Tech Tool Offers Police ‘Mass Surveillance On A Budget’

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police have used the “Fog Reveal” database to search hundreds of billions of records drawn from 250 million devices, and have used the data to assemble location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to company records. Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2017 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection.