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As someone interested in true crime, this is fascinating:
FBI arrests man in Jan. 6 DC pipe bomber investigation, sources say
Jan 6th pipe bomber arrested
This concludes a five year investigation.
My biggest question, and the question on others' mind is, how was he caught when there is apparently so little evidence? A grainy video, a sneaker brand, and that was it pretty much it. The FBI has even outdone the 4chan geolocators, which describes a community of online sleuths who “dox” targets by analyzing geographic details such as weather patterns, cloud formations, and other environmental cues in photos, who were unable to identify him (of course, the FBI has much more resources, evidence and extralegal powers).
The affidavit is available here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327.1.1.pdf
One thing to note is previously the FBI had stated that cellphone data was not available due to corruption (https://vinnews.com/2023/06/19/in-stunning-testimony-former-fbi-official-says-j6-pipe-bomber-could-not-be-located-due-to-corrupted-phone-data/). However, now in the affidavit cellphone data is able to place Cole at the scene of the crime. That seems to indicate that someone is either lied to congress or someone screwed up their job. Because its possible the FBI queried one cellular network for data and the network claimed the data was corrupted and then the FBI made no further queries to other providers and then went to congress and claimed the data was corrupted. This is probably not technically lying (its ok to be deliberately mislead your audience as long as you don't make a clear lie!) but this would be gross incompetence. The data was clearly available because now we know the government was able to access it and these were provider records (presumably, from the carrier) not information from Cole's own cellphone. I guess its possible in the affidavit the government is being misleading when they say 'provider' and they mean some kind of other third party location data ('google') but I feel like that would be misleading the court because they refer to Provider's 'cell site records'.
The congressional testimony also claimed the provider in question was aggressively deleting cell site records (presumably to protect the privacy of their customers and to save money). But now we find out that after 4 years the cell site records are available. I presume the FBI was able to collect cell site records from other providers at the time but for some reason was able to claim to congress because they were missing information from one provider that it was not possible to use the records to identify suspects. Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs. The other possible explanation is the government has another crazy data collection program where they are thieving huge amounts of metadata from the cellular networks and storing this somewhere and this is classic government lying to the court to hide their data collection methods.
I presume any trial is going to be a complete shit show where the defence is going to ask how these cellphone records mysteriously appeared after law enforcement officials testified to congress that they were not available. I also now have a bit more empathy for congressional witnesses who claim they are unable to talk about ongoing investigations.
Also, I assume this is not the full evidence of the State's case against Cole. But it has Steve Baker gait analysis vibes. This guy bought some stuff related to bomb making and then his cellphone was in the area of where the pipe bombs were planted. Hopefully, there is some more solid evidence linking him to the crime. Though, the cellphone data would seem to be much stronger than the gait analysis since presumably there would not be that many people in that area at the time, whereas presumably there are many people would match the gait.
I'm confused. How the hell are they storying cell site records? This should be dirt cheap. Unique identifier for cell tower plus unique identifier for cell phone, plus minute by minute records.
Or at least that is my intuition. I guess I'll do the math.
(128bits + 128bits) * 1440 (minutes per day) = 46.08 kilobytes for a daily record of cell phone locations for an individual. (Assuming no attempts to simplify the data, like only storing the location changes).
46.08 kilobytes * 365(days) * 5(years) * 400 million(customers) = 33.6096 petabytes (about 8 days of YouTube uploads)
Petabytes of storage cost in the range of a million dollars a year. I'll say 2 million to account for deflation in the costs of storage over time.
So at most about $66 million for a 5 year nationwide database of all cell phone location records. This is chump change for any organization with the ability to collect such records. And I was estimating on the high end wherever possible. There are absolutely going to be a bunch of optimizations that would cut this cost by orders of magnitude.
And companies don't delete data to save money. That's insane. They all hoard data like there might be some nugget of gold in there if only they can algorithm it hard enough. Data deletion happens mostly by accident or neglect. Some piece of data is too old or has been mined so many times and produced nothing. It gets put on a server somewhere, but the server goes down and there wasn't a good enough back up, and the IT guys that proposed triple backup data protocol were turned down this one time because no one could figure out the business value of this data. The process of data degradation takes a decade or more.
The other process of data deletion is a legal request from the EU.
You could get a LTO-9 robotic tape library capable of storing a lot more data than that for a few million.
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