So I’ve just been thinking about privacy, and how everyone’s location can be tracked. Then I realized: What about people who have no permission to enter the country?
Like do they just decide to not have a phone, or do they still have phones and just roll the dice and hope they don’t get caught?
There’s a few things here.
The government doesn’t actually know who’s illegal or legal unless they specifically check a physical person. It’s not like they maintain a list of “illegal” people. Your name gets recorded when you enter the country legally, but it’s not recorded when you leave. If you fail to leave, they don’t really know until they find you and match you to the entry. If you entered illegally, there’s no record at all.
Second, You could easily use a fake ID or fake identity to get a cellphone and the carriers wouldn’t give a shit as long as the bill gets paid. It doesn’t even have to be under your name, maybe it’s under your friend’s account.
Third, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, but you don’t need a “cell” phone to have a phone. A lot of poor people just have a device that can connect to WIFI, and make calls through an app or just message.
Some carriers specifically cater to unbanked people.
When I worked at Radio Shack back in the day, Sprint had a card you could just hand to the cashier with cash. Didn’t even need to speak any English. The card had all your details on it.
Of course they charged a $5 fee per transaction because fuck poor people.
Second, You could easily use a fake ID or fake identity to get a cellphone
You don’t actually need any ID in the US to set up a phone account. You could be anyone.
Prepaid phones don’t need an ID.
but it’s not recorded when you leave
Uhhh what gives you this idea?
You don’t talk to US customs on your way out via land borders.
If you fly out, there would be a flight record, but most of the other methods don’t get recorded. If you go to Canada, the canadian immigration shares that data with the US, assuming you use the same passport (some people have more than one)
If you go to Mexico though, there’s no record and the Mexican government doesn’t share that info with the US. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47541 Page 14
Ah interesting, I knew it was recorded in Canada and shared, hadn’t realized it wasn’t in Mexico. Other than that, very familiar with the process overall, but my experience has been with flights mostly.
It depends. Physical borders may only photograph traffic for security purposes, no dedicated exit gate. Usually its the entry country that records your crossing, which they may or may not share with the other country.
I’m pretty sure TSA does record people exiting internationally though because people have been caught leaving after an arrest warrant has been issued, even if they made it past TSA onto the flight and into the air. TSA will know immediately if you checked in or boarded your flight.
Accessing that location data isn’t trivial. The data is typically held by various private companies who put up at least token legal resistance to cover themselves from lawsuits.
Intelligence agencies have their own avenue for getting the data, and on paper they’re not allowed to share it with police agencies.
Police agencies typically need to specify the individual in question, or the specific location and time to get a warrant. This is because they’re not supposed to be able to blanket surveil an otherwise private piece of information without having a good reason.
The classic example is not being able to listen to every call on a payphone they know drug dealers use because they’ll listen to people who have not done anything illegal.
Intelligence agencies are an entirely different thing with weird special rules and minimal and strange oversight.This is all relevant because the government doesn’t actually know who’s allowed to be here or not.
Most people in the country without proper documentation entered legally and then just stayed outside the terms of their entry. The terms can be difficult to verify remotely, which is why you’re not actually here illegally until you go in front of a judge, they deport you, and then you return again.Finally, there are significant chunks of the country where location tracking via cell tower is imprecise enough to get the country wrong, and a lot of people live there. So any dragnet surveillance setup is going to have to exclude some pretty large population centers to avoid constantly investigating people in Windsor sometimes quickly teleporting into Detroit.
I disagree. Location data is trivial to obtain. I worked for a data broker and the company just buys location data from telecom companies. They werent allowed to disclose location and times, but they could use the data to verify a person’s work address and home address easily.
But you probably received the data anonymized, i.e. you had a code that meant a person, and you could track information on that person, but you couldn’t immediately know who that person was.
Otherwise that company, and whoever sold it its data, are in for a BIG lawsuit from any EU citizen you track. And you might say “who cares, my company didn’t act in the EU”, but whoever sold you the data certainly does, and they would get sued and fined very heavily, so it’s unlikely they would not anonymize the data before selling it.
We were in the u.s. and the data had no names but did have IMEI numbers which is easily matched to a person. So ya, kinda anonymous, but not really.
They werent allowed to disclose location and times
That makes it wholly unsuitable for a dragnet surveillance system.
Further, a business can aquire data that a police agency can’t gather without a warrant.
Unless you’re a person of great interest that level of effort just isn’t happening at the scale needed.
They got better things to do than go after all the people just trying to vibe with the locals.
They might know where a phone is, but not if it belongs to a ‘legal’ person or not.
I get what you are saying, but there is a pretty big difference between “undocumented immigrant” and “the authorities are actively looking for you.” Also, it’s pretty easy to enter alias information into a phone so you can use it without announcing that it belongs to you.
There is a big difference as of now. Who knows what’s coming.
You can buy a prepay phone at Walmart or similar, then just buy cards to add airtime. You don’t have to register your name anywhere. I had one like that for years.
When I was young that was how I had cell phone service. It was simply the cheapest option for a kid with no friends to have a cell phone to call their parents on at the time. $20 every 2-3 months or so plus a $40 flip phone and you’re golden
Ah yes, the Saul Goodman phones. What are yo sellin’? 🙃
Law enforcement got their hands on the location records of the people who stormed the white house by… buying it from google.
Not every government has as much spying going on as some might think.
by… buying it from google.
LMAO!!
I know right, I wish I was kidding
here’s the first result when you google it. There was more detailed coverage on the news at the time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/06/jan-6-google-location-warrants/
Must’ve cost them an arm and a leg
Probably
I assume they roll the dice because it’s rather hard to get by without a phone.
Also, it’s not like the government is actively tracking everyone’s location. I’m sure if they wanted to track me they could, but it’s not like my position is being actively logged right now.
