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How Technology Caught the Austin Serial Bomber (foxnews.com)
Wednesday police in Austin, Texas finally located the "serial bomber" believed to be responsible for six package bombs which killed two people over the last three weeks. "The operation was aided by different uses of technology, including surveillance cameras and cell phone triangulation." An anonymous reader shares this article:
The suspect, who has been identified as 24-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, was killed near the motel he was traced to thanks to surveillance footage from a Federal Express drop-off store, The Austin American-Stateman reported. The authorities were able to gather information after police noticed the subject shipped an explosive device from a Sunset Valley FedEx store, a suburb approximately 25 minutes away from Austin. The evidence included the security footage from the store, as well as store receipts obtained showing suspicious transactions. The authorities were also able to look at the individual's Google search history, the Statesman noted, which gave them further insight into his dealings...
The authorities were also able to use cell phone triangulation technology, which provides a cell phone's location data via information collected from nearby cell towers... The phone's GPS capabilities can track the phone within 5 to 10 feet and can also provide "historical" or "prospective" location information. It can also "ping" the phone, forcing it to reveal its exact location... As cell phone companies store this type of data, law enforcement authorities must request it via the appropriate court processes.
"Authorities in Austin were able to use this technology to trace the suspect to a hotel in Williamson County."
The authorities were also able to use cell phone triangulation technology, which provides a cell phone's location data via information collected from nearby cell towers... The phone's GPS capabilities can track the phone within 5 to 10 feet and can also provide "historical" or "prospective" location information. It can also "ping" the phone, forcing it to reveal its exact location... As cell phone companies store this type of data, law enforcement authorities must request it via the appropriate court processes.
"Authorities in Austin were able to use this technology to trace the suspect to a hotel in Williamson County."
People caught him using technology, moron editors!
That is some truly next gen stuff. Tracing a mobile phone to a cell tower and using the video from a security camera. Next time they will move into 1990s technology.
Nice to see the main stream still won't call a white guy a terrorist.
I mean, we live in a surveillance state. This kind of thing is routine now.
Imagine that instead of criminal acts, you instead were trying to organize against a clearly corrupt government. These exact same weapons would be used against you.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
At least this time, the suspect wasn't killed while resisting arrest. We may never know his motives or if the victims were targeted or random and if the bombings stop, we may never really know for sure if he was guilty, but nobody will be able to claim that the cops killed an innocent man.
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Leave your cellphone turned ON and at home next time you are going to do illegal shit. Lazy law enforcement will rule you out as a suspect because no one believes anyone can leave home with out their tracking devices anymore.
I thought they were able to identify a "rare" battery that he used in the device that malfunctioned and then were able to find out where in Austin batteries of that type were shipped.
The guy mailed his package FedEx. The package blew up and FedEx was able to provide miles of paper trails of evidence for the police.
Based on this targets (prominent members of the black community) you're right. I can't imagine he wasn't. It's just odd that there's no manifesto? The police have a 25 minute video of him though that they won't release until the investigation's done. So far I don't know of any hard evidence on his choice of targets. Though to be fair I think if we were Muslim the media would call this terrorism without that evidence. You're correct to point out that this sort of caution only exists for whites
It does disturb me he was home schooled. School isn't just about learning, it's about socializing.
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I saw the security footage... He walked up to the fedex counter wearing gloves and a wig. What did he honestly think was going to happen?
The "technology" that caught the bomber has been around for >30 years. Stores have been recording video and cops have been using it since your grandparents by this point.
The Google search history on the guys computer was used after he was caught. By triangulation of his cell phone, I think the author kind of means, "the fact that most people now carry cell phones", which can be triangulated.
Nothing about this is implausible to have happened 30 years ago with some moron using the pay phone system periodically instead. Makes me believe that the stupidity of criminals, and old fashioned police work based on our *current* laws are the solution to calls for increasingly invasive privacy monitoring and backdoors specially (ahem) for law enforcement.
The bomber was white, Christian, home-schooled, anti-LGBT and conservative. This fits the profile of almost all domestic terrorists in the US. Why wasn't he on the FBI's radar?
Where was he radicalized? Why hasn't the rest of the white, home-schooled, anti-LGBT, conservative community denounced him?
