Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

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.

You are right. And you're fighting against the credit reporting agencies and google, facebook, apple, and all car manufacturers for privacy rights.
This is the result of jurists and legislators who don't understand a single goddamned thing about computers in 2024. For fuck's sake it's been thirty goddamned years since this was obviously going to happen. Take a class, you bastards! Those of you who aren't Heritage Foundation fascists.
- It's not getting better either: https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
  There seems to have been a short window of maybe two decades in the 80s and 90s when computers and the Internet were becoming household staples where almost everyone who grew up in that time period knows what's up, while everyone who didn't is way more ignorant. The older folks are lost because they didn't grow up with computers. The younger kids are lost because they were born into a world of advanced UIs, "plug and play", and software that heavily obfuscates the nitty gritty details of how it works.
  Being forced to run command line installers, edit config.sys files, set DIP switches correctly for your front side bus speed and messing with IRQ settings for your sound card and such just to play a computer game will definitely teach you a thing or two. My family's PC came with not only an instruction manual, but an entire language reference for the built in GW-Basic interpreter. Nowadays, you get a laptop with a small pamphlet showing you how to plug it in and turn it on.
- I'm convinced that a good number of legislators understand the implications of this stuff on a cursory level, but are convinced (read: bribed) to not care on the "condition" that it doesn't apply to them or their families. They are beholden to their constituents, and their constituents aren't you and me, as we can't afford them.
Search and seizure, the Fourth Amendment, only applies to State actors. The only exception is when a private entity is acting as an agent of the government, such as in the case of private prisons.
Congress needs to pass consumer protection laws aimed at privacy in the digital age. They haven't updated this sort of thing I believe since 1996. It used to be legal for adult video stores to disclose the tapes people rented, but Congress passed a privacy law forbidding it when some journalists disclosed some of their rentals. The scandal had some cool name. I forgot what.
- The government cannot access the information without a warrant. It does not matter if SPYco lays it all out on a public website. If they needed a warrant to track you before, they need a warrant to check for you on the public website.
  Saying the government is allowed to obliterate the 4th amendment because a private company did the hard part is just asking for government aligned corporations to gather it all up and hand it over whenever the government gives them a dollar.
  Edit to add- This is the way it should work. Instead the government really is just buying data they'd need a warrant for previously.
The solution is to subscribe to these services. Then create a website that offers real-time tracking information, freely to the public, of the most wealthy and powerful people in the country. Every Congressperson should have their location shown freely available to all in real time. You could call it "wheresmyrep.org" or similar. Literally all of them tracked like animals in real time, freely shown for any and all to see. Let them live in the fish bowl they've created for us all.
- We’re kind of seeing that with those private jet trackers. But that’s not changing anything except getting those accounts banned from social media.
- Although we already know what would likely happen if someone did that. It would just be made illegal to track the locations of congresspeople (and only congresspeople), like it was made illegal to do so during the BLM protests.
- When supreme court justice kavanaugh was followed by protesters he had a hissy fit and said they couldnt do that. But it's totally fine to spy on everyone with a phone and expose their medical data.
  These hypocritical fuckheads deserve exactly what you are proposing and I'd fucking love to see it happen.
  We could even say it's to protect the children... make sure certain politicians who have expressed interest in legalizing child marriage aren't left alone with any.
Time for faraday cage phone covers/bags to become popular in these states.
Get this in front of the Supreme Court ASAP!
...oh...

It drives me nuts how our economic system is making not having a cell phone increasingly difficult. Many necessary things won't even work on a tablet. The smartphone is the most amazing futuristic device I dreamed about that has evolved into a distopian nightmare.

- instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.
  imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can't even tell what's real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.
  There's an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I "clicked" every ad they'd know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them...
- that’s by design.
  See also: automobiles. Automobiles and smartphones certainly have strong cases for how utilitarian they are. They are both genuinely very useful.
  But the expectation that everyone has one, along with them becoming practically a requirement for most people, has turned them into a dependency and a means of control. Some people can manage to forgo them, but you almost have to build your life around doing so.
- ML breaks this defense
It is only dystopian because we have not taken back the power to control our devices. We of course need some serious privacy laws to allow this to happen. Right now is the defining moment for the 21st century. Will we take control of our technology or be enslaved by it?
- I don't see smartphones being better unless they are completely different. Since its basically iphone and an iphone mimic and its just the way the whole ecosystems are built. Like you can install a free smartphone os but you will not be able to do things with it at the same level as someone without one as far as corps and stuff.
- Most of the population is choosing be enslaved by it. Buckle up.
The smartphone has effectively turned into a leash.

