From the Associated Press:
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 potential 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.
[...] "It's sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget," said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
[...] The documents and emails were obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act requests. The group shared the files with The AP, which independently found that Fog sold its software in about 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies, according to GovSpend, a company that keeps tabs on government spending. The records and AP's reporting provide the first public account of the extensive use of Fog Reveal by local police, according to analysts and legal experts who scrutinize such technologies.
The EFF's Web page has an inside look at Fog Data Science and also a guided tour on how authorities easily browse your location data.
Also at Chron and Apple Insider.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @11:13AM (8 children)
Any introduced piece of evidence should be accompanied by how it was acquired including the documentation of due process.
This data source does not adhere to due process, and thus has/should have poisoned the entire case. Any defendant subjected to this should go free.
If the cops can't follow the (very) simple rules that safeguard our freedoms, maybe:
a) they shouldn't be cops, fire the lot of them, make sure they can never be in a similar position again
b) they do not get convictions for their targets, instead they should get a talking to
Those "pesky bureaucratic rules that hamper our ability to toss folks in jail" are there for a reason, you know...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @12:42PM (4 children)
Pretty sure if they did that then a large percentage of police, and public servants, would be out of a job
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @08:24PM (2 children)
And it will be a job that nobody wants, so expect difficulty in filling it. The long history of corruption has caused a loss of respect, puts us in kind of a pickle
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @09:49PM
Is the solution then to allow for the abuses and/or to do an intake of those who do this job poorly?
I acknowledge that this is a very hard, very difficult job. I am perfectly fine paying good money for someone to do this job properly and in accordance with respect for the laws and freedoms on the books. But in return, the job must be done properly because the consequences of abuse are even worse then the job not being done. That last part is super important. At no point in time should we allow this job to be done poorly, and those who can merely do it poorly should be expelled.
True, it would/will be a hard-to-fill job. That seems fine to me. I don't want it filled by incompetents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @09:52PM
The solution to the problem of being hard to fill is not to lower expectations or requirements nor is it to allow crookedness; the solution to that problem is to look harder for and at candidates including evaluating the compensation (however shape that takes) for the job so that you get higher quality candidates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @09:44PM
In the words of Francois Mitterand: "At alors?"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:11PM (2 children)
> Any introduced piece of evidence
Presumably they are not using it as evidence, rather they are using it to inform the gathering of evidence. E.g. "X got shot. fog reveal says Y was in the same place at the same time, well we had better keep an eye on Y and find some admissible evidence".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by legont on Monday September 05 2022, @12:24AM
Let me translate this to the sad reality.
They use this to find who was next to the dead body, then offer a deal - confess or else.
99% confess simply because the alternative is way worse.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Monday September 05 2022, @09:29PM
That is evidence. Every investigative technique that is used to gather evidence is also part of the record of that evidence.
Look at that ShotSpotter tech. [soylentnews.org] Sure, it's just a tool, but there is some controversy around them because they can redefine what counts as a "gunshot" whenever they want, and they have been doing exactly that.
The same kind of review of general data used to find the evidence should always be available for examination by the defense. If it isn't, that is by definition denial of due process.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday September 05 2022, @12:20AM
Do we have Ad ID spoofing tools available? Why the fuck not...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.