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Police Are Using Phone Tracking As A Routine Tool

Lagged2Death 15y ago
...law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits. That's just what I was thinking last time I held up the local liquor store. Who knew I had so much in common with the police!
- mhurron 15y ago
  It's rare that you can have all the problems with something so well summed up in a single statement, but there it is ; all the problems with law enforcement agencies summed up in one statement.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    "All the problems with law enforcement agencies". I think this comment sounds wittier than it actually is. Policing is a dangerous and often unrewarding job and even the worst cops spend most of their time dealing with toxic situations we rarely even imagine. I'm a civil libertarian, but I've found that I'm saner and my perspective much improved by remembering that the police are not an evil entity out to destroy us all, but rather a typically clumsy and inept collection of human beings trying to perform a vital task for society. Seeing the police this way lets you pick out the difference between, for instance, false-alerting drug dogs used to effect civil asset forfeitures on interstate highways from situations like "active investigations aided by cell tower locations".
    - psb217 15y ago
      Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice." The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence. I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed. In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes. Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        What you're saying here, I think, is that it's not fair to, in order to build support for policy, cast about for sympathy for the specific police officers who, for instance, get shot in the line of duty. That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that adversarial encounters with the police are in the general case far more likely to involve actual criminals than they do law-abiding people being oppressed by malicious or busybody government entities. I'm not saying that in order to advocate for a specific policy. I support increased oversight of the police. What I'm doing is objecting to sentences like "this sums up the whole problem with law enforcement". That wording clouds the issue. It makes it hard to distinguish between legitimate policing interests and illegitimate ones.
Nrsolis 15y ago
The benefits of having an on-your-person radiolocation beacon are somewhat muted by the possibility of having the government use that same technology to undermine your Constitutionally protected privacy. If there is anything that history can teach us, it's that law enforcement agencies will work hard to keep us from knowing that this is going on and they will fight to keep this tool because it makes it easier for them to do their job. Ask any cop and they will tell you that they often view our "rights" as a complete hinderance to their effectiveness. One man's "civil rights and due process" is another man's "got off on a technicality."
- ChrisLTD 15y ago
  I think it's damning that the police go out of their way to hide they are performing this kind of surveillance. It's as if they know it's wrong!
  - mhurron 15y ago
    Wrong (morally) isn't the problem. It's that it's illegal, and they know that. Law enforcement operating above the law is not law enforcement.
    - Produce 15y ago
      Food for thought - all law enforcement operates above the law. They all intimidate, kidnap and assault and some of them even kill. A law enforcement officer who operates within the law wouldn't ever raise his fist.
  - cdr 15y ago
    I doubt any officers think that it's wrong, but most are no doubt aware that this thing that is making their jobs easier is unpopular with the public and likely to be barred by courts when challenged. Best, then, to keep it as quiet as possible.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      This, absolutely. The police have a dim view of virtually every restriction of their powers. And that makes sense. The police know well that in the overwhelming majority of the situations they work in, society wants and needs the police to intervene. They're spending all day locking up bona fide criminals, and, in urban areas, worrying about getting shot. And all that means is that the police shouldn't be left to regulate themselves. And, they aren't.
JonnieCache 15y ago
"And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment." Anyone fancy taking a guess at what this might be?
- uncoder0 15y ago
  So I looked into this and found a case in Fort Worth where a 'Cell Phone Tracker' was purchased and it looks like it is marketed and produced by Harris Corporation.[1] I found their product list if you want to dig through it. [2] [1] http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-buys-cell-phone-tracker-without-considering-privacy-rights-140052293.html http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-buys-cell-phone-tr... [2] http://publicintelligence.net/harris-corporation-amberjack-stingray-stingray-ii-kingfish-wireless-surveillance-products-price-list/ http://publicintelligence.net/harris-corporation-amberjack-s...
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    Hmm so I'm guessing basically it's a software-defined radio that can predict the frequency hopping algorithms in phones to distinguish an individual handset's communications. Someone showed something like that at some hacker conference in the last few years, but that was reverse engineered. I'm guessing these guys have access to restricted knowledge from the networks/manufacturers. The actual triangulation of the position once you can do that is pretty trivial I'd imagine, perhaps with some algorithms for compensating for physical obstructions between you and the target.
- Natsu 15y ago
  Seems odd to consider Gilbert "small" given that it's part of the Phoenix metro area. But I guess it technically only says that their police department is small.
javajosh 15y ago