That does not sound like a viable long term solution to me.
- I'd be surprised if it lasted longer than any other socially progressive trend. A few weeks, tops, with largest proportions falling off in the first week.
  This is the reality of social momentum these days. Resistance is no threat because it has extremely brief lifespan before moving onto the next thing to be a part of.
- It also won't work since the service has enough precision to know whether you go in, and for how long. The real issue is that mobile phones are continuously broadcasting their location to any device that wants to listen, even if you turn wifi and bluetooth off.
Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.
It's true the cell ping is always going, but that's a different thing and definitely not what this tool is using to track people. Odds are good it's using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
- I don't think cellular location would be excluded from such tracking tbh. I would rather not take my phone with me at all when visiting such a potentially sensitive place, or at the very least use a Faraday cage.
- Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
  You really need to read the entire article. Turning off your WiFi and deleting Facebook isn't going to fix this.
- The problem is turning off wifi doesn't actually turn off the wifi, it just stops a subset of packets being broadcast and won't trasmit any data you want it to send. Among other things this is how 'find my device' works with the wifi and bluetooth "off". They're actually on.
- That won't work. But if you install the ROM without gapps or closed source software, you don't have to worry about these issues.

Start tracking politician phones. Oh look who paid a visit to the lobbyist house this week! That shit will get shut down real quick.

Lol next story over is this https://infosec.pub/post/19174603
If you don't want to be tracked illegally, don't bring your phone.
If you don't want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
edit: responded to the wrong comment
- Ah yes, democracy is a healthy and fully functioning institution.
  You just got confused who's sponsoring it, that's understandable.
- If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
  And donate to the EFF if you have the means because they can and have and will likely continue to lobby on average internet users behalf!
I sure wouldn't vote for someone who met with lobbyists.
Do you?
- All politicians meet with lobbyists. It's hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that's a different question.

"I got nothing to hide. I'm a boring person" dumbass mfers

I got nothing to hide.
I'm willing to bet that they have curtains on their bedroom window...
- I'm willing to bet they lock their doors
"Got nothing to hide" - Man wearing pants
"why don't you take your clothes off, then? You said you 'have nothing to hide', didn't you?"
I’ve heard this exact same thing from a former colleague that left my company to go work at a place selling “smart” security systems 🤦🏻‍♂️

This is nothing new. Did we already forget about the Snowden leaks?

The leaks that 2% of the population got very excited about for a while, but try not to think much about? The leaks judged by many on the reputation of an obscure man living in Russia? Those leaks?
I trust my government and not things only nerds understand. Also they sound weird and made up and very scary ( said most of the people)
- Maybe, I think people still "know" its going on, but they forget by the allure of our smart phones, so this is a good reminder.
- Average people were only "thinking" about it for as long as it remained in the news cycle. Once the new cycle moved on, so did they.

The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.

God I hate data brokers. Rats! All of them, vermin contributing nothing of value to society.

How is this not a warrantless search?

It is, but the USA hasn't cared since Snowden.
- UNDERTALE???!?!?!??11
That's the issue with the patriot act, they've been allowed to do warrantless searches for a long time now.
FISA court if they run into any friction
Because a carrier's data on you is not your person or belongings. The companies holding this data are selling access to it, so it's not being searched, it's being offered.
In other words, the same reason as why they don't need a search warrant if there's a breaking and the business across the street volunteers their security camera footage, even if you're on that footage.
- Courts have actually said that looking back at someone's location data counts as a search and requires a warrant. There's currently a lawsuit recently filed by the institute for justice aledging that the use of flock safety license plate readers is unconstitutional because it's a warrantless search.

As people get ready to vote here in the US, one issue I haven't even heard brought up is the lack of privacy regulations in the US. Do most people not care if the person they're voting for is fine with every corporation selling and sharing personal data?

