TL;DR version: a high-end riflescope lets you link to your phone to get images and other data from the scope. A buncha the scopes were illegally exported. .gov is demanding to know who uses the app so they can try and see where the scopes wound up.
This is quite similar to the blanket searches the cops are doing where if someone gets shot in XYZ neighborhood they demand the phone records of everyone who was in that are at the time and then they troll through that info looking to see if they recognize a suspect.
The solution to these rather broad and offensive assaults on privacy, other than politely walking these people to the end of a long pier and giving them a strong pat on the back, is not to discard your smartphone but rather acquire one that isn’t attached to your ‘real life’. Theyre a tad more expensive, but burner smartphones that don’t require ID might be worth it. And, of course, never leave your phone with the battery in it anyplace where you’re going to be spending a lot of time.
Thanks for the heads up on this. I guess that if you are one of those who already has this app and are outside the USA, deleting it will make no difference since you will already be on record as having downloaded it.
As for using burners phones. I, for one, always use burner phones when I travel. The last thing I want is for some ham handed customs goon to be pawing through my device so it stays home.
Somebody please answer me this, a scope is so you can better see your target eh? So what the hell do you need a stupid phone app for to see what your scope sees! Look through the damn scope and leave the stupid phone at home. And if you need the phone app to sight in the scope, u r waaaaay beyond needing help….. U wonder why gummymint and high tech are invading your life and everything in it……. cause you give it to em that’s why … Figure it out, it aint rocket science………. Course I could B wrong, won’t B the furst time……
Youre wrong.
Youre assuming that the only purpose of the interface to the phone is to sight in the rifle and that the video link has no utility. It also dumps the video from the scope into the phone…so you can replay and see what the shooter saw, which, presumably, has some utility for reviewing the actions of the shooter.
Hi enn ess!
Something you forgot is that if you have a recording of what you were seeing at the time you fired, is that it makes it difficult for the relatives of the bad guy to say he was simply looking for his dog, didn’t have a gun and wasn’t trying to climb in your window!
How is his sc*mbag lawyer going to make money if the case is clear?
Plus.
If you can show it was a righteous shot, the gummint will find it hard(er) to confiscate your weapon for recklessness…
To the powers that be, they would call this a lose-lose.
The ONLY evidence the Government and the left-wingers of the press want, is that the gun-toting homeowner was in the wrong.
Keep on ruining their day!
God bless..
Today I had to travel to another state, and broke out my seldom used GPS. I only turn it on once I get to the area that I’m unfamiliar. Today it told me that I needed to plug it into a computer to download the latest firmware. Yeah! Right!
The GPS records all of the tracks whenever it’s on, but it has no way to “phone home” with that data. I guess it’s going to start hounding me so it can report my travels to it’s maker. Practically everything you buy today tracks you in some way or another. Don’t even get me started with the new mandatory smart electric meter.
Can you get a smartphone that doesn’t need any kind of ID at all? Not even a credit card?
I know you could back in the dumbphone days, but can you still do it today?
Yes, you can easily, at least for now. A variety of stores sell both phones and airtime cards for various prepaid services.
When you get up service, they ask for personal information but don’t check it so you can put in anything you want.
You should choose a big service so that you can keep buying airtime in stores; some of the smaller services no longer do that and are online only now.
I like TracFone as a backup service; they have $30 phones and offer a year of service for only $100
http://www.commanderzero.com/?p=3051
I solve this problem by NOT owning a smart phone – throwaway flips only for me that I turn off if I want to go dark. I also don’t have a GPS equipped vehicle to track my travels. If I want to hide on the net I start up my Tor browser…
Regards
Read this article about police capturing an elderly Florida man who regularly traveled to New York to burgle apartments. Toward the end it noted that police tracked His vehicle frpm Florida. You have to wonder if they somehow pinpointed his vehicle and tracked it alone, or more likely, they sifted through a database of license plates and found one with hits on the correct dates.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/09/08/us/nyc-burglar-82-years-old-upper-east-side/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fdrudgereport.com%2F
We know that NYFC uses automated license plate scanners at the bridges and tunnels because of the gunblogger that got hassled when he entered. They knew who he was and stopped him.
We’ve also had short lived articles on various fugitives caught by ANPR at state lines on the interstate highways. One in Georgia comes to mind.
If you do the same thing more than a couple of times, given enough motivation, they can discover it.
nick
(keep in mind that you going radio silent is ALSO an indicator to anyone watching. “Why’d you leave your cell phone at home on the 29th Mr Smith? We know you left your subdivision at 10:53 and returned 4 hours later….”)
(added- if you want to be able to move around, you better start establishing some patterns NOW that will facilitate that, and a REALLY convincing rational for doing so.)
(added more- and you better figure out what to do about all the cameras you are going to pass. Play a game next time you are out, see if there is a single mile or minute you can’t see at least ONE camera… and if you are in any populated area, think really hard if you would bet your life on seeing all of them.)
Sometimes I think about life 30-40 years ago, before modern technology and forensics. It’s kind of amazing they ever caught any criminals!
Think about this in terms of organized resistance. For the Red Coats to actually locate and capturing the Revolutionary War Patriots would have taken quite an effort, especially in areas sympathetic to the revolutionaries.
These days, it would be a relatively easy matter for a ruling party (in China, for instance) to pin down the location of dissidents and would-be revolutionaries with a high degree of accuracy, and surgically remove them.
I somewhat disagree. Regardless of the technology involved, anytime you try to bag a large group of scattered individuals you always have the problem of tipping your hand once the first few suspects are picked up. The only way to avoid that is a coordinated action against all members at once…and against a large enough group that sort of staging and resource movement is just as big a tip off. It’s like trying to shoot every elk in the herd…unless you get forty guys with rifles, each targetting a different elk and all firing at once, the herd is gonna break for the trees once the first one or two go down.
I take your point, and I agree with you that trying to sweep up everyone at once remains a challenge.
The point I was trying to make is that finding the people is not really the challenge any more. They may not be able to solve the logistical problem of how to bag every elk in the herd at once (to use your example), but it won’t take them much time to relocate most or all of the elks who made it to the wood line.
Back to the scope + app thing…hypothesizing here…what if a weapon with that scope system got rolled up in a crime scene (perhaps a very important one) and someone needs to know who might have been observing the shot(s). Ten thousand data points to go thru is peanuts if you know what you are doing and have some other cross references. Good plot device for an action story or movie, anyway.
I almost hesitate to say this, because of all the decades of jokes, but the phone uses radio communication, if you don’t want it to be able to communicate, just put it in a Faraday cage, such as by wrapping it in aluminum foil. I think you can buy metal cases for some phones that would be more convenient, but either way, just surround the phone with metal and nothing gets in or out. Of course you can’t use it while it is cut off, but when you want it, you can get it easier than if you had left it home. And if the phone has inertial navigation it will still know where it is all the time but it might not tell, or maybe the record of that could be erased. Perhaps there is a way to find out whether the first thing the phone does after you let it out of its cage is phone home. Seems strange, doesn’t it, the phone belongs to me, it ought to follow my orders, and maybe there are – or will be – ways to get closer to that ideal. One place that I worked we had 2 rooms that were totally lined with metal, for working with small, sensitive electronic components without electronic interference from everywhere. Not cheap, but that would enable turning the phone on to tell it what to do, without letting it talk to anybody but you.