It’s definitely being logged by your Telco and phone manufacturer. Police can send them warrants to ask which phones were in X area around Y time frame and go from there.
Of course. But they need to ask. The FBI or local police doesn’t get a daily report of our whereabouts every day.
Ur telco is legaly required to install any tracking the government wants and they legaly cant tell u.
What the government is capable of doing, and what the government will actually do, are two vastly different things. Movies depict the government as this insanely competent, unstoppable machine, with endless resources and desire. The reality is that detectives won’t even interview eye witnesses, since they’d have to leave their desk to do so. So, if a detective won’t even interview people with critical information about a case, how determined do you think they are about tracking down someone who may or may not exist, who they have no knowledge of, who probably hasn’t committed any crimes except for being here?
How would they know who’s phone to track if the individual is undocumented?
Account linking from ad ids, and social media profiles.
But again - how would they know that someone was undocumented? If someone started new social media accounts when they arrived, and bought a new phone/started new service, then what do they have that’s going to reasonably demonstrate that they’re undocumented? Particularly if they buy a pay-as-you-go phone, which doesn’t require any kind of ID to buy and activate?
The bigger problem for law enforcement is the price of that data, big tech want big money for that volume and specificity of data.
Unless they post on those social media that their visa is expiring, how are social media profiles to know that info?
You’re talking about CIA levels of surveillance for what amounts to basically nothing. Despite the Republican politicians constantly ranting about illegal immigration, they’re the ones benefiting from undocumented labor. They’re not going to put much work into changing something they benefit from.
Yes there is plenty of track-able info on this person’s phone.
Law enforcement still needs to know exactly who they’re looking for, in order to know exactly which phone to track.
If the individual in question is undocumented, by definition they can’t know exactly who they’re looking for. They can’t tie them to a specific individual phone.
The word “theoretically” is doing a LOT of work here.
They don’t use tracking capabilities to help people, they use it for law enforcement. And if you want to track someone illegally entering the country cellphone triangulation is the least effective method. The person could: - Not have a phone - turn the phone off - use a burner phone and number. And by the time you’ve found them they’re already across. If their traveling by boat they could drop the phone in the water aswell. And cell tower triangulation is inaccurate anyway, a 5G triangulation can pin someone down to the cm. (Half a hotdog for the Americans.) And you need to have towers close enough to the entry point aswell. If the tower is too far away it will be inaccurate.
You’re high, half a hotdog is 7.5 cm
I think they’re conceptualizing hot dog radius.
What’s are the most common radii of lukewarm dogs?
I’d reckon about half a cm.
In functional democracies, there is law protecting individual against the government. Meaning that you’ll require a court-order to request the localization of a phone (to the phone provider or applications collecting GPS data). This is (in democratic countries) allowed in criminal matters but not for administrative status matters like immigration.
Partly true, there are other ways to legally track a phone. For instance, when you call 911 and are unable to tell where you are, they can track your phone. There are other loopholes to track without a court order. Especially in the US the so called “citizen rights” are very limited compared to other democracies. Not that the US is a functioning democracy in the first place (slavery, gerrymandering, etc.). The US government also bends the rules a lot (like torturing people abroad instead), or straight out breaks them (remember Snowden?)
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s really hard to know which phone is from an undocumented immigrant, especially when there are millions of phones around. Even with AI it’s hard to mass spy on people to find out whether they are undocumented, as people rarely send an ondinary sms message saying “hey I’m an undocumented immigrant”. Most people use encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, making it even harder. And if someone uses their phone like anyone else does, they are invisible in the mass.
I work in 911 dispatch
The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.
For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.
I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.
I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.
We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.
Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.
And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.
Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.
And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.
Thank you for the explanation. Really interesting to know more about it.
Although I live in a different country so over here it might be different.
It’s interesting to know the capabilities of the 911 dispatch, however I believe this is different with intelligence agencies. When I see what Snowden leaked, the location data isn’t just from cell towers but also from the phone GPS itself, as well as wifi data. Those agencies often operate in a large grey area, or just outside the law. Loads of reasons to track someone without a court order. Look at the terrorist act which came after 9/11. Loads of bypasses when it comes to “terrorists”. Holding indefinitely without charge, denying legal advice or a phone call for example. Claim someone is a terrorist and you don’t need a judge anymore.
When Trump wants agencies (like ICE for example) to have an easier job to track undocumented immigrants, he can change the law (especially with a majority in the supreme court and government). Look at Hitler. When he came to power he managed to change the law for so many things to do the most horrific acts. A law is only a law until it is changed.
You can scream “you can’t do this, we have rights!” but those rights can be taken away in an instant (look at abortion for example, or slavery when incarcerated in certain states). You have rights until you don’t.
The big thing is whether people are behaving in a manner that brings them to the attention of the government.
It’s not like you have to give your SSN to a carrier to get a phone; the government needs a reason to be tracking you.
Now, they very much could put in a warrant for all phones crossing the border at unusual times/locations. But someone who snuck in with family and is working cash-only jobs to get by is unlikely to get tagged by the government unless they’re going somewhere or doing something the government is already watching.
It’s not like you have to give your SSN to a carrier to get a phone
Actually it is like that, if you are getting any kind of deal where you’re paying off the phone with your service plan and/or commit to a term contract. They use it to run a credit check on you. Most companies where you’re committing to a length of service do this. It happened to me when I was going to get some kind of cable or internet service one time, where you got x number of months free if you promised to keep the plan for two years. They asked for my SSN and I refused, so they wouldn’t complete the transaction. That’s how I found out about why they want your SSN.
Spending the resources and time to location track and arrest then deport people in such a way would be way too expensive and a waste of time probably