Our electoral system results in a choice between two candidates, and both are fine with it.
- And more over the electorate is calcified along party lines where the outcomes for either side is perceived as being stark and dire. I suspect this means concerns like these might get stifled even if it is held by both parties.
- I was just traveling in the UK and I had this discussion more than once having to explain why our options are always terrible and ignoring issues voters want addressed.
Privacy regulations are to the left of the Overton window. The idea that corporations don't have some divinely ordained ownership of our personal data is unthinkably radical.
I definitely support federal Privacy legislation. Here's at least one take on the issue.
It's such a non-problem to my family members that if I even suggest it is a problem, I get ignored.
No one cares. It's either nothing anyone values or they figured they never had any privacy to begin with.
improving the healthcare system is not even a topic of discussion this time around let alone something most people would see as abstract
You don’t hear about it because the two major parties both oppose them and have nothing to argue about
Omg there's soo many critically important issues that never even get brought up.
Like shutting down the nuclear arsenal, defunding the military and police, establishing a carbon tax, making carbon extraction illegal, establishing UBI. All of these basic policies never even get discussed on mainstream media and it drives me crazy.

a device that constantly connects to antennas all over the place, is used to track your location.

who would have thought?

if you dont wanna get tracked - dont bring your phone.

If you don't want to be tracked illegally, don't bring your phone.
If you don't want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
- Also just write your Supreme Court and ask them how this isn’t a flagrant violation of the intent of the fourth amendment. Seriously the founding fathers would be asking what the fuck about this. They weren’t good people but they would’ve been privacy nuts.
Or, you know, let the gov work for you, not against you, & fully expect people to get jailed if they track you.
It's a matter of perspective what the minimum standard should be.
Especially when a personal device like a phone is basically necessary for a normal life and even public services.
- Is a phone a basic necess[ity] for a normal life?
Or we could get rights protecting us from this. Especially considering that that’s a reasonable interpretation of the fourth amendment and the ninth amendment.
- We already have rights protecting us from this. They aren't being enforced.
Meanwhile when I turn off Bluetooth on my iPhone it says "for the next y hours" and there's no option to turn it off permanently.
- Don't buy Apple?
- and there’s no option to turn it off permanently.
  Did you actually try looking this up. Turn it off in settings and it's off forever until you turn it back on.
- Yeah, IOS and stock android are not acceptable if you care about this stuff
  On graphene my bluetooth and wifi turn themselves OFF if I haven't been connected for a few minutes
- Maybe you need arch btw
Wouldn't just keeping your phone in a metal box prevent it from communicating with anything? Keep your phone in a metal box and only take it out when you need it. Only take it out in a location that isn't sensitive. Or hell, just make a little sleeve out of aluminum foil. Literally just wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should prevent it from connecting to anything. A tinfoil hat won't serve as an effective Faraday cage for your brain, but fully wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should do the job. Even better, as it's a phone, such a foil sleeve should be quite testable. Build it, put your phone in it, and try texting and calling it. If surrounded fully by a conductive material, the phone should be completely incapable of sending or receiving signals.
- A Faraday cage is supposed to be grounded, so aluminum foil isn't the same thing. Maybe you could turn the phone off, wrap it in foil, and then place it upon a conductive metal surface that is grounded, such as a 240v kitchen appliance
- You could also just turn it off.
There has to be some way that we could have created the architecture to do everything a phone does without letting a user be triangulated easily.
I know there is no incentive to do that, but it amazes me how far ahead the security of the web is compared to phone tech.
Like maybe if phones could authenticate without broadcasting a unique identifier. And maybe they could open a vpn style encrypted tunnel and perform their auth over that tunnel.
Idk, I know nothing about phones, but it has to be possible.
- there's the ole https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
  kitschy name, but when it was established it was not even planning anything like what it is doing now. meshnet is the section you're looking for.

Don't bring your phone.

Get a burner and set up call forwarding.

