Submitted by Sorin61 t3_10cct5u in technology
NoPossibility t1_j4go29m wrote
Reply to comment by dratseb in NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again by Sorin61
Don’t know about the OP’s topic, but I will say I’ll be surprised if they didn’t know who it was in the first day by cell phone data alone. He supposedly turned off his phone during the murders, but many cell phones still transmit when “off”. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if his location was shown as being in the house by non-essential transmissions while in an “off” mode, but the cops are keeping it quiet that they can track a phone this way.
dotjazzz t1_j4h2nwf wrote
You keep digging that hole, you'll end up the dark side of the earth. Radio transmission isn't rocket science, it can be easily detected, dumb ass.
NoPossibility t1_j4h76bm wrote
It’s not some brain dead conspiracy theory. The NSA and CIA were using this kind of technology way back in 2004. Imagine what they can do today.
And it isnt just cellphones that could’ve given away the location. Health devices like step counters, headphones, etc can sometimes record location data that gets reincorporated to a device’s location history when the hub device like a cellphone is reconnected. There are many ways to piece together meta data from someone’s devices to paint a complete picture of who they are, where they are/went, and what they were doing (ie, stopped in front of a store display for 20 seconds facing west). Any number of these could be pieced together to identify who was likely in the house.
If he government wanted to hide their methods of discovery (which they’ve been known to do), they could easily piece together the map and say they found evidence of the car passing a banks cameras to justify their investigation pattern without revealing their true method of discovery.
When the San Bernardino shooter’s phone was capture, it was widely reported that they had a back door method to break into encrypted phones but didn’t want to reveal it. They pressured Apple to break open the phone for them and got rebuffed. Then soon after they revealed an Israeli company was able to do it for them, and they got the data they wanted. All of the legal pressure on Apple was an attempt to hide that they already were able to open it but didn’t want to admit it publicly. But they also didn’t have a solid legal/public way to have gotten their information and needed a cover story.
Same happened with Wi-Fi/cell signal hijacking. Government would set up fake cellular hot spots to hijack radio signals and rap lines and location data. https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/
Now this is extremely unlikely to have been used in a rural Idaho town with no recent murders. But it illustrates that the technology to track a device is very advanced, sometimes not documented or intended by the handset manufacturer, and the government often attempts to deceive the public to hide their methods so they can continue using it as long as they can without public outcry or the arms race of encryption and behavior changes among people who may conduct criminal acts.
dratseb t1_j4hg4zu wrote
Oh yeah, the military was setting up fake cell towers in Afghanistan to catch terrorists. I’m not surprised at all the government was doing it to citizens.
technofuture8 t1_j4j0ci0 wrote
From what I understand they caught the dude who killed the Idaho girls because he left behind a sheath for his knife and from the sheath they were able to get his DNA????
[deleted] t1_j4jc0eq wrote
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