Posted on 09/15/2021 5:39:29 AM PDT by Theoria
Agencies’ growing use of purchased data without warrants raises new legal questions
In January 2020, a 14-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Missouri and classified as a runaway by local police. Her phone had been wiped of data and left behind, leaving few clues about her whereabouts.
Several hundred miles away in Fayetteville, Ark., a local prosecutor named Kevin Metcalf heard about the teenager through his professional network and suspected she might have been abducted or lured into leaving. Using widely available commercial data, he pursued that hunch in a way that is now in the sights of privacy advocates and lawmakers from both parties.
Mr. Metcalf, who runs a nonprofit that assists law enforcement in data-driven investigations, used a commercial service that provides access to location data of millions of phones drawn from mobile apps to search for devices that had been in the vicinity of the girl’s home. He identified a mysterious cellphone that appeared there about the time the teenager was believed to have left.
Through the data, Mr. Metcalf says, he saw the device had traveled from Wichita, Kan., to the Missouri teenager’s home and then back to Wichita. He could see from the patterns of the cellphone movement that the device’s owner appeared to work at a Pizza Hut in the city and live at an apartment nearby—the kind of detailed movement history that law enforcement need a warrant to access from cell towers or tech giants.
Mr. Metcalf turned the information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which shared it with Kansas police. They quickly identified and arrested the device’s owner, Kyle Ellery, and an accomplice on charges related to indecency and sexual contact with a minor and recovered the girl in Kansas.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
As with any tool, it can be used for good or bad.
Soon enough it will be mandatory to carry a cell phone at all times. You’ll also be required to have it on so you can be monitored.
Just like in China
This is the method that True the Vote says they used to identify a couple of hundred ballot harvesters in Georgia, as well as additional harvesters in several other states.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3991779/posts
The Breitbart Article | TRUE THE VOTE UPDATE
truethevote.org ^ | 08.29.2021 | Catherine Engelbrecht
...
What We Did
In late 2020, True the Vote engaged a select team of contractors and set out to determine whether widespread ballot trafficking was occurring as part of an organized criminal enterprise.
We’d watched the mass mail out of paper ballots to highly inaccurate voter records, the harried installation of ballot dropboxes privately funded by billionaire tech magnates, and the hundreds of legislative changes, lawsuits, and consent decrees that fundamentally altered election processes. All of it came together in 2020, under the fog of COVID. It was planned. It was purposeful.
Having studied election process for decades, our team was well aware of the pitfalls associated with America’s uniquely insecure approach to elections. We knew that attempts to prove certain types of election malfeasance would fail, so we chose instead to focus on the grifts that would necessarily leave trackable, provable data trails.
To test our trafficking theory, we acquired over ten trillion location-based cell signals in major metropolitan areas across six states. Initially, we worked with whistleblowers and witnesses, but soon enough, the data alone told the tale. Using mobile and GPS data, we mapped the travel patterns of ballot traffickers to ballot dropboxes.
This tracking method is explained in great detail by The New York Times in a series they ran called The Privacy Project. They and others have published much about how mobile data was used to track President Trump and identify individuals at the January 6th event at the Capitol. Law enforcement uses this type of data routinely. So, lest anyone say we did anything untoward, let us be very clear, all of this data is regularly bought and sold, about all of us.
...
So, in summary, the police need a warrant for this sort of data.
But business does not.
And once again, business is being used to bypass Constitutional Protections.
Exactly right. I'm struggling with my strong beliefs in protecting children from child sex predators as-is this case vs. my strong beliefs in my Constitutonal rights to privacy.
I'm not sure how to "balance" both. Requiring a court order may likely turn out to be another rubber-stamp process like the FISA court and the resulting abuses of that, as have been well documented by now.
That needs to be stopped, period. Full Stop.
This sort of communist propaganda is terrible and misleads people.
Working a known crime and asking for evidence that appears to be appropriate to solving the crime is perfectly constitutional, as shown in the article.
However, what people object to is total surveillance that leads to control of the people. The 4th Amendment is about preventing government surveillance and control.
The article attempts to conflate the two. That is propaganda.
Engelbrecht and True The Vote dumped this flaming bag of dogpoo on Christopher Wray's doorstep on August 29th.
Wray and Department of Jesters boss Merrick Garland are currently filling their adult diapers over what to do with this investigation.
Engelbrecht says if they don't act, she's gonna dump it all into the public sphere.
Where's my popcorn?
#4 I believe that is why batteries are glued into devices now. It was simple to remove and replace a battery from a cell phone but most are glued shut. The phone is ‘on’ all the time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.