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March 6, 2024

Before the “Insurrection” (the one where people forgot to bring guns), the smart people at the New York Times knew that cell phone pings could be used to track people with great precision. In a piece called, “How to Track President Trump,” Stuart Thompson and Charlie Warzel described how they tracked one of Trump’s Secret Service agents, by using cell phone technology.

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The meticulous movements — down to a few feet — of the president’s entourage were recorded by a smartphone we believe belonged to a Secret Service agent, whose home was also clearly identifiable in the data…We could also see other stops this person made, apparently more connected with his private life than his public duties.

The article, written in December 2019, included an aerial map of Mar-A-Lago, and it showed exactly where the Secret Service agent was standing:

A single dot appeared on the screen, representing the precise location of someone in President Trump’s entourage at 7:10 a.m. It lingered around the grounds of the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., where the president was staying, for about an hour.

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The agent’s location was shown with such precision that it was possible to closely estimate how many feet he stood from each palm tree surrounding the Mar-A-Lago entrance.

After the “insurrection,” Thompson and Warzel continued to believe in the tremendous power of the ping, and seemed happy that it was being used to round up Trump supporters. However, the reporters worried that cell phone technology could also be used improperly.

“…such data is (sic) collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence, as happened in cities across America last summer” (emphasis added).

Do you get it? It’s okay to use cell-phone tracking to round up the MAGA folks, but don’t use it to track the thugs who killed 25 or more people while they gutted court houses and police stations, and caused a couple billion in damage.

Later, when the 2000 Mules movie came out, serious concerns about cell phone accuracy suddenly materialized. According to media “fact checkers,” the people who were supposedly stuffing ballot drop boxes were probably just returning their books to the library — in the middle of the night — while wearing blue latex gloves.

Another Look at 2000 Mules