This is so terrible, and yet, apart from giving money to the ACLU it's not clear what I can do about it. Theoretically people are supposed to get upset and at least vote to change the policy next election: but who do you even vote for that would change policy? And why isn't this practice challenged in court by defendants? It seems like a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, and should result in acquittal.
- tptacek 15y ago
  In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? There are numerous contexts in which the police can literally search your physical person and surroundings without a peep from the court. How is diagnostic logging from cell towers worse than that? It's possible that, as happened with the FBI GPS case, the police are going to end up needing court orders to get this information in the future. But are you aware of the evidentiary requirements to get similar court orders? They're minimal. The police will get these court orders whenever they ask for them: the history of recorded locations of subjects in active investigations is certainly going to be considered legitimate enough to outweigh the privacy expectations here. I'm happy if the police end up needing court orders for this, but I'm also happy the police have access to this facility.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? Agreed, I'd like someone to answer this. As far as I can tell, this isn't especially different from having a detective shadow you, which (unless I'm mistaken) has always been pretty acceptable for law enforcement to do.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      For what it's worth, the police do not need a court order to shadow you.
  - Duff 15y ago
    The court order is important, because it shines a light into a dark corner. Like cockroaches, bureaucrats engaged in behavior that they believe to be wrong always avoid the light. Court involvement means court supervision and ultimately a more consistent application of justice. The courts are more trustworthy than a faceless police agency. I agree that it's a good thing that the police have access to this sort of technology -- but someone needs to watch the watchers.
hack_edu 15y ago
For what its worth, my phone was stolen last month and had Lookout Mobile Security installed. It pinpointed the location down to a few meters. Still the cops more-or-less said, "Oh, that's nice but we can't use that." They said that civilian tracking apps that use the cell network are only usable down to the tower, matter how exact it claims to be. This was in a big SF Bay Area city with a well-funded, adequate, and tech savvy police force. Your phone tracking software is non-binding and irrelevant in court. It says so in the user agreements you click-through. That said, its nice to have the ability to wipe and lock the device remotely.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I was mugged in Chicago last summer and my phone was stolen. The phone and the people who mugged me were in police custody ten minutes later because of cell tower phone tracking. The police asked questions about what tracking the phone did; I have no doubt they'd have used that information too. (Of course, this is a case in which I obviously would have consented to them tracking my phone).
  - GoodIntentions 15y ago
    Today I learned to remove the battery from any wireless device _immediately_ after stealing it :P
  - haberman 15y ago
    It took ten minutes for you to call the police, track your phone, give the tracking information to police, and for the police to find and apprehend the suspects? That seems astonishingly fast -- how did that all go down?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I am being hyperbolic about the timing by about 2 minutes. I timed it from the call to the police to pulling up in a squad car next to the fast food place where the police detained the muggers and had me ID them. It was crazy. I told my neighbors: the muggers asked for my bag, I said no, so they settled for $12 and a device that tracked them from space.
tptacek 15y ago
Worth noting: the FBI's GPS case turned on the fact that a person's vehicle is an "effect" in the sense of the people's right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The word "effect"; it's right there in the 4th Amendment. The court did not find that people have a reasonable expectation to privacy in public spaces (an argument made by the defense in that case). If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public. (I'm happy if the police end up universally needing [easily obtained] court orders to collect cell tower logs, but unlike most of HN, I don't see the status quo as particularly outrageous).
- barrkel 15y ago
  If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public. This isn't obvious to me at all. I think you're falling into a trap peculiar to computer security in particular, generalizing from binary distinctions of "secure" vs "insecure", or "anonymous" vs "authenticated" as if these things were matters of Boolean logic, rather than of probabilities and degrees, in arenas outside of the easily automated. If you're being followed around in public, that is by itself obvious; it normally affects your behaviour, it's stressful, and in fact prisons (Panopticon) have been designed around the idea of being under constant surveillance. The specific and explicit goal of such was "obtaining power of mind over mind"; if you don't think those who literally seek power do not have similar motives, you're naive. The cost of following someone around means that it will only be applied in cases where police value it highly; presumably, incentives up the chain of command are aligned such that that level of investment is only made when the public interest is high; similarly, the levels of manpower will mean that conspiracy and persecution would be hard to hide. When the effect of following someone around - knowing where they are at all times - is automated and based on cheap technology - indeed, technology whose cost is largely borne by those being followed, for phones - then the bar for following is much lowered. Far more trivial cases can have this level of intrusiveness applied to them; the public interest may not be so well served. Furthermore, without appropriate controls, persecution by individuals is enabled, without any need for a group conspiracy. For example, ex-husbands with access may spy on the location of their ex-wives and further their own corrupt, human goals.

