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salusinarduis | 4 years ago
- The location the device was turned on, used, turned off.
- The devices contacted by the burner phone
The kind of graph databases the government uses can round down the number of people that could be using any burner phone to a reasonable guess after just the first power on and contact (call/text). This is possible with only metadata. If you have the persons voice and message content it's even easier. As the phone stays on and contacts multiple numbers the graph database increasingly narrows down the possible user. I would guess within 3 calls/texts (not considering location data, or god-forbid other smartphone data) you would have 99%+ certainty who the user was if those interactions follow any previously known pattern.
You can't hide.
zie|4 years ago
Nonsense ;) You just can't practically and cheaply hide. The various world governments regularly hide things from the other world governments. Crime organizations manage to stay operating, etc. I forget the exact statistic, but the FBI's most wanted list has a 90+% effective capture rate, but that leaves some that manage to hide sufficiently well as individuals. How much of that is luck vs skill is unknown by me at least.
To be fair, I basically agree with you, it probably takes 1 mistake to leave a useful to trackers digital footprint that can get back to you, so it takes a lot of skill/luck to leave no digital traces these days, but it is arguably possible, even for individuals, it's just not remotely easy.
To think it's as easy as using a VPN is ridiculous. It's generally not the technology, it's the relationships and habits that get you tracked. I.e. It doesn't take a genius to see the communication logs and figure out the close relationships. We all regularly communicate with our loved ones and do the same sorts of things day after day.