The NY Times recently published an article, “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night,” detailing how easily someone could reverse engineer location data to identify someone and track them. While the article is correct to point out that there are few (and in some case no) safeguards regarding who can use the location data, the revelations are by no means new.
In 2009 Zeit Magazine in Germany worked with the politician Malte Spitz to demonstrate how phone records could be used to track and trace someone—no apps required. Certainly no permissions.
The triangulation and “handing off” that cell towers do allows anyone with that data to reconstruct, as Zeit did here, the life and movement of any individual with a phone. It’s fascinating viewing. Link: https://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
As a citizen and phone user, I found Zeit’s trace map disconcerting. As a novelist, I was 
intrigued to discover what happened during the times for which there’s no data. Where was he? What was he doing? The record is incomplete.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that Mr. Spitz was doing anything nefarious, but as my second Imogen Trager thriller, Dark Network, began to take shape in late 2016, I saw how I could have Imogen track her quarry via their phones—and her genius is that she pieces together the trail by linking the time and location of known acts with where the conspirators were when they turned their phones are off.
In an early scene from the book (p. 35), frustrated at the FBI’s lack of progress and in a fit of pique at her new boss, who keeps calling and texting her for status updates, Imogen considers turning her phone off. To do so, she admits sourly, would be “like an act of treason.” She sits at her desk seething, looking over the scant bits of evidence she has—wallet, keys, drop phone: “Or,” she thinks, “if you were committing treason, wouldn’t you turn it off?”
She teams up with an IT specialist, Trey Kelly, who designs a trace very like the one Zeit created, only they overlay all four known conspirators, and look for meetings and similar times when their phones are switched off. Together, Trey and Imogen pick the lock on a door no one else thought to look for.
James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thriller series Faithless Elector and Dark Network. The third and final book in the series, working title Who Governs, is coming soon.
Find them through Indybound.org. They are also available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s Books.
Link to REVIEWS
In the Noirpolitik thriller Faithless Elector, the reason the faithless electors give for not voting as they pledged to vote (for switching) is presented as a vote of conscience. In the book, there were seeming irregularities in the Illinois vote count, allowing each faithless elector to say their switched vote was cast as a vote of conscience for the candidate who should have won the presidency.
Perhaps I should have chosen Florida, particularly since the scandal, irrespective of the truth remains a volatile point of contention across both (now, all three) books and Florida is back in the news again…and likely, again.
2016 election (March, to be precise), long before either of the parties had chosen their candidates. At the heart of the stories is FBI Analyst-turned-Agent, Imogen Trager, whose patient, analytical approach is regarded as alien and “soft” by many of her colleagues—even while it is precisely her methods that are getting results.
So, did I just get lucky that many aspects of the novels jibe with our collective sense of democracy off the rails? Do I have a crystal ball?
was originally construed in the Constitution) that the candidate with the majority of Electoral College votes should be president and the candidate with the second best showing be vice-president. But, as the nation realized in the 1800 election, that meant that president and vice-president were from different parties.
Chosen Words - James McCrone 