Posted on 09/01/2022 7:00:37 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.
Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.
Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.
The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.
“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone’s user, but can be traced …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Some "burner" phones never truly shut off. They reduce the rate at which they ping the cell phone towers in order to save battery life.
Put one inside a faraday cage with an RF monitor and watch how often that phone "lights up". It will be every 10-30 minutes when that phone is supposedly turned off.
Yes, that feature was designed into the phones at the requirement of various governments, so the phones could be tracked. The phone carriers are fully cooperative with such programs and will supply call logs and tracking logs on request to authorized government agencies.
Think of a cell phone as a government-sponsored personal tracking device with a 90-day memory and you have a reasonable assessment of what you are carrying.
The only way to be sure a phone is inactive is to pull the battery from the unit.
You, too?
'Face
;o]
Note that many phones batteries are not user removable.
Buy a ton of cookies,eat the cookies or not,put the phone in the tin and put the lid on tight.
Sorry, the article uou linked does NOT say a switched off phone can be tracked.
“tracking a switched off phone is a little difficult because when a phone is turned off it will stop communicating with nearby mobile towers. It can only be traced through its last location when it was switched on...”
And
“Putting your phone to Airplane mode will restrict anyone from tracking your location.”
Only exception to the “switched off” case is if you have apple and are dumb enough to always leave bluetooth on. Then again, stupid should hurt.
But Airplane Mode kills all emitted signals, period, end of story. No signals, no tracking.
What the article forgot is that even in Airplane Mode, it can RECEIVE signals. So if someone is dumb enough to leave google tracking on, technically the phone could monitorr and store pings from towers as you move. Then, when you switch off Airplane Mode, it can “phone home” google and update where ya been (but just gross location).
EE speaking.
Advertising can be reset on android, too. A bit hard to find.
But if you’ve meticulously switched off all tracking, it won’t follow you in the first place. For now, anyway. Goolag can update their tos anytime they want, and quietly implement a new method.
So keep checking.
“The only way to be sure a phone is inactive is to pull the battery from the unit.”
Absolutely, 100%, true.
All modern phones have a “soft” power switch, which is constantly monitored by low level electronics. To see if you pushed it “ON.” So it’s an active circuit.
Without actually cutting batt power with a mechanical switch, it’s never completely off. But they are good about powering off all transmit and receive circuitry, so as long as they are a “trustworthy “ company, you’re ok.
Sopull the battery, or use a faraday cage (which do work great, and confuse everyone monitoring).
Or just leave the phone at home when going out for nefarious deeds. "They" will assume you are at home watching the television.
If the television reports that it wasn't running during the time of interest, you can always claim that you were reading a book. Or you could leave the television on while you are gone. Courtesy tip: turn down the volume.
If the traffic camera spots your car at an intersection and manages to read the license plate, it might draw unwanted attention, but "they" still do not know who was in the car.
You could paint your license plates with clear nail polish to defeat the IR scanners, like the Dutch used to do. That might still work.
Street cameras might catch a glimpse of you on the sidewalk, but the resolution is terrible and facial recognition algorithms are extremely unreliable. Wear different hats and some cheap reading glasses. Dress to blend with your surroundings.
No worries then.
> The only way to be sure a phone is inactive is to pull the battery from the unit.
And hope that is the only battery on that device ;-)
Well, it won’t be too long until a freeware version is written by someone else and will be available to everyone. It will probably be available on SourceForge soon;-)
The AP alone is enough reason to re-establish suspending habeus corpus for journolists in the US.
You make good points...
However, at no point in the cold war years did East Germany (or any other communist nation) have the population-control technology that exists in this country (as well as most countries) today...
In addition, the total acceptance and subservience of the American people to the communist-imposed tyranny makes the population-control technologies even more effective...
These two elements are the key basis for knowing that Reagan's prophesied 1000 years of darkest tyranny is just about guaranteed...
On a positive note, we now are only facing the remaining 998 years of subjugation...
We must stay positive and start focusing on the 3020 elections since those might be the next honest & free ones the country ever sees...
Yes. This is exactly what the FIB used to know who was where on Jan 6 so they could know who to go after.
This is exactly what True the Vote used to find the 2,000 mules who stuffed ballot boxes in key big cities in swing states to steal the 2020 presidential election.
imagine if you knew the gps coordinates of ballot drop boxes in battleground states ... you could find people making ‘rounds’ back and forth stuffing all the boxes
oh wait... that’s already been shown. and the FBI couldn’t care less. go figure.
You used to be able to reset your advertising ID in IOS. It doesn’t appear that you can do that anymore.
Did you actually read this link?
Spoken like a true JBT.
please ignore the hell out of my last comment. obviously, it should have been on a different thread.
Your statement relies upon the assumption that governmental entities will never have an interest in you, at any point in the future. The fact that you post on places like FR would create such an interest.
Now, reflect on how many people who were in DC on Jan 6 have been sitting in jail, many identified and tracked by their cell info.
Of course, you are right. I’m sure I’m on a buncha lists. If I ever do light out...it’s no familiar trails, no cellphone, no charge cards, all cash, sunglasses...and the dreaded med mask.
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