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A few months ago here in St Louis, a woman was murdered in broad daylight in an armed robbery attempt. Police started looking at other recent street robberies
by ben1040 14y ago
A few months ago here in St Louis, a woman was murdered in broad daylight in an armed robbery attempt.
Police started looking at other recent street robberies reported in the area. It turned out that a week before the murder, a person was robbed at gunpoint just a few blocks from where the murder took place, and their cellphone was taken. After that theft, call records for that stolen phone started showing showed a woman's phone number.
Upon tracking down that number, they got to a woman who said her boyfriend was involved in the murder. That led to two men being arrested for this and at least one other previously unsolved armed robbery.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cellphone-played-big-role-in-arrest-of-two-in-central/article_25de4910-ed40-11e1-a428-0019bb30f31a.html http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cellphone-played-bi...
However, the NYT article says it can take weeks for a subpoena to be issued and acted upon by the phone company. So I question whether a database like that would really have even been helpful in a situation like this, since they'd need the data a lot sooner after an incident.
Seems to me that this might be more of an attempt to mine phone records on a larger scale and look for drug networks or other emerging patterns.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoIf everybody was forced to have the mic and camera on all the time on their cellphone, I bet the police could catch even more criminals. That is obviously a strawman, but there is a point: there will always be a tradeoff between privacy and safety. I'd rather not give up my privacy to combat what are essentially black swan events. With my base opinion out of the way, I will say I would be comfortable with the kind of tracking you mentioned if there were strong protections on what the police could do with that data. For instance, the phone's owner should be protected from prosecution in similar ways to evidence gained from an illegal search. This data should also have a maximum lifetime. Finally, it should be clear when the records are being requested so the owner of the number can turn it off if they move the number to a new phone. Unfortunately, I can't imagine these kinds of laws being passed, so, until they do, I'll stick with my default of believing the government should require more effort, not less, to snoop in my life.
- twmb 14y agoThe problem is when they don't use this to track drug networks and murder crimes and instead use it to lock up peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, or other political dissidents.