It’s the intermediate ones who will be, as you say, difficult to pick out of the crowd.
OTOH, one of the features of mobs in general is that they often aren’t really led. Once a group of vaguely like-minded people show up in one location, so called “mob psychology” takes over. Like a more sophisticated version of bird’s flocking behavior, everyone takes their cues from the surrounding people and waves of different behavior, be that violent or peaceful, just spread spontaneously through the crowd.
Which is also why a tiny cadre of agents provocatuers can be so effective. They can deliberately trigger very specific behaviors in the vastly larger crowd by being a critical mass of common behavior in one or two small clusters.
That speaks to the events after the group was assembled and began marching towards the Capitol.
How that particular list of individuals happened to show up that day may be much more amenable to identifying the movers and shakers who made it so. Or maybe not, and the “blame” lies entirely with the amorphous nature of the R.E.T.C.H. :
Note also that a cop was killed as part of this–hit with a fire extinguisher. While I doubt any DA would take this proposal seriously, in theory, I conclused that everyone involved in that attack could be charged with capital (Capitol? sorry…) murder.
So once the Fibbies find that your phone was there and get you in a room, they’ll start talking about how Sicknick’s murder puts YOU on the hook, and how long do you think it will take after that before they start getting some useful intel from some of the dweebs who were just along for the ride?
I just hope they are as aggressive pursuing these domestic terrorists, as they were at depriving people of middle eastern appearance/names/connections of their civil liberties post 9/11. All the hinky crap we libtards were complaining about in terms of no-cause warrants and surveillance issued by secret tribunals should provide plenty of opportunities for law and order conservatives to go after these dangerous people.
I’m just citing this last post as an example, but many other posts in this thread are not appropriate to GQ or relevant to the OP.
Going forward, please confine your posts to the technical aspects of tracing phones. This thread is not about assigning criminal culpability, the psychology of mobs, or political issues. Limit your responses to factual information directly related to the OP.
Indoor tracking will use WiFi or Bluetooth unless the building has microcells. Outdoors, GPS if there’s a clear view to the sky and WiFi if not. In either case, inertial sensors are fused with the coarse location data to increase precision. But they drift quickly and need constant updates from something that can do absolute positioning.
In some cases, the phones themselves act as beacons. You can get little location trackers that only have Bluetooth. If a nearby phone senses one of these tags, it will note this (along with its own location) to the network. Then, the owner of the tag can query that location.
Apologies if this has already been discussed, but ISTM that cell coverage within the capitol building may not be worth a shit. The building is made of brick, sandstone, and marble, and the dome is made of iron. Thus, the picocell brought up by @phs3 in post #38 could be a very real possibility. It looked to me like every one of those rioters was having no trouble with phone coverage.
Good article, thanks. Although the focus of this article is mostly on outside of the building. And I was referring to the rioters inside that were merrily filming their fellow mobsters.
apparently the process is called go-fencing and has probably already been done.
Neither would an agency need actual photos or footage to track down any mob participant who was carrying a mobile phone. Law enforcement agencies have also developed a habit in recent years of using so-called geofence warrants to compel companies such as Google to provide lists of all mobile devices that appeared within a certain geographic area during a given time frame.
Pretty sure it’s every “deleted” post ever. Social media sites don’t really ever delete anything (well, maybe some privacy-focused ones do); they just tag the posts as non-visible.
Still, 56 TB ain’t that much. It’s only that little because Parler is tiny. YouTube gets ~1000 TB uploaded per day.
