Authorities looking to prosecute the mob of Trump supporters who overran the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday stand to get powerful help from cellphone records, facial recognition tools and other technologies to assist in the identification of anyone who was there that day.
Turning off GPS, cell tower triangulation is good to within about 100 feet in cities. I tested this a few years ago. Better location can be achieved by asking your phone which wifi networks it can find.
I usually run around town with tracking turned off. Here’s a short description of tracking methods.
Were I to decide to commit some heinous crime, I’d leave my cell at home and drive an older model car, as newer models are now tracked as well.
Getting info on every phone in the Capitol over a period of time would probably involve multiple lawsuits, court orders etc. It’d be interesting to see the Feds try for it.
Find my device will tell me if my phone is at my desk, in my bedroom, or in my car parked in the attached garage. They can tell where you were.
The question is what if they do not know who “you” are?
You are in a mob of a thousand. Running around. Shoulder-to-shoulder.
In court can they say it was YOU who ninjaed through the senate or YOU who relaxed in the Speaker’s office based on cell phone data?
I am all for busting these people. I just don’t know that cell-phone data is sufficient.
Agreed, cell phone data in and of itself is not sufficient. Someone can just take your phone and commit a crime to frame you.
However using cell phone data is a good first step in identifying these people. Then you can combine cell phone data with social media, tips from the public, camera evidence, etc to build a case or get an interrogation.
My point is that getting the cell phone data of everyone who was ‘in’ the capital will be a good first step in identifying the 5000+ people who were in the capital illegally.
Several good points -
To get cell tower data for a person accused of a crime, the police need a warrant. It may depend on what a judge may allow for now, but using a list of several hundred cellphones to sift through and determine the identity of a perp is considered too broad a net. However (!) once the identity is known, using cellphone data as a corroborating evidence to bolster the ID is OK.
Getting a list of several thousand to identify 500 to 1000 perps is probably not in the category of “overbroad”. This does not prove someone is guilty, but it gives the police grounds to dig further and if necessary seize phones, and knowing possible identities look for social media posts, emails, etc. I hope we are not at the point where “your phone was at the scene of the crime” is the only evidence needed to send someone to jail. .
I would be very surprised if the Capitol does not have an advanced enterprise WiFI system… if for no other reason, to keep cellular data minimal. That system should have been logging the unique MAC addresses of any phone that entered the building - if not, the IT staff and some NSA guys need to be fired. Do you need a warrant to look at government logs as opposed to private cellular company info?
"[a killing ] or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children.”
Simply based on media reports, attempted kidnapping (the “Zip-tie guy”), espionage (Stolen laptops, people photographing documents); what’s “sabotage”? Does trying to prevent congress from doing its job count? Treason is “iffy” but trying to prevent the legitimate election results being finalized in order to allow someone else to take the presidency sure comes close… And the capitol Police Officer was beaten and died (murder) so then anyone participating in the riot would conceivably be also liable for the death of the protester who was shot.
The example case in Florida I read about was the fellow who asked to borrow someone’s car so he could “go teach his ex a lesson” (beat her up). He beat her to death, and the guy who knowingly only lent the car is also serving a life sentence for felony murder. It doesn’t sound like the connection has to be too direct. (But that’s Florida law.)
Well, murder indisputably happened during this event. Attempted kidnapping was clearly the goal during the attack-those zip ties were brought for a reason, and espionage is being investigated. Sensitive government documents and computers are missing.
I don’t see the problem. I agree that treason and sabotage might not be the strongest charges, but there are many possible charges that qualify. Admittedly, none of the people being arrested are black so the charges will be nowhere near as severe as they could be, but since murder did occur, at least the ringleaders should be concerned.
Especially since they know there won’t be any pardons in their future.
Don’t forget that these people left the capital and went home. I doubt the jury will be persuaded if they argue that someone stole their phone during the riot and then returned it afterward.
They broke into the headquarters of our government, into the offices of many of our nation’s leaders, and looked through the documents and electronics therein. How is that not espionage?
As for the “someone stole my phone” defense, I’d be willing to bet that a large portion of the insurrectionists not only had their phones on their persons, but actually used them in one way or another (pictures, texts, etc.). And a large portion of those probably had to unlock their phone to do so (via face recognition, squiggle drawn on screen, or whatever). Want to bet there’s no records of them doing that? So not only were their phones there, but they were there in the possession of someone capable of unlocking them.
Evidence that somebody was inside the Capitol during the riot only indicates, at most, that they MAY have committed a crime. Some people–for example reporters–have legitimate reasons for being onsite where crimes are being committed.