I saw on TV that white folks in South Carolina were celebrating with each bombing. There's video. Why isn't the mainstream media talking about that?
Don't stop fighting for the truth. The reckoning is coming
#QAnon
You are welcome on my lawn.
what is the first thing they always do in movies about heists and other crazy illegal doings? the newbie always pulls a phone out then jason statham grabs it and and chucks it out the window.
They called him "Mark Anthony" and not just "Mark." We've known at least since the time of Lee Harvey Oswald that dangerous people have three names.
The Boston Tea Party participants were called terrorists for dumping Tea in the harbor in protest of tariffs.
The founding fathers and revolutionary war soldiers were called terrorists for not adhering to formal rules of warfare (IE standing in rows and gunning each other down, a practice that 100 years later Americans emulated during the Civil War no less!)
And if you look through American history, I am pretty sure you can find lots of other uses of the term terrorist for people in labor disputes, etc. Yet you almost never hear about it used on groups it definitively should have been, like the KKK.
My thanks to those who used technology for a very good purpose! To bring such a person to justice is a good use of technology!!!
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
It is lucky for us it was the local police that caught him. The FBI is convinced that they are going dark because of encryption so would have just put out a press release calling for backdoors in cell phones and web etc.
It is reasonably obvious that despite encryption which is shutting some traditional doors that the cops were used to looking through, that there is a plethora of new data that can be used instead.
This was exactly what we were taught in school ~30 years ago.
This sort of surveillance, demanding identification to travel, etc was all considered Commie Russian anti-American values. And yet by the early 2000s that was all forgotten as we clambered over ourselves to institute those exact activities to 'help protect us', or 'so police will make it home to their families at the end of their shifts, all those poor poor policemen who otherwise will be gunned down in the street like the pigs they are.'
*cough* Ahem.
Canada was tthe last country to have an open landrush of natives land. Canada is the country where everyone comes together to hate and supress the Indians on who's stolen land our country exists. Shooting them is basicly sport, see Colton Bushie. Australia is too eco & granola to still do that shit.
He walked into a FedEx store wearing an obvious wig and pink heavy plastic cleaning gloves he never took off.
Why wasn't the FedEx guy calling that in??!?
https://www.statesman.com/news/breaking-austin-bombing-suspect-dies-police-close-official-says/KZmUAGvKlNazDr31EzeUzI/
"... . The authorities were also able to look at the individual's Google search history ..."
The fact that google gave its users' search history to authority scares me
No, I am not a bomber, nor a terrorist, but I am living inside a dictatorship (not as harsh as North Korea, but do known to 'disappear dissidents' from time to time) in which the authority keeps a very tight control on what we do online
If google gave the austin authority the search history of that bombing suspect, what will stop google from giving search history of its other users to their own respective 'authorities', even to those dictatorships?
I will try to stop using google from now on
The phone's GPS capabilities can track the phone within 5 to 10 feet and can also provide "historical" or "prospective" location information. It can also "ping" the phone, forcing it to reveal its exact location.
On an unrelated note; the police should have suspected that the suspect might not want to be taken alive, and that a bomb maker might have some means handy to ensure that. They should have apprehended him in an unfamiliar and isolated context, like when he was trying to take a piss. The bomb in his vehicle could have just as easily been something much more powerful.
Armchair quarterbackin is easy though, ain't it?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Cell towers are not triangulating. They can do it, but to a very limited approximation only where directional antennas have narrow coverage. And narrow is 30 degrees, that can not give a practically usable location, unless you plan to napalm him. What they use instead is trilateration, by comparing the signal strength at nearby towers. That can give meters of location precision.
the individual words makes sense, mashing them together does not, it makes what is usually referred to as a word salad I believe!
Terrorist is the correct word.
IMO a serial killer uses directed killing techniques. This dude was using bombs. Bombs can't be controlled or directed in quite the way that a knife or gun or a garrote can be controlled. Bombs introduce the possibility of multiple killings, mass damage, mayhem. Even small bombs can be fairly easily scaled up to larger devices.
Mayhem was the goal here, as was terror. Ergo, the guy was a terrorist.
Today I Learned: 24 years old qualifies you as a teenager.
Stay Classy, dumbass
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