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Even after the gravesite was discovered and McStay's DNA was found inside Merritt's vehicle, police were far from pinning the quadruple homicide on him.
Until they turned to Project Hemisphere.
Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.
"Merritt was in a position to access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared," an affidavit for his girlfriend's call records reports Hemisphere finding (PDF). Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay family's remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders.
In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a "partnership" between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.
However, AT&T's own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.
Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.
So, AT&T's one stipulation is a pinky swear with law enforcement that their program won't cause them public embarrassment.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:52PM
As usual, what is missing is accountability. AT&T can create this product, that's actually not a problem. They just cannot allow law enforcement to use it without a valid warrant. When law enforcement uses this tool without a valid warrant, that is a criminal offense. People need to be in jail: police, prosecutors, attorneys general --> inside of a cell.
Until that starts happening, abuses like this will continue. As long as abuse carries no penalty, why not?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:03PM
Looking from a slightly different angle at a different aspect of the problem:
When law enforcement uses this tool without a valid warrant, that is ...
... inadmissible evidence. So they gotta parallel construct something.
I'm not so queasy there. In theory if our justice system didn't suck and didn't find people guilty on some pretty flimsy circumstantial stuff or planted stuff then there wouldn't be much of a problem. Of course our justice system does suck so we most certainly are gonna put innocents in jail for literally being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so in practice it sucks. If the parallel construction is bulletproof and correct (lets say the accused owns a car with the inside liberally splashed with the victims DNA evidence blood) then it feels kinda "eh" dude got caught kinda illegally but deserves to fry anyway so I wouldn't feel any qualms pulling the switch or trigger or whatever ...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:05PM
Oh and I forgot a tangent of my different angle is I acknowledge you're gonna have problems with illegal use and crazy cops stalking and killing ex-girlfriends and stuff. I admit that sucks.
In like an optimist/pessimist thing the glass is like 75% empty and 25% full. In practice its bad, just not entirely bad.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:10PM
Or use this to know exactly where a political opponent spends his time so that the frame up or hit planning can be perfect, then real-time location information from Onstar and cell phone tracking will let you know where they are exactly. If you want to know positively they aren't home so you can plant kiddie porn on the PC in hidden folders with a carefully crafted false history of file dates so you can add them to the next sting operation and the legit investigation team won't need to know anything (very few involved for improved opsec), you're all set. If they're already doing something embarrassing, then you'll have plenty of time to install recording gear to get that great leverage. A ranking person in your opponents team that you control is even more valuable than removing one.
Now consider possibilities: Ruthless people, targets in self driving cars - what fun! Of course, as with this AT&T operation you wouldn't want to give your methods away. We see they already have access to cell phones. Plant info setting up a date with a hooker who wants partial payment in meth or crack on the otherwise disabled phone while you force drive them to a nearby drug trafficking area where they are shot through the window and a bag of crack thrown in. Of course you can be messier with some kind of wireless device plugged into the can-bus via an OBD port on a fly by wire car. Control of throttle, braking and possibly steering from a nearby car has so many interesting possibilities.
I really prefer some style though. So I'd plant cell location tracking data, ONStar/self driving car logs and 'net access logs putting the person in regular contact with massage parlors, drug dealers or pedos. Leak to Wikileaks later. For extra spice, do something like find a murdered drug dealer and put your target at scene, and with the drug dealer semi-regularly going back several years. If your target is a bigger player in gov't, you've got more fun options. Show meetings with foreign intelligence operatives if that'd be unfortunate. If an organized crime figure is busted for trafficking in underage girls and seems to have flown under the radar, put your target with them as though they were offering protection. If you're a US agency, do these things to destabilize foreign governments.
We know Tinfoil hat wearing paranoid delusionals of ten years ago were wrong, because they weren't crazy enough. How far out there do you have to imagine to be close to the truth?!?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:19PM
Pretty soon you will be able to call a self-driving car and program it to go somewhere...and then send it off with your cell phone. Perfect alibi?
"But, from my cell tracking records you can see that I was driving across town in an auto-Uber".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:21PM
I'm sure some fine upstanding citizen will take a dump on the dashboard and like two weeks later a bunch of Chinese webcams (of course the security is no good so you could pown them and insert your own pix) will get installed and they'll have a nice picture of your phone taking a driving tour of the city.
I wonder at what point being outside in public without possession of your cellphone will be a misdemeanor or felony along the lines of possessing burglar tools or in some uncivilized areas they ban guns so only criminals have guns in uncivilized areas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:26PM
Keep in mind that while tracking by phone maybe questionable in a legal sense, even if that method is removed from law enforcement, new methods are being developed to track people in mass: http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-eye-sky/ [radiolab.org] (in particular the part about how they discover a entire cartel doing hundreds of murders from back tracking a single murder).
- JCD
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:25PM
tracking by phone maybe questionable in a legal sense
Theres a recent something-con video or ... something that I watched along the point of we're not tracking your phone,we're just tracking the serial numbers of your car tires radio pressure monitoring system and bluetooth packets sniffed from your car talking to your sync'd phone.