...law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits. That's just what I was thinking last time I held up the local liquor store. Who knew I had so much in common with the police!

mhurron 15y ago
It's rare that you can have all the problems with something so well summed up in a single statement, but there it is ; all the problems with law enforcement agencies summed up in one statement.
- tptacek 15y ago
  "All the problems with law enforcement agencies". I think this comment sounds wittier than it actually is. Policing is a dangerous and often unrewarding job and even the worst cops spend most of their time dealing with toxic situations we rarely even imagine. I'm a civil libertarian, but I've found that I'm saner and my perspective much improved by remembering that the police are not an evil entity out to destroy us all, but rather a typically clumsy and inept collection of human beings trying to perform a vital task for society. Seeing the police this way lets you pick out the difference between, for instance, false-alerting drug dogs used to effect civil asset forfeitures on interstate highways from situations like "active investigations aided by cell tower locations".
  - psb217 15y ago
    Borrowing from Arthur C. Clarke, and shifting the often overgenerous connotations of Hanlon's razor, I say that: "any sufficiently advanced ineptitude or ignorance is indistinguishable from malice." The rather "Up With People" connotations conveyed by Hanlon's Razor (i.e. "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") may be preferable to the more cynical tone of my chosen phrasing when dealing with inconsequential events. However, when effectively malicious incompetence and lack of foresight occur within societal institutions capable of sufficient influence, a perceived lack of malicious intent should not distract those affected by the offending institution from aggressively rooting out the sources of the incompetence. I would also like to make a subtle point regarding the way in which you seem to have associated the phrase "the police" with a collection of instances of "police(wo)man". As suggested by my previous paragraph, I think it is worth distinguishing between "the police" as a societal institution capable of profoundly affecting those within its sphere of influence and those individuals from which it is composed. In particular, it seems that attributing systemic problems to the individuals through whom they are expressed leads to a pair of difficulties. The first difficulty is that which you encountered, in which one hesitates to apportion any blame due to the perception that any assigned blame would correspond to an attribution of evil/malicious intent to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. The second difficulty is that pursuing solutions to a systemic capacity for sustained malicious ignorance/incompetence/ineptitude through actions targeted at the individuals through whom this capacity is expressed offers a potent example of the potential futility of treating symptoms rather than causes. Note that my view converges with (my interpretation of) yours in the sense that I consider it important to avoid unnecessarily shifting blame earned by an institution onto its constituents, as this is unlikely to ameliorate systemic problems while generally producing negative consequences for those onto whom blame is shifted.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      What you're saying here, I think, is that it's not fair to, in order to build support for policy, cast about for sympathy for the specific police officers who, for instance, get shot in the line of duty. That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that adversarial encounters with the police are in the general case far more likely to involve actual criminals than they do law-abiding people being oppressed by malicious or busybody government entities. I'm not saying that in order to advocate for a specific policy. I support increased oversight of the police. What I'm doing is objecting to sentences like "this sums up the whole problem with law enforcement". That wording clouds the issue. It makes it hard to distinguish between legitimate policing interests and illegitimate ones.

