way reasonable.
It seems like a massive overreaction. If we're truly interested in democracy and the rule of law, we'd do well to not shred our standard democratic and legal procedures (such as the presumption of innocence, and the fourth amendment's prohibition on searches without probable cause) the instant a few thousand angry, unarmed yahoos show up with pitchforks and banners and achieve precisely nothing.
We shouldn't even do that if a few thousand armed, trained people show up, with the express intent of doing battle, taking control, and holding territory (which, again, to be clear, is not what happened). We absolutely should not do it when a bunch of idiot yahoos break windows and set off fire extinguishers and steal shit.
Even had the building burned to the ground, universal surveillance such as this would not be a proportionate reaction.
I don't see how putting everyone in a huge radius, journalists and those otherwise uninvolved included, under investigative suspicion and location surveillance to respond to what is only charitably described as an insurrection (the group was almost entirely unarmed) is in any way reasonable.
Huh?
Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you on overreach. But this action is completely reasonable because it's standard operating procedure for many law enforcement departments around the nation. Most of us simply do not reside in the neighborhoods where these tactics are employed. None of what we are discussing today is even Patriot Act type stuff. It's just standard law enforcement investigative technique. Worse, our law enforcement infrastructure already took the exact same actions during the BLM riots. None of the people complaining now, uttered a peep at the time.
I said all of that to say this, as a privacy activist, I learned decades ago that the best method of protecting my rights is to protect the rights of others. The issue today, is that most who complain are called out as hypocritical. With good reason. We can't go back now. Law enforcement would be accused of racism. Whatever tactics we used on others, we have to use now. And law enforcement gets to use them because people were not forward thinking enough to protest these methods when they were designed and employed during the latest stages of the drug war. Or even just a few scant weeks ago during the BLM riots.
I'd just encourage everyone to be more forward thinking on these issues. Sometimes complaining only when the issue affects you creates more problems than it solves. It makes it more difficult to get legislative changes made because certain key organizations, and people, whose cooperation we need have to double down on their positions so as not be called out as hypocritical themselves. AS a consequence, we come into headwinds trying to get the changes necessary to outlaw these practices.
What is the harm that is incurred when the tower records are transferred from the operator to the government?
Is it just too scary of a slope to stand on or something?
To me it seems to fit under 'reasonable' for the government to issue a warrant for presence information in the locality of the capitol. Given the 3rd party doctrine that probably isn't what happened, but the objection there would be more procedural than about control over data stored on servers.
The state collecting this information is a public hazard, especially considering the relatively recent development of the assassination of US citizens without trial.
Even if literally nothing had happened, the government still would have had this technical capability. I think that's what people are worried about, not the specific fact that they're using it to track down the Capitol rioters. If the FBI were evil instead of a force for good, they could use this capability to harass the "good guys".
Not to be a grammar nazi, but I fail to see how this sentence works "The capitol was assaulted in order to prevent the democratically elected president." On an emotional level, I can see how you see it as a threat to your illusions. Someone was trying to prevent your president from existing. It does sound scary and fits in line with the gnostic thought pervading the American left. "The world is broken, but we will fix it, and it will be not broken then." (Cue the unicorns...)
Now, addressing the actual proposition (short of an argument): Where was the "actual insurrection" and where is the evidence for "attempted assassinations" and "theft/sale of national secrets". I'm not a lawyer and certainly not in your jurisdiction, but it is apparent that you possess evidence of these three things. Hence, I urge you to contact the appropriate law enforcement and share your findings.
Were they reacting to their voting rights being taken away, or reacting to having been led to believe that their voting rights were taken away? I have seen no credible evidence that they were disenfranchised.
Well, we can't investigate because the ballots have already been shredded and the voting machines have already been re-imaged. Despite there being laws on the books that cover one, if not both of those cases, making it illegal to do those things.
Except, their voting rights were not taken away. They voted for a candidate that received fewer votes than his opponent. They didn't like the results. They were fed deliberate lies and baseless theories, and acted upon bad intelligence.
That seems beside the point though. Nation-states could well coopt/dupe unwitting agents to do their deeds for them. Not necessarily saying that's what happened here, just making a point.
I think there are still just as many of us who are against it as there were years ago, we're just no longer as vocal about it. A lot of us have given up being perceived as "doomsday" prophets. Mainstream culture doesn't really believe or care about mass surveillance until it personally affects them negatively.
I think people are also terrified by the political violence from both sides over the past year. That was obviously the impetus for this. Just as other extremist violence like 9-11 was the impetus for the patriot act.
Man all of this cool tech would have been useful during the... oh I don't know... entire summer of deadly riots and the formation of an actual rebel state in Seattle CHAZ
It blows my mind that a bunch of conspiracy-minded folks (the sort of people who won't get a vaccine because they think it contains a tracking chip from Bill Gates) would stage an insurrection and not turn their phones off!
Honestly, what did they think was going to happen? As the saying goes, "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." You don't get to fail miserably at your coup and then go back home to your regular lives.