But no technically we're not tracking your phone or your car or anything registered to you.
Then you mix pictures of traffic with data on which tire pressure transmitter was where and given enough data you can do some interesting monitoring.
Ideally a good samaritan would send you a postcard that your passenger side rear tire is slowly losing pressure but in practice it'll be all nefarious.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:43PM
political opponent
the problem with this scheme is we've trained generations of TV viewers to expect much less interesting stories. So the Russians pown a zillion servers a year semi-automatically and they happened to stumble across Hillaries felonious illegal by its very existence server and then all the emails show up on wikileaks. And thats the entire story.
or they think we're so stupid that zillions of gold digging women will supposedly get molested by a candidate decades ago and will all be silent for decades until exactly precisely three weeks before the election when all bazillion of them will simultaneously try to get their fifteen minutes of fame, and we'll be stupid enough to believe all of it and give the election to a known rapist enabler felon because, um because, ... because they think we're stupid, I guess. They already think we're "deplorable" so ...
I mean we "could" do stuff thats more far fetched than the plots in Neuromancer and Snow Crash, as recently discussed on SN, but the general public have been trained to expect stuff that makes the three stooges look smart witty and hip.
The Clinton crime family has an interesting solution to getting framed which is to be so deeply involved in crime that they have an alibi. Bill's like "naw dog I never raped that woman because I was too busy raping that other woman, just ask her, and hillary never did nuthing wrong with that mail server because she was busy covering for me raping the restaurant server" or whatever. Hillary never killed that drug dealer in your imaginary story because she was too busy plotting to kill Seth Rich the guy who leaked information. Everybody knows she's too busy killing that guy everyone knows she had killed, she never done that other thing, no time. Too many bodies to bury. Americans like organized crime kingpins like billy the kid and Dillinger and the Kennedy family and such which explains the appeal of the Clinton crime family so some overly sci fi action adventure flick hollywood plotline might backfire. Like imagine if Oceans 11 were real and Hillary was the mastermind, damn, thats impressive, she'd actually gain votes for that. So every time Bill Clinton rapes yet another girl and Hillary covers it up its kinda a "damn its good to be a gangsta" boost in her numbers.
There is a classic meme (can election memes be classics already?) from the debates where Trump was tearing the Clintons a new hole on TV for being rape enablers and theres a photo snap of Bill and his daughter looking absolutely petrified, and the Bill caption is "I don't remember raping that ugly one" and the Chelsea caption is "Dad... that's Mom". I laughed so hard I was nearly incontinent. Anyway turning a "plot" into laughter as per this paragraph may or may not affect the polls. I don't think it gained Trump any points or Hillary for that matter. So thats yet another way that rather far fetched plot may not be effective may just turn into comedy.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @08:21PM
The Snowden documents showed the government actually does the things you're describing. I mention that because some people, even Soylentils, might still be tempted to dismiss those facts as fiction or paranoia.
1984 is now.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @12:58AM
I'm not so queasy there. In theory if our justice system didn't suck and didn't find people guilty on some pretty flimsy circumstantial stuff or planted stuff then there wouldn't be much of a problem.
You don't consider violating people's privacy a problem in and of itself? Because I do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:10PM
Incorrect. Law enforcement agencies need a warrant to compel AT&T to provide them with data for investigations, but no warrant is required if the information is volunteered.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:07PM
What? A self-confident loudmouth idiot doesn't actually have even the most basic understanding of a topic, but he decides to make definitive proclamations about it, and other idiots of the same feather take him at his word?
That's never happened on soylent before!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:13PM
And yet it's how you got modded up to 0 points. Go figure.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:23PM
Why yes, you certanly are a self-confident loudmouth idiot doesn't actually have even the most basic understanding of the topic.
Maybe you should learn something [propublica.org] before spouting off about others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:33PM
You seem to be accusing me of the same ignorance that bradling is guilty of..
And yet your proof is an article that literally says bradling is wrong.
Authorities can often obtain your emails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a court order that doesn't require showing probable cause of a crime.
And it doesn't even mention voluntary cooperation which, as has already been mentioned, negates the need for even a court order (and to be explicit, court orders are administrative, basically rubber-stamped by court clerks, the judge never even sees them).
So, no, I'm not an ignorant fool like bradling. I do know my shit. But now I wonder about you.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday October 27 2016, @08:01AM
That is what the courts currently seem to believe. Unfortunately, in an age where corporations have lots of data about you and are readily willing to share it with the government, that way of thinking makes it pretty much impossible to keep the government from obtaining quite a bit of information about you. Requiring a warrant to access data about someone--even if the corporation is willing to give it away--is not only reasonable, but necessary if we wish to live in a free society [gnu.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:38PM
Accountability? From law enforcement??? In a country where being a cop almost guarantees you can literally get away with murder? Think of the "black lives matter" movement and why it came about.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:18PM
Though I agree that it should be a criminal offense ...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @08:16PM
Who puts the police, prosecutors, and attorney generals in jail?
Washington DC delenda est.