by Chris Black
They haven’t used them for many purposes that we’ve seen yet, but presumably they are planning to.
January 6 was a big deal on this front, as we learned that it was possible and apparently legal for the government to demand location data and identify people as being in a place based on that location data.
Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
People should learn about parallel construction, probably. Intelligence agencies can use the cellphone data to identify you and something you did, and then find a different explanation for how they identified you.
This has happened a lot with doxings of anon right-wingers. The explanations given for the doxing were obviously statistically impossible, or at least so improbable that they were not believable.
So in reality, they were identified using ostensibly illegal spying methods, and then a different explanation was given.
CNN has done this multiple times, where it was just obvious that they were collaborating with US intelligence to dox a right-wing activist or sh*tposter.