>Honestly, what did they think was going to happen?
They thought they would succeed. The Democrats would be marched en masse to the gallows and revealed to the world to be the satanic blood drinking pedophiles the faithful always knew they were. The world would see the insurrectionists as patriots and heroes for stopping the CCP in league with the Democratic Party from stealing the election and denying Donald Trump his rightful second term .
Many of these people literally believe they're involved in a holy war and that Trump was sent by God, so for them, victory was a metaphysical certainty. The rest were certain Trump would pardon them in any case. Why bother with OPSEC when the Lord will prepare a table for you in the presence of your enemies and your leader has infinite "get out of jail free" cards to hand out?
Overturn by peacefully protest, showing Pence that there is popular support to investigate the election inconsistencies.
The biggest act of violence was a policeman shooting a protester point blank in the neck, after being let through by 6 other policeman.
I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?
> I mean can you elaborate how exactly would it work with violence? What was their plan? And how would that be accepted by the every authority and the people?
I have no idea! As I stated above, it seems like it was mostly a dumb angry mob that didn't think this through! That group in Michigan thought they could kidnap the governor and hold her hostage to remove covid restrictions, so maybe they were hoping to do something like that.
The fact remains, that they did use violence against people and property, and they might have done worse if they had managed to get their hands on politicians, or if the IEDs planted at GOP/Dem party headquarters had gone off.
If you want to call it a "mostly peaceful protest that featured one attempted violent coup" then knock yourself out.
I visit right-wing websites for research purposes and this is actually true. If you visit right wing websites and review posts about the jan 6th protest it was actually related to basically having a peaceful protest to put pressure on the electoral vote. Most of the flyers related to it and were extremely vague. The slogan was simply: "be there, it will be crazy" with no other concrete details.
The reality is that the actual insurrectionists were a small fringe group (Qanon) that managed to convince the rest of the useful idiots to join in. If you watch the videos of the siege you can see that it was mostly Qanon people leading the charge in while the other people simply walked into the building.
Of course comments like mine are not welcome because it paints a different picture compared to the narrative being presented in the media but the facts are still there. I encourage everyone to go online and do your own research. Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information. Same with the siege videos, you can watch the livestreams and reach your own conclusions yourself.
> Go to the right-wing websites, pull up posts from December talking about the march and see what is being said. It is all public information.
Don't take it personally, but this is nonsense. TheDonald.win (now patriots.win) was full of all sorts of violent rhetoric in the run-up to January 6. Maybe they've scrubbed a lot of those posts now, trying to avoid FBI scrutiny, but the general online mood was absolutely apocalyptic[0] in the lead up to that riot. If anyone wants to go digging, look for contemporaneous archives or screenshots, and keep in mind that mods have sanitized already sanitized some of the most obvious incitiment.
I don't live in the EU currently but I don't think "no means no" and "informed consent is good" and "stop abusing and violating all of your users" is a bad thing.
edit: This news article of several paragraphs is loading content from 11 domains directly. If you unblock a few of them, it loads JS that collects and sending your data and unique identifiers to dozens of domains. This one page of text makes over 1,000 requests, almost all of them for tracking/fingerprinting. According to devtools, the page itself is 900KB ungzipped. The ad XmlHttpRequest load is 37MB.
No one said pursuing these good things is a bad thing.
But expecting everyone to do it for you, and then lecturing them on their inferiority when they find it easier or more profitable to block you than comply, is pretty lame. Europeans and their representatives have shut themselves off from this world of 1000 fingerprints; they should try owning the consequences of their actions.
> For the past year we have had not-always-fully-peaceful riots with many deaths and tremendous amount of property loss. Through all this, the FBI never breathed down the neck of the protestors- not even those who could have been actually committing a crime.
I don't think this claim is accurate. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have always been happy to investigate and suppress nonviolent protest activity (much of it from the left).
Other commenters have pointed out the FBI's involvement. Other state overreactions that immediately come to mind:
- 'The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News.' https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/george-flo...
Even Russia cannot detain everyone at a protest. Most typically the leadership is followed and under covers trail them at protests and they get bagged.
The acting police chief of Seattle (acting because the black female chief resigned rather face a punitive pay decrease among other things) said today that they will start arresting rioters who destroy property or assault people.
He said the SPD has the support of the city attorney. The Seattle city attorney, Pete Holmes, is mostly famous for not prosecuting anyone.
The chief said it had nothing to do with who occupies the whitehouse.
Cell phone location data does not imply person is guilty and people will get their day in court if the FBI actually determines they've committed something illegal.
This is similar to 2011 England riots where end result was "By 15 August 2011 around 3,100 people had been arrested, of whom over 1,100 had appeared in court"
As I remember, they went pretty hard in England as well, a judge stated that "an overwhelming obligation on sentencing courts to do what they can to ensure the protection of the public", that "the imposition of severe sentences, intended to provide both punishment and deterrence, must follow" and that "[t]hose who deliberately participate in disturbances of this magnitude, causing injury and damage and fear to even the most stout-hearted of citizens, and who individually commit further crimes during the course of the riots are committing aggravated crimes".