Nrsolis 15y ago

The benefits of having an on-your-person radiolocation beacon are somewhat muted by the possibility of having the government use that same technology to undermine your Constitutionally protected privacy. If there is anything that history can teach us, it's that law enforcement agencies will work hard to keep us from knowing that this is going on and they will fight to keep this tool because it makes it easier for them to do their job. Ask any cop and they will tell you that they often view our "rights" as a complete hinderance to their effectiveness. One man's "civil rights and due process" is another man's "got off on a technicality."

ChrisLTD 15y ago
I think it's damning that the police go out of their way to hide they are performing this kind of surveillance. It's as if they know it's wrong!
- mhurron 15y ago
  Wrong (morally) isn't the problem. It's that it's illegal, and they know that. Law enforcement operating above the law is not law enforcement.
  - Produce 15y ago
    Food for thought - all law enforcement operates above the law. They all intimidate, kidnap and assault and some of them even kill. A law enforcement officer who operates within the law wouldn't ever raise his fist.
- cdr 15y ago
  I doubt any officers think that it's wrong, but most are no doubt aware that this thing that is making their jobs easier is unpopular with the public and likely to be barred by courts when challenged. Best, then, to keep it as quiet as possible.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    This, absolutely. The police have a dim view of virtually every restriction of their powers. And that makes sense. The police know well that in the overwhelming majority of the situations they work in, society wants and needs the police to intervene. They're spending all day locking up bona fide criminals, and, in urban areas, worrying about getting shot. And all that means is that the police shouldn't be left to regulate themselves. And, they aren't.

JonnieCache 15y ago

"And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment." Anyone fancy taking a guess at what this might be?

uncoder0 15y ago
So I looked into this and found a case in Fort Worth where a 'Cell Phone Tracker' was purchased and it looks like it is marketed and produced by Harris Corporation.[1] I found their product list if you want to dig through it. [2] [1] http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-buys-cell-phone-tracker-without-considering-privacy-rights-140052293.html http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort-Worth-buys-cell-phone-tr... [2] http://publicintelligence.net/harris-corporation-amberjack-stingray-stingray-ii-kingfish-wireless-surveillance-products-price-list/ http://publicintelligence.net/harris-corporation-amberjack-s...
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  Hmm so I'm guessing basically it's a software-defined radio that can predict the frequency hopping algorithms in phones to distinguish an individual handset's communications. Someone showed something like that at some hacker conference in the last few years, but that was reverse engineered. I'm guessing these guys have access to restricted knowledge from the networks/manufacturers. The actual triangulation of the position once you can do that is pretty trivial I'd imagine, perhaps with some algorithms for compensating for physical obstructions between you and the target.
Natsu 15y ago
Seems odd to consider Gilbert "small" given that it's part of the Phoenix metro area. But I guess it technically only says that their police department is small.

javajosh 15y ago

This is so terrible, and yet, apart from giving money to the ACLU it's not clear what I can do about it. Theoretically people are supposed to get upset and at least vote to change the policy next election: but who do you even vote for that would change policy? And why isn't this practice challenged in court by defendants? It seems like a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, and should result in acquittal.

