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December 5, 2022 19 mins

It’s the FBI’s biggest investigation ever.  Looking into who was in Washington on Jan.6 and who stormed the Capitol.  It has also included the biggest ever request of phone data from geofence warrants.  Google has provided data from over 5,000 devices as the FBI has tried to narrow their search to pinpoint suspects.  Google also has a three-step process for these types of warrants to help protect as much privacy as possible and only provide info on those most likely to have commit a crime.  We are only learning more about this now as lawyers for one suspect are looking to throw out the geofence evidence in court.  Mark Harris, contributor to Wired, joins us for what to know.

 

Next, if you weathered the pandemic storm and stuck with your employer over the last couple of years, then you very well could be underpaid.  The tight labor market has led to a lot of movement and forced employers to try and lure new candidates with bigger paychecks and more work benefits.  That has led to a divide with current employees as salaries for new hires are on average 7% higher than existing workers.  Aki Ito, senior correspondent at Business Insider, joins us for more.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Monday, December five. I'm Oscar Ramiers in Los Angeles
and this is the Daily Dive. It's the FBI's biggest
investigation ever, looking into who's in the Washington on January
six and who stormed the capital. It has also included
the biggest ever requests of phone data from geo fence warrants.

(00:22):
Google has provided data from over five thousand devices as
the FBI has tried to narrow their search to pinpoint suspects.
Google also has a three step process for these types
of warrants to help protect as much privacy as possible
and only provide info on those most likely to have
committed crime. We are only learning more about this now
as lawyers for one suspect are looking to throw out

(00:42):
the geo fence evidence in court. Mark Harris, contributor to Wired,
joins us for What to Know Next. If you weather
the pandemic storm and stuck with your employer over the
last couple of years, then you very well could be
under paid. The tight labor market has led to a
lot of movement and forced employers to try and learn
new candidates with bigger paychecks and more work benefits. That

(01:03):
has led to a divide with current employees, as salaries
for new hires are on average seven percent higher than
existing workers. Aki Eto, senior correspondent at Business Insider, joins
us for more. It's news without the noise. Let's die
in The Capital Police, the d C Metropolitan Police, other

(01:25):
law enforcement agencies were attacked and assaulted before our very eyes, speared, sprayed,
stomped on, brutalized lives were lost. Joining us now is
Mark Harris, contributor to Wired. Thanks for joining us, Mark,
I'm glad to be here. Well, we're getting some new
news in what's going on with all the January six

(01:47):
insurrection stuff. Uh, the latest news we're hearing is that
the leader of the oath Keeper, Stuart Rhodes, was found
guilty of seditious conspiracy for his part on January six. Um. So,
a lot of movements going on. There are a lot
of other people awaiting trials and whatnot. But Mark, you
took a look into the FBI's geo fence dragnet on

(02:09):
January six. They asked Google for information for for all
the phones all the people that were there, uh in
and around the Capital on January six, just so they
can help narrow down who might have been there. This
is the biggest ever investigation for the FBI, and it's
the biggest ever haul of phones from these controversial gel

(02:31):
fence warrants as they're called. So Mark, tell us a
little bit about it, because it gets super interesting. Yeah,
it's really interesting. I mean, do your fence warrants have
been around for a while and there it's where law
enforcement can ask a technology company just given the identifying
info for phones that it was in a certain area.
And you can imagine. We've had ones in the bank robbery.

(02:53):
You know, someone walks into a bank robbery, you get
all the phones that were in the bank at the time.
You can easily exclude the tellers and the customers, and
then anyone's left over, you know, could be could be
the criminal. So we've had them for a few years,
but this is by far the biggest um G offense
warrant that's ever the most productive. It's given the most
um it's given the most results, and that's obviously because

(03:15):
there are lots of people at the Capitol that day.
So what the d o J and the Department of
Justice in the SBNI asked for was a four They
set up a defense of a four acre area that
was the Capitol building itself and the immediate surroundings that
were beyond the barriers where people shouldn't have been. And
so the idea was that anyone who was in this
area is kind of at the very least is committing

(03:37):
some sort of trespassing because they were in an area
they shouldn't be. And so, you know, they served this
warrant on Google. I don't know what they expected, but
what they got back was five thousand, seven hundred and
twenty three devices in that area at the time of
the riot. Right, so they specified at the time of
the riot. They didn't get some you know, tourists you know,
at other times a day or whatever. And so that's

(03:58):
a huge number of people. Um. And what's really interesting
is just the scale of it UM and that kind
of it's also interesting to see the process by which
the FBI narrated down they haven't filed charges against three people,
what they have done, They don't charge them about thousand people,
And so they go to this three step process um