And by and large its easy to identify who has access to the Capitol legitimately. All legitimate visitors are registered. They go through metal detectors. They get tour passes (or if they want to get into the gallery, they get a gallery pass from their Congressperson’s office - with I believe involves a background check). If you have business (aren’t just there to tourist) you get on a list. If you are from the press, you have a press pass. If you are an employee or contractor, you have a Capitol badge. You don’t just wander into the Capitol - which makes some of these people’s excuses ludicrous. If you want to watch the electoral vote count from the gallery, you would have needed to get a gallery pass months ago (and I suspect this year its really hard to get them because of social distancing).
I’m thinking that it might be unnecessary - and awfully expensive, especially in times of COVID - to try to arrest, try, and jail EVERYONE who was involved. (BTW - has anyone seen estimates of the total number of folk who breached the lines/how many entered the bldg?). But a wider net could be cast to identify folk as domestic terrorists, along the lines of a no-fly list. Triggering alerts anytime they try to pass a government security standpoint.
Something like that could require less process under the Patriot Act. (Would be nice to have that piece-of-shit legislation serve some useful purpose!)
Interesting. My Find My iPhone is regularly wrong. This morning, it placed my iPhone 8 in a house across the street and two doors over. I have never been in that house. I rang it and it was one room over from me. However, it does give you an error band, and my house was just within it. Usually one of my devices will show up in the wrong place while active.
The GPS maps pinpoint me reasonably well (though it thinks I parked my car in the neighbor’s garage right now), though, so I don’t get it.
I use a Pixel. And the GPS will put it within 10 ft every time. It can be hard to tell the difference between my desk and my bedroom - as the desk is on the first floor and the bedroom on the second floor above it. But I don’t put my phone on that side of the bedroom.
The GPS error circle varies tremendously depending on where you are and what sort of phone you have. If you have an app that can display the GPS position and error circle in real time you might just find your house is in a bad spot. Or your phone sucks at GPS indoors. Or that you have a metal roof whereas other folks have tile or tar-shingle roofs.
There are lots of reasons that “find my phone” would suck at finding your phone in your house.
“Sabotage” is a collection of crimes which only apply to national-defence premises or materiel.
Espionage offences mostly require that the information was taken “with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” That might be difficult to prove in these cases.
I have an Android and when I look up Google location maps for me (back when I actually went places) it was very accurate - within a few feet of a bus stop, for instance.
I also get mail asking how I liked places I visited.
Phones don’t have “location beacons”. There are two ways a phone can be located:
- By which towers it pings off of
- By GPS data collected by the phone
The latter requires some app on the phone to report that data–as others have noted, some of the posts that were made may include location. Or not.
Tower pings are typically less precise, though I see several factors that could possibly make them more reliable in this case than others:
- Density of towers in cities
- Relatively wide-open space on the Mall, meaning probably clearer line-of-sight to whatever towers were “seen” by the phones, thus increasing the data points to triangulate
- Possible picocells in the Capitol
- Possible Stingray in the area
One might, in fact, posit that there is/should be a permanent Stingray in the Capitol, so that in case of a bomb threat, they can shut down cell service (keeping the Stingray up, so phones connect to it, but not letting calls through), thus removing the thread of a phone-triggered bomb.
As for identifying folks by their phones, anyone who was there and did not carry a burner (or leave phone elsewhere, obviously) is an idiot. No points for suggesting what percentage of the mob falls in that demographic.
The next question is, what would phone metadata be good for? Well, it would tell the FBI “This phone was in this area at this time”. That of course is not enough to arrest someone–but the fact that Joe Smith of East Armpit’s phone was there allows them to look Joe up on social media, find his pictures, and then say "Hey, that looks a LOT like this guy who was ". With that information, I expect they can get a warrant to dig into him more, find that he used his Visa to pay for a hotel in the area and to buy gas, food, and pay tolls, and hey, look, there he is on camera at a tollbooth.
Is that enough to convict? Depends how good the pictures are, and who else they can squeeze. One Joe’s idiot buddy, who was located using the same technology, breaks down and says he was there and Joe drove him, the dominos start to fall. And/or they get Joe or idiot buddy in a room and he lets them look at his phone (or it isn’t password-protected) and look, there are his photos.
It’s going to be a long process for the FBI. I guess they signed up for it, but I don’t envy them the slog.
Great post overall. Good explanation.
As to your bottom line …
IMO compared to more typical more difficult investigations, this strikes me as going fishing in a barrel full of hungry carp. Drop the hook; reel one in. Drop the hook, reel in one hanging on another. Drop the hook …
I’ve been actually fishy-fishing in places where bringing back 50 fish per line was a normal half-day’s catch. It’s fun compared to the usual sitting around waiting for something, anything, to happen other than beer disappearing then reappearing sorta.
They’re going to arrest hundreds. The hard part is going to be sifting backward through all the disorganized crosstalk to hunt down the original instigators and prime movers, the people who bear the most responsibility for inciting and driving the rebellion. Given the way Trump likes to plant ideas indirectly, the authorities will have a devil of a time working out the causal sequence and differentiating between people who were influenced and those who were consciously doing the influencing.