Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics
Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics
Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.
Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.
This should be illegal. There is absolutely no good reason this should be available to anybody. It should also be considered unconstitutional; if one of those dots is a person, whether you directly know who the person is or not, it should violate the right to privacy and the right of illegal search and seizure — no questions asked.
The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.
Archive: https://archive.ph/bSrZR
tl;dr: It's basically a MAID attack, along with the usual suspects of social media, navigation, and weather apps.
Your survival kit:
Empty GrapheneOS Pixel 6a bought with cash that isn't your daily driver (last Pixel with snapdragon chip that allows IMEI changes)
JMP.chat
Silent.link
Sensors off (developer options)
Bluetooth/WiFi/NFC off
Disable 2G/enable LTE only mode
Offline maps/airplane mode when navigating/at destination/anywhere near your residence or other frequently visited places that could be associated with you. When changing the IMEI/IMSI combo make sure you go to another location first so that you break the link
Infrared AND polarized license plate covers. Remove any and all bumper stickers and other accessories that can be fingerprinted
IR blocking lens sunglasses for facial recognition
And of course, it wouldn't be complete without the tor browser over a trustworthy VPN
So yeah fuck the police
Edit: I forgot to mention that if you drive a car that is mid-2010s or newer you may have to do some digging to disable telemetry, satellite, cellular and any other dystoptian fuckery they install these days.
Some additional info based on their published material (screenshot below). The software gets its data from "publicly available sources" which includes tracking information from many different online advertisers, public social media posts, etc. As we know, the advertising data can sometimes have your personal info attached - sometimes not. Babel Street claims to anonymize the data, but let's assume there is a $$ amount at which they won't.
So, theoretically, if you can successfully avoid ad trackers, and you don't post on social media platforms except where you want to be "seen", you can avoid this tracking (granted that seems quite impossible these days).
Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it's for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app's functionality. That's the data that is leaking to these data brokers.
In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.
Instead, the OS could add a button that says: "Yes, but randomize." After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.
You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.
Time for an alternative means of communication
🤯imagine how much they spent only to to terrorise women
This is not new and it has previously been used against anti-abortion activists, tracking locations and even being used to record religious confessions. People on both sides of the abortion issue can oppose this type of monitoring.
Article link not requiring you to sign up: https://archive.ph/Th1Sq
Holy shit.
privacy is important, kids
Hard to connect these dots for most "normal" folks without feeling like a conspiracy nut. Appreciate this journalism.
Looks like everyone should be getting these bags
Better to leave your phone at home (or better, in the pocket of someone who lives in your house and takes the same daily path as you do) if you are doing something that's currently illegal. Or in any situation where you are doing something legal that the cops are likely to break up.
The juror going home thing is terrifying but I don't think the government would be after you for fulfilling your civic duty.