DC residents get visits from FBI as agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol
A D.C. woman said an agent visited her neighbor and called her, telling them investigators were tracking people whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol during the riots.
Stevens said an FBI agent told her they were reaching out to every single person whose cell phone put them near the Capitol during the riots.
She was out for a walk with a friend and his two young daughters on the afternoon of Jan. 6, but they were diverted by bomb scares until they ended up right next to the insurrection. Adults and kids were cordoned off and unable to get back to their apartments for four hours.
“You don’t want to be anywhere where they’re going to go!” she said on a video she shot while police officers in riot gear quick-stepped toward the Capitol.
Stevens was out of town, so the agent called her on the phone number that the FBI had tracked.
“Extremely creepy, because he explained that they have everyone’s phone number from pinging off the cell phone towers, and they know basically exactly where you were, within the vicinity of the Capitol,” Stevens said. “And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on my cell phone ping.”
Maybe it’s time to invest in long-range walkie-talkies for regular communication within your family.
Also, get yourself an RF signal blocking bag.
When shit goes down, don’t whip out your cellphone and start taking videos, go dark and GTFO.
You don’t want to get an anal-probe from the FBI because you just happened to be near something you weren’t involved in.
IIRC, the cops caught a murderer in NYC some years ago because his cell phone placed him at the scene of the body dump. Makes me uncomfortable to carry a cell phone everywhere.
Good advice when some funky shit is going down in the city, though.
As with any tech, there are benefits, and drawbacks.
Good advice though. Turn the damned thing off if something is going down. Unless you are antifa/blm, than it is OK to be at the scene.
Hmmm… now, where did I put that bundle of FRS radios? I bought a few of them long æons ago, back before cellphones became ubiquitous, for coordinating outsized or otherwise spread-out hiking groups.
Might in fact be a good choice for family communication around the homestead. Better’n cellphones from a usability perspective, even.
FRS ain’t a secure way to communicate, but carrying one around doesn’t tell Big Google where you are. And if your communications are on the order of, “Hey, I need help moving this log out here!”, secure comms might not even be a consideration.
Faraday bags are offered on eBay too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/FARADAY-CAGE-EMP-ESD-BAGS-3-PC-PHONE-SIZE-5-X-7-PREPPER-KIT-BY-EMP-DEFENDER/131891340056?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649
Those are crazy prices. Just use a tin can (cookie can) or wrap the thing in aluminum foil.
My wife, in the 1960s, got the FBI treatment. It took her a long time to figure out why, but since she has always kept all her calendar books she did. The answer is that she scheduled, and then canceled, a massage in Boston. The masseuse operated out of a room in a building owned by people connected to the Weather Underground. That’s what the FBI was investigating, so they aggressively questioned her about her connections to domestic terrorism. The answer of course was “none whatsoever”. Eventually they did accept that answer, but it took a while and it was a major headache.
Modern technology makes it easier for the FBI to do unreasonable things, but they did long before that time.
A clean Mylar chip bag or a leftover bag from a electronic device will also work.
Of course, you can turn off your phone, too.
If “off” is really off. Most devices these days, when you hit the power button, does a soft power-down. Unless the battery is physically disconnected there are still energized circuits there.
Valid point. My iPhone really seems off. It won’t even link to my WiFi until I unlock it.
(Oh, nice MIB III reference.)
https://gunfreezone.net/faraday-bags-for-cell-phones-and-other-electronics/
And if you have doubts, double bag.
And check related links at the bottom
https://gunfreezone.net/going-to-upgrade-my-radio-set-up/
I have a faraday bag in my house, and one in each of our vehicles. I also have my “everyday” HAM radios, plus a few Baofeng UV-5R radios to loan to people that I need to communicate with. They are FAR superior to FMRS or CB.
A technician HAM license is easy to get. A basic handheld HAM radio gives you thousands of channels, and they are all less crowded than CB, FMRS, or GMRS. The radio mounted in my vehicle is capable of operating as a repeater. All of this means that my communications are robust, resilient, and largely safe from easy tracking.
Also, you are NOT going to get 50 miles range from those radios. That is BS, because radio is line of sight and radio waves won’t pass through the curvature of the earth.
In all fairness, how many of the people getting rounded up like this have location turned on? I know a lot of them got caught because they were streaming through the Capitol Hill open Wi-Fi network.
I keep location info turned off unless I’m actively using my GPS (or want to be easy to locate, like when I went to Canada a couple of years ago and kept my location info turned on the whole time so that if I disappeared, someone would be able to find my last known position). I also keep Bluetooth and NFC turned off unless actively using them, and I never connect to unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.
I actually know a lot of people who don’t do any of these things.
Keep in mind that the location function affects a few things: whether the GPS receiver is active, whether apps have access to the data, and so forth. But it relates only to the phone’s internal functions.
The cell towers the phone is talking to, know the phone is somewhere within range. Turning off location services doesn’t stop this. Get the tower logs, and you can get reasonably accurate location information. (The original iPhone mapping system used this approach; at the time, GPS chips were too big and power hungry, so they used tower triangulation. In a densely towered area it can work remarkably well.)
It doesn’t matter if you have location, or Bluetooth and WiFi turned off. You can still be located. True, it’s a bit less precise if you take those precautions, but in an urban area with a high cell site density your location can be determined with a precision close enough “for government work”.
Just so you know, those quoted ranges are, for the most part, marketing bullshit. No set of handhelds is going to have more than 2 to 5 miles range under anything but optimum conditions. That’s why hams put up repeaters, to extend that range.
Don’t Forget. Your nice new shiny vehicle with the integrated electronics package, wifi, gps and electronic monitoring is a big old surveillance target too.
It does no good to turn off your cell phones if you travel in a vehicle with cellular and wifi installed at the factory.
You can unplug the modules, specially the Onstar. Plenty videos in YouTube. That will give you some protection against easdropping.
And then the old basic rule applies: Don’t rob a bank and use your car as getaway vehicle.
“Don’t rob a bank and use your car as getaway vehicle.”
NOW you tell me. 8>)
How about a rental car?
Probably worse than using your own.
Duly noted. 😉
Something else to consider…
We carry cell phones because it’s convenient to have a telephone, Web browser, mapping GPS, camera, flashlight, calculator, etc., all in one package.
But you can still separate the functions. You can get a “dumb” flip phone, a handheld GPS, and a compact camera, for instance. It’s not as convenient, but it’s separable functionality.
A “dumb” flip phone is still going to beacon your position every time it pings the local cell towers, GPS or not.
The safest thing is to simply not carry one. I don’t.
Shame there wasn’t 100 guys with backpacks full of burner phones milling around in the crowd. Would that be considered weaponized autistry?
Media is already spinning proud boys seen using two way radios as preparation for conflict that day so its not gonna save you from a trying if you are seen with a radio in these circu mm stances.
you’re harder to find after the fact but doesn’t do anything for you “innocence” wise.
Yep. Check this out.
https://radiofreeq.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/militia-radio-frequencies/