(04:18):
to narrow down the initial production of those enormous thousands
of devices down to a more manageable number. Yeah, and
they do this in all fence cases. Yeah, exactly, real
quick before we get into that, because Google's response to
this was, hey, look, you know, if we were going
to cooperate with the government when they ask for stuff,
but we do have a rigorous process in place for
geo fence warrants. Oftentimes we push back. We're trying to

(04:41):
narrow the scope of what they're asking for to provide
as much privacy for our our customers as much as
we can. So, yes, now detail that three step process,
because what they did is they started off with this
huge pool of phones. Then they whittle it down, whittle
it down, whittle it down, and this is this is
the very interesting part. Yeah, it's a really interesting part. Um.

(05:03):
So Google always insists on the three step process. While
they have the big old drag net where they just
get everything in there. Number two, they then try and
exclude any numbers that that they know not to be
people of interest, and that would be in the bank
robbery case, that would be the tellers and the customers
who were standing around. They know they have their identities,
it's not one of them. And then the third one

(05:24):
would be particular device I das that had an interesting track,
maybe the the the device, um, you know, it was
just in and out quickly, or maybe it was there
for a while. There was something about those particular you
know spots, you know, dots on a map, the blue
dots on a map that intrigues them. So that would
be the three step process, and they would only get
the email and account recovery telephone number for the for

(05:48):
the third group, the smallest group, And so we went
through a similar process here. They originally asked the five thousand,
seven twenty three, so they got those. Then they took
away any phones that were also in the capitol in
the morning or in the evening when the rioters weren't there,
so that in the morning before the right happened and
in the evening after it was all cleared out. So

(06:08):
it took away those because they've presumed they would be
like capitol police or congressional staffers. And I've only got
them down to five thousand eighteen, so there are still
a lot of devices in there. And then what the
and then what the FBI said, right in order to
be really safe that we're only getting people that were
actually participating in the right and not just milling around

(06:30):
near the barriers, we want to get only those people
whose little blue dot was entirely within the g CENT
And you know, when you're using your phone, you're looking
at your maps and you have that blue circle around you.
Sometimes there's a tiny dot when you're in lots of
great GPS reception and lots of Wi Fi and cell
phone tiles around. That means the blue dot gets small
because it knows where you are. And sometimes that dot

(06:50):
is that circle is really big, perhaps when you're out
of the countryside and you don't and you haven't you know,
you've only got one GPS satellite um and so your
location isn't that accurate. Well, the FBI said, let's let's
only half the ones to the whole circle is inside
the GFN So we're pretty sure, We're not we're not positive,
We're pretty sure it's about a likelihood that that dot
was actually inside the gf ns at the time, and

(07:13):
that got the numbers right now, and that got them
down to like um under just on devices that were
in pretty much definitely in the And one of the
other interesting things that they can tell and they have
the information about, is that they noticed that a lot
of these phones had their airplane mode turned off. Presumably
somebody said, well, I'm going to turn it off that

(07:33):
way they can't track me. But what the location history
does on these phones and all that it tracks you
either way, And that prompted FBI officials to even put
more scrutiny on some of these people that we're trying
to delete their location history in the days after. Who
had their airplane airplane mode on during the the insurrection,

(07:54):
the capital riots. So that was another interesting factor that
they looked at. You know, maybe people try to hide
their tracks. Yeah. Right, there's two separate things. The one
is people who put there who well we know, we
don't know they had them in their phone in airplane mode.
What we do know is that Google didn't have their
location data live when it was happening. They only had

(08:15):
it later. So that's probably that it had it they
were in airplane mode. It could have just been they
didn't get self service for some reason. That's less likely
because obviously it's pretty well served by cell phone towns,
but there are lots of people there may be overloaded anyway.
There are like seventy devices that they only got the
data on a few days later. Um, presumably when people
pop their phone back out of airplane mode, so those

(08:35):
were all in the mix. And then yeah, you're right,
the FBI also said, we'll look as well as these
fifty dred that were definitely inside the building. Out of
that pool of five thousand, tell us anyone who tried
to delete their location history, which is a bit different
from just going into airplane made. They're actively going in
saying WHOA to delete everything I did in the last week,
And the FBI asked for those people in particular, and

(08:57):
so that that gave them an extra thirty seven people
who had or thirty seven devices that had been had
their thirty seven accounts that are tried to delete their data.
So yeah, the truth is the FBI thought pretty carefully
about who they were trying to target um and put
some of these limits on it, and they ended up
in the end, they ended up getting the recovery email

