Post #801009

Phone security/store surveillance notice for Best Buy: In the MacDill AFB IED case (it's a confirmed IED now), the FBI claims to have gotten a phone number from the warning call, traced it to a phone purchased at Best Buy-and then pulled up footage of that particular phone being purchased at Best Buy. Unknown if this was a phone also activated at Best Buy or not. A phone that needs to be private must never be activated in-store, and of course must be a cash purchase. This was probably a recent and in-area purchase, going through six months of register photos in stores within a 250 mile radius is a real pain in the ass unless they can apply AI and facial recognition to the store's entire database of photos. That goes double if the register photo is of empty air with the person scanning from one side, and they must now scroll through video footage. That should slow down even an AI search, as facial recognition etc requires some computing power. Once again, this is the same drill as a murder case many years ago where a crowbar was traced to Home Depot and the case solved by examining snapshots of every person who had purchased that make and model crowbar. The killer left the UPC sticker on it, and that was enough. Now this has happened again. If that IED incident had instead been a nonviolent street blockade of MacDill AFB that blew up into a media hornet's nest, credit card records might have been checked but the labor-intensive process of going through Best Buy register footage would likely have been skipped. Things like burn phones for felony-level ops need to pass through "cut-outs," people who do nothing else but buy phones and other things out of area and do not appear on the FBI or cops' radar for other reasons. This is how all intelligence agencies procure local materials, and also how real guerilla groups do it. If this is not possible, standing to one side of the register while scanning all purchases will cause the close-up register photos linked to the UPC codes to be be of empty air. The cops can still go through time-stamped general security camera footage but this is still more work. Cops are usually lazy and don't like to work, but nobody should bet their life on that. The defense that works the best for just about anything is a layered defense of multiple separate defenses. This is every bit as true of phone and purchase security as it is of trench warfare.