tptacek 15y ago
In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? There are numerous contexts in which the police can literally search your physical person and surroundings without a peep from the court. How is diagnostic logging from cell towers worse than that? It's possible that, as happened with the FBI GPS case, the police are going to end up needing court orders to get this information in the future. But are you aware of the evidentiary requirements to get similar court orders? They're minimal. The police will get these court orders whenever they ask for them: the history of recorded locations of subjects in active investigations is certainly going to be considered legitimate enough to outweigh the privacy expectations here. I'm happy if the police end up needing court orders for this, but I'm also happy the police have access to this facility.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  In what sense is this a clear violation of the 4th Amendment? Agreed, I'd like someone to answer this. As far as I can tell, this isn't especially different from having a detective shadow you, which (unless I'm mistaken) has always been pretty acceptable for law enforcement to do.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    For what it's worth, the police do not need a court order to shadow you.
- Duff 15y ago
  The court order is important, because it shines a light into a dark corner. Like cockroaches, bureaucrats engaged in behavior that they believe to be wrong always avoid the light. Court involvement means court supervision and ultimately a more consistent application of justice. The courts are more trustworthy than a faceless police agency. I agree that it's a good thing that the police have access to this sort of technology -- but someone needs to watch the watchers.

hack_edu 15y ago

For what its worth, my phone was stolen last month and had Lookout Mobile Security installed. It pinpointed the location down to a few meters. Still the cops more-or-less said, "Oh, that's nice but we can't use that." They said that civilian tracking apps that use the cell network are only usable down to the tower, matter how exact it claims to be. This was in a big SF Bay Area city with a well-funded, adequate, and tech savvy police force. Your phone tracking software is non-binding and irrelevant in court. It says so in the user agreements you click-through. That said, its nice to have the ability to wipe and lock the device remotely.

tptacek 15y ago
I was mugged in Chicago last summer and my phone was stolen. The phone and the people who mugged me were in police custody ten minutes later because of cell tower phone tracking. The police asked questions about what tracking the phone did; I have no doubt they'd have used that information too. (Of course, this is a case in which I obviously would have consented to them tracking my phone).
- GoodIntentions 15y ago
  Today I learned to remove the battery from any wireless device _immediately_ after stealing it :P
- haberman 15y ago
  It took ten minutes for you to call the police, track your phone, give the tracking information to police, and for the police to find and apprehend the suspects? That seems astonishingly fast -- how did that all go down?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I am being hyperbolic about the timing by about 2 minutes. I timed it from the call to the police to pulling up in a squad car next to the fast food place where the police detained the muggers and had me ID them. It was crazy. I told my neighbors: the muggers asked for my bag, I said no, so they settled for $12 and a device that tracked them from space.

tptacek 15y ago

Worth noting: the FBI's GPS case turned on the fact that a person's vehicle is an "effect" in the sense of the people's right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The word "effect"; it's right there in the 4th Amendment. The court did not find that people have a reasonable expectation to privacy in public spaces (an argument made by the defense in that case). If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public. (I'm happy if the police end up universally needing [easily obtained] court orders to collect cell tower logs, but unlike most of HN, I don't see the status quo as particularly outrageous).

barrkel 15y ago
If you're out and about in public, your location isn't private. This is obvious, because it's clearly lawful for the police to simply follow you around in public. This isn't obvious to me at all. I think you're falling into a trap peculiar to computer security in particular, generalizing from binary distinctions of "secure" vs "insecure", or "anonymous" vs "authenticated" as if these things were matters of Boolean logic, rather than of probabilities and degrees, in arenas outside of the easily automated. If you're being followed around in public, that is by itself obvious; it normally affects your behaviour, it's stressful, and in fact prisons (Panopticon) have been designed around the idea of being under constant surveillance. The specific and explicit goal of such was "obtaining power of mind over mind"; if you don't think those who literally seek power do not have similar motives, you're naive. The cost of following someone around means that it will only be applied in cases where police value it highly; presumably, incentives up the chain of command are aligned such that that level of investment is only made when the public interest is high; similarly, the levels of manpower will mean that conspiracy and persecution would be hard to hide. When the effect of following someone around - knowing where they are at all times - is automated and based on cheap technology - indeed, technology whose cost is largely borne by those being followed, for phones - then the bar for following is much lowered. Far more trivial cases can have this level of intrusiveness applied to them; the public interest may not be so well served. Furthermore, without appropriate controls, persecution by individuals is enabled, without any need for a group conspiracy. For example, ex-husbands with access may spy on the location of their ex-wives and further their own corrupt, human goals.