“We don’t even know if he did kill himself,” says Andy. “Let’s find out.”
? ? ?
“So what’s your problem?” Andy asks, as he and Jane leave the FBI field office.
Jane shakes her head. “You know what my problem is. It feels weird.”
“What’s so weird about how they were behaving?”
“Why does Lauren turn off her phone at home, after Conrad’s already moved out? I mean, while he’s living there, sure. But once he’s gone in mid-September? He’s not there to see her phone light up or hear it buzz.”
“Maybe she’s thinking ahead to the divorce,” says Andy. “Conrad playing hardball. Hiring an investigator to track her cell records.”
“A cell phone Conrad doesn’t even know exists?”
“Shit, I don’t know, Janey—it’s not that odd, is it? People having an affair acting paranoid?”
Jane goes quiet. Of course, what Andy’s saying is one way of looking at this.
“You’re thinking about Simon Dobias,” he says. “And everything we heard earlier today. How he manipulates people and covers his tracks.”
“Well, yes.” They reach their car. Tate takes the wheel. Jane prefers not to drive when she’s spit balling a theory. “You don’t think this feels a bit staged, Andy? Doesn’t this seem a little too obvious to you? I mean, could the arrows be pointing more obviously at these locations? These people never strayed from those locations?”
“Then what’s your theory?” Andy asks. “Say this is Simon Dobias behind all of this. What, Simon travels to this guy’s workplace every weekday morning to send text messages? And he travels to the guy’s house—”
“Or right around his house,” Jane interrupts. “It’s just an area, right? You could stand outside a guy’s house and text right there, and it will ping the same cell tower as if you were inside the house. Like Dee said, you could be a half block away and ping the same tower.”
“Okay, but that’s still going to an awful lot of trouble.”
“Exactly what he’d want us to say.”
“Well, shit, Janey, we can play that game all day. Every bit of information that exonerates Simon, you can say, ‘That’s just what he wants us to think,’ or ‘He staged it that way.’ I mean, do we—do we even know if Simon Dobias would know something like that?”
“I don’t know, Andy. People know that their cell phones send signals to cell towers.”
“Yeah, but do they know that the cell towers keep records of those pings down to the minute and second and store them for years? Do people know that we can draw on historical CSLI to trace someone’s movements years later?”
“The only question is whether Simon Dobias does,” she says. “And I’ll bet the answer is yes.”
79
Simon
“Happy Wednesday, all, and happy November,” I say to the class. “Hope you all had a nice Halloween and a day of recovery yesterday. Let’s get to it. Carpenter versus United States, a case that best can be summarized as, boy-is-it-scary-what-the-government-can-do-to-us.”
That gets a laugh. I try to keep it light.
“Cell phones,” I say. “No longer just mechanisms to make calls or shoot a text message. No longer simply little computers to search the internet or monitor your daily step count or play Spotify. Cell phones are now tracking devices, too. As the unfortunate Mr. Carpenter learned, cell phones allow the government not only to surveil your movements contemporaneously but also historically, going back years.
“Your cell phone is always working, even if you’re not using it, if for no other reason than to refresh and receive new text or email messages. It always seeks the nearest cell tower for a connection. And each cell tower then records that connection and memorializes it, stores it, down to the day, hour, minute, and second. So if the government has your cell phone number, they can go back and subpoena those cell-tower records—called cell-site location information or CSLI—and retrace your steps. Not just the calls you made. Not just the text messages you sent. But every place you walked. Every place you drove. And exactly, down to the second, when you did so.
“In a nutshell, the government can go back in time and know, within a reasonable approximation, every place you’ve been and when. Unless, of course, you’ve turned off the phone. But how often do we do that these days?”