REAL LIFE NEWS: SURVEILLANCE OF THE WEEK
by Hazed
This story shows a triumph for the police, and for technology, but perhaps it’s not so good for civil liberties.
Two bank robbers had been targeting banks in rural areas of the American southwest for months, gaining between $3,000 and $6,000 each time. They were always masked so surveillance footage was no use at all in identifying them.
However, a witness noticed that a man had been hanging around one of the banks in the time running up to the heist, talking on his mobile phone. That gave the FBI an idea about how they might track down their thieves.
They requisitioned records of everybody who had made phone calls near cell phone towers close to the banks. The idea was to compare the numbers from the different areas, to see if any common numbers popped.
The good news for the Feds was that to get a cell tower dump didn’t require them to get a warrant. They got the records from the most rural of the banks that had been targetted, figuring that the data sets would be sparser, so easier to analyse.
Then they set about poring over the hundreds of thousands of numbers.
And it worked! They found two numbers that matched their search parameters, and so they were able to reconstruct the movements of the criminals by following them from one cell tower to another. This was possible because if your phone is switched on, every cell tower you are in reach of will log your presence. It’s this that allows your phone to stay connected to the network – but it’s also what allows your phone to be used to track you.
Creepy!
Source: http://io9.com/how-police-caught-two-bank-robbers-using-verizon-cell-p-1232742089