burner goes from your house, to abortion clinic, to your office, back to your house
Hmm, must be someone else, I don't recognize this number
-The Government
- You really can’t think of a solution to this?
Then how you gonna take a selfie in the bed?
Seriously tho, people need phones for everything, including their calendar and map and communication with their partner.
Not bringing a phone isn't an option
- I can assure you that people don’t need instant access to calendars and maps. Smart phones are a convenience, not a necessity.
  (Source - lived through the 80’s. Still alive to tell the tale)
- There are alternatives to all of that. If you're going to do potentially illegal acts, and you don't want to rot in jail for the next however many decades until a scotus exists to set you free, take basic operational security into account and don't bring the corporate tracking device that cops can freely tap into.
- Mapquest is still around, so that solves one problem. The rest can be alleviated by communicating in person with your partner and aligning on a plan to not get tracked (like partner driving you and leaving their phone at home).
  In the absence of that help, friends or family you trust. A cab? The clinic probably has a phone to hail a cab when you’re there.
  Disclaimer: I’m just providing work arounds, I’m not saying they’re ideal.
- Believe it or not, digital cameras exist as standalone devices.
  You can also buy an rf blocking bag for your phone.
- Not bringing a phone definitely is an option.
  But I suggested a burner with forwarding so that handles comms to partner.
  If you can’t function without your main device for special circumstances such as this, I guess you just can’t be helped.
- If you want maximum privacy, you gotta nix that partner and, really, the communication. Shit, I've already said too much.
- Calendar
  Non digital is sufficient. And if it must be digital for some reason, no you don't specifically need to use a serf phone for that.
  map
  I get around just fine without proprietary tracking BS. Navit + Openstreetmaps pre-downloaded binary data + detachable USB GPS transceiver.
  communication with partner
  Softphones and SIP telephony are fine for this.
  Sauce: I am a functioning adult who lives without a phone as a matter of principle.

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.

Thank you for this, I had to scroll down so far to find a subscription-wall free link. Makes me wonder if anyone actually checked the article...

this combined with the whole "your pager/phone is now a bomb" texture that the IDF decided to add into the mix should make for interesting times.

soon you will be the drone.

That required special assembly. It was not a hack blowing up commercial batteries. That's not a possible thing. They gave Hezbollah pagers and radios with explosives built in.

...Or just not taking a phone and taking public transport instead of a car.
how does one change your imei number using a pixel 6a, with a rooted phone with magisk.
Still can’t escape cell tower triangulation

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).

If that's true then a simple VPN and some social media opsec will work.

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.

Apple and Google want to sell that data, they're not going to help you obscure it.
I don’t think this would be technically useful to prevent exploitation of location data. The handset always has to identify to a tower using the SIM card, which is going to identify the phone and its user. Your cellular service provider can still sell this information to data brokers.
With that said, I would love the option to lie about my location to apps that have no business knowing it.
- You have the option to spoof/fake/mock it manually with an app. This one, it seems, even has some available add-ons for mocking UnifiedNlp data and more...)
  Mock my GPS (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location/
  Mock my GPS UnifiedNlp Backend (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.service.microg_nlp_backend/
  Mock Silently (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.silently/
  Possibly you'll have to enable dev options and set the location spoofing app in there. At least, I remember seeing the option in there, but that was years ago.
Tower dats i guess is harder to get as it requires a warrant?
- Unless you become a phone company or use a StingRay

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

ty 🙏🙏🙏

Holy shit.

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

I didn't read the article, but wouldn't the site see the phone as soon as it's taken out of the bag? Unless the plan is to leave the phone in the bag the whole time, at which point it seems easier to just leave it behind.
- Pretty much. Can't see the rest of the article, but most likely it's just tower data, which only gives a general location. But as soon as you pull your phone out and get messages you would be traceable. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a phone
Or just hit airplane mode / power off. Or just leave the phone at home, the procedure takes only 5-10 minutes.
People are way to attached to their phones. The world will not collapse in that hour, it is a survivable event, or so I hear from reputable sources.
- Can you really trust airplane mode to ensure there is nothing going out. I agree people should just leave them at home, but these bags are like putting tape over your laptop camera. Just an extra peace of mind when going to the Dr.

Who else are they selling this too?

Whoever has money I suppose. Makes me wonder if there are laws regulating this sort or tech.

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.

So why abortion clinics in the title if it can track people anywhere? Do they think abortion clinics are the most popular destination for the majority of people? Why not put pizza joint im the title? Or sex club? Bath house? Dairy farm?

Because right now’s political climate is about how abortion is being billed en masse as murder, and people are having to go to other states to get abortions (even for miscarriages), so the states that bill abortion as murder want to be able to prosecute the women. So there are a lot of fears that states will be tracking women through tools like this, and it turns out the fearful were correct.
- All they gonna do is chase their women away. They're welcome in sunny Canada
It's American focused and abortion is at the forefront of their christofascist-liberal culturwar.
- You really wanna piss people off, tell them their bosses are using it to see if they're actually going into the office or not
You could always read the article......
- Yeah, I could, but it's a perfectly valid line of conversation to critique a post's title.
  There's a reason we have the saying, "Always judge a book by its cover, and judge a response by it's grammar"