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TIL that tracing phone calls by keeping the phone line open is a totally outdated trope
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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Almost all copper wire phone lines are gone.
Almost all calls are routed via the internet these days, which makes them trivial to track. This was the "metadata" scandal during the Bush admin where they said they were only spying on people's metadata. But metadata is enough to see that someone made a single, hour-long call to a suicide prevention hotline, and that's enough to make some likely valid assumptions of what happened during that call.
The NSA has been sucking down the entire internet into their Utah datacenter since late 2013, over 10 years ago.
When the MAGAs went to the Capitol on Jan 6th 2021 I was actually shocked they weren't rounded up more quickly because cell phones have an IMEI identifier as well as a MAC address , both of which get logged on the cell towers they connect to. It should have been trivial to connect devices to device-owners and be able to track where the devices went after they left the Capitol.
Stingrays, fake cell towers that allow police to surveil all connections made to their Stingray, have been around since 2001.
Hell, hacker Kevin Mitnick was caught using simple cellular tower triangulation back in 1995.
I think they didn't round up the insurrectionists because the executive branch was supportive of the insurrection. Once Congress and others put pressure on the executive branch, they started slowly working on getting them. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a closed-doors negotiated deal. Trump goes free at the impeachment, but the insurrectionists have to be prosecuted and not pardoned.
If the executive branch wasn't supportive of the insurrection, the whole thing would have lasted less than a minute and been a pile of dead bodies. There's no way a ragtag group of populist dipshits would have been able to compromise the US Capitol otherwise.
The truly political move from the legislator would be to let them storm the capital. If you kill them all, then that makes you look bad. You let them do it, and it makes Trump an insurrectionist.
The issue was more that they needed to identify only the ones that illegally entered the premises, and separate those from people legitimately working there. They then had to cross reference those IMEI/MACs to camera footage of them illegally entering the building. Some of those dipshits were ID'd and picked up immediately, others used burners and covered their faces with masks (ironically) and had to be tracked similarly to how Luigi was caught; establishing a timeline of events with that same individual using other cameras in the area until you find one of them without a mask on.
WhatsApp also collects this "metadata", only the content is end to end encrypted
well of course. how else would they route the content. the only other way is route all messages to everyone and only the real recipient can decode it. that would be a data nightmare.