Also, what do you expect them to do after 2 police officers were killed on tape, one lady got killed by her stupidity, pipe bombs found, imbeciles looking for Pelosi to hang... Computers with potentially sensitive data stolen... and god knows what foreign agents could have taken/compromised just blending in...
What would you do if you were in charge of the investigation?
The activity at the Capitol clearly went beyond the bounds of what I’d call a protest. Furthermore, as a resident in an area which saw destruction by left-leaning groups, I believe those individuals should also be prosecuted.
I don’t think this has anything to do with “right” or “left”, it has to do with illegally breaking into the Capitol, especially while congress was present. A group of left leaning trespassers would likely have seen, and deserved, a similar response.
As I said, “the activity at the Capitol clearly went beyond the bounds of what I’d call a protest.” I have less concern about what people outside of the Capitol were doing.
There were estimates upwards of 300K people there to peacefully protest, that some people decided to enter the building does not negate the protesting. Even if social media calls for the arrest and ostracisation of everyone within a 5 mile radius.
Regardless, I stand by my words, “the activity at the Capitol clearly went beyond the bounds of what I’d call a protest.” I have less concern about what people outside of the Capitol were doing.
If the riotors in Portland decided to travel to DC en masse to take down the US government, to hang members of Congress, you betchya it would be the same.
I condemn all violence but there is a major difference of the context.
Would the key here be that the FBI has jurisdiction to investigate rioters interacting with federal property, but not when they burn down a local Minneapolis police station or something like that?
I don't think many people inside or out of the FBI would agree that it is a tool of liberal politicians.
> Most of the people who went to DC did so peacefully and lawfully.
The story is about phones near the capitol building, not attendees at the Trump rally near the White House and certainly not the entirety of DC.
Most of the people at the capitol seem to have breached the perimeter, in fact. I haven't seen any coverage of a static demonstration that stayed outside the barricades anywhere. Once those fences went down the whole mob went across.
Can you point to the people at the capitol you think were incorrectly snared by this surveillance?
There's a great YouTube video that collects a ton of footage taken through the day you can review to see the behavior of the protestors on that day.[1]
As an aside, since you appear to feel that breaching a threshold is grounds to review the behavior of all parties in the vicinity—regardless of their involvement—do you feel similarly about breaching country border thresholds?
The reason I ask is simple: nobody disputes that people who illegally entered the capitol should be held responsible. What is under dispute are the methods used to determine who that was. The particular method outlined in the article implicates a number of completely innocent protestors. Further, it leaves ample room for things like "lists" used to monitor protestors—even if they haven't committed a crime.
I'm trying to understand your principled threshold for engaging in law enforcement tactics that involve people who haven't committed a crime.
> What is under dispute are the methods used to determine who that was.
What's the dispute, though? Use of cell records to filter suspects has a long history. And here we have a situation (an assault on a single building) that is almost perfectly suited to exactly this technique.
> The particular method outlined in the article implicates a number of completely innocent protestors.
Again, I see little evidence for an organized protest outside the capitol. Virtually everyone walked across that barrier. And given that, yeah, I think it's reasonable to assume that people in the capitol building cell viscinity without an existing alibi are suspects.
Equating people protesting police brutality with people attempting to overturn an election by force is quite a stretch. But words mean precisely nothing to the right. One moment they'll be screaming "Blue Lives Matter!" and the next they'll be braining Capitol cops with fire extinguishers. Did a store owner kick out a kook ranting at and bullying people? Great! Did $WEBSITE boot a kook for doing likewise online? CENSORSHIP!
Here's what I think: Smash out a store window and steal stuff because the cops killed someone you might or might not know? Go to jail. Rampage through the halls of Congress, carrying zip ties and looking for elected officials to kidnap and hold hostage or kill, in the name of overturning the election, because your presidential candidate lost? You damn well better go to jail for a long time.
I watched the summer riots on youtube live streams, I don't recall the FBI using this technique for the tens of thousands of man-hours spent looting, burning and rioting in Portland, LA, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC or Atlanta.
I don't think its the FBI's job to figure out who smashed up a Target or looted a Footlocker.
Its definitely the FBI's job to figure out who breached a federal building, let alone the seat of our legislative branch during an active session.
That being said... the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and state agencies definitely do shady stuff and track people via their devices at protests. I'm remembering surveillance planes over Baltimore that were traced back to feds.
Your linked article is about a company data-mining Twitter. TFA we are discussing is about the FBI getting location data from phones. These are two very different things...
Your point was clearly the broader law-enforcement tracking, you sought to draw a comparison between the two events to ask why one had been an infosec focus of law enforcement.
I find the rioting and looting and violence in American cities all summer much more disturbing than the half-assed attempt at the capitol. Especially when the violence continues in the nearby residential areas.
The people who invaded the Capitol Building are domestic terrorists who tried to overthrow the government. The former lot you refer to are just criminals. Huge difference.
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).