(09:18):
and telephone number for one thousand, five thirty five devices,
and a lot of times, a lot of times, these
geo fence warrants are very kept secretive. I mean, even
this process for January six right now is still being
kept secret. But the reason why we're learning a lot
about this because there's actually a court case concerning one
man who is kind of bringing this up in as

(09:40):
part as their defense, saying, you know, they shouldn't be
using this stuff. I have an expectation of privacy. So
this is how we're learning about this, Uh, this particular thing,
this the moves by the FBI on this one. Yeah,
that's right. I mean, all your defence warrants are normally stealed,
and that seems means they're not available for public viewing
because obviously they don't want to give away who they're

(10:02):
looking at before they get there, before they make charges.
And so I mean, the other interesting thing about this,
this three step process that Google came up with, it
was Google's inventions. There's no court that said you have
to do this three step process. There's no one overseeing that.
There's no defense attorneys at that point of course, because um,
they don't know who they're looking for, right, it's quite
an early day. So it is quite an opaque process.

(10:25):
And Google's kind of set the standard for it because
it's the one that law enforcement goes through most commonly
because Google apps are on all our phones, you know, Apple, Android,
you know, regardless it's on you know, it's the most
popular one, and the location history is extremely you know,
widely used, but yes, it's still very secret. And so
the only way we found about this was when that

(10:48):
when the individual tried to get the dear offense data
thrown out, his lawyer included a lot of information from
the original sealed search warrant. And so this is how
we get we you know, we we knew it was
a big one and that the FBI had talked about
hundreds and even thousands of devices, but we didn't know
exactly how big, and we didn't know the process. So
it's really interesting to get a peek into, um, you know,

(11:09):
how the FBI operates and how Google responds to that,
and you know how this whole process comes because even
in that one thousand, five hundred devices, you know, even
with their efforts of trying to exclude people who were
in the capital before and afterwards, but you know, they
weren't trying to exclude say like photojournalists who were there,
you know, pretty much at the same time as the rioters,

(11:30):
and obviously their data would have got kept swept up
in this hall, as well as paramedics who are responding,
and you can imagine many types of people or you know,
several other types of people who who may have got
caught up and had their data handed over to the
FBI that actually had no reason to be handed over.
And that was the real key part of the motion
that this suspect is is trying to get past, you know,

(11:53):
to try and exclude this data. He's saying, look, way
too many other people are getting caught up in this.
It's not constitutional. It goes against the four Amendments. The
constitutional unfair. So, I mean, it's totally interesting that suspect
is David Ryan. The court is supposed to be ruling
on whether to throw that stuff out in December, and
then his trial is scheduled for late January. This is

(12:15):
going to call into question a lot of that stuff
and there's gonna be a lot more conversation about all
of this geo fence warrant. It's a super interesting look.
Mark Harris, contributor to Wired. Thank you very much for
joining us. Thanks, it was a pleasure to toky. You

(12:38):
would think that, you know, kind of in a perfect world,
it would be the opposite. The veteran employees would get
paid a little bit more because they've already proven themselves
because they already know their organizations. Well, you know, they
should be rewarded for their loyalty. But what's happening right
now in this current economy is the exact opposite. Joining
US town is Aki Itto, Senior correspondent at Business since Eier.

(13:00):
Thanks for joining US Hockey. Thanks for having me on. Well,
here's an interesting question. You wrote up an article about
how much could you be paying for your loyalty at work?
We've been hearing a lot of the stories people leaving
their current jobs for something better, hopefully higher paying or
with a better work life balance. You know a lot
of people really want to do that work from home thing.

(13:20):
But we also heard stories about how much power the
employee had. You know, employers were you know, desperate for workers,
and they were doing everything they could, you know, offering
a lot of benefits and perks, offering a lot higher salaries.
And so this question comes up now now that the
dust is settled a little bit, Now you know what
happens to the people that stayed at their jobs throughout

(13:41):
all of this compared to the people that were moving
all these jobs. And we're seeing in a couple of
places that you know, the newer employees are being hired
in with a higher salary, leaving the people that stayed
at the job kind of falling behind. So ACKI tell
us a little bit more about it and what we're
seeing with this. Over the past year, the jump market
has just been so incredibly hot that employers have had

(14:04):
to just throw these huge salaries at new candidates just
to get them to come work for them. And that's distorted,
you know, the salaries across organizations because these new hires
are getting paid so much more than what existing employees
are getting paid. You would think that, you know, kind
of in a perfect world, it would be the opposite.

(14:26):
The veteran employees would get paid a little bit more
because they've already proven themselves, because they already know their
organizations well, you know, they should be rewarded for their loyalty.
But what's happening right now in this current economy is
the exact opposite. Yeah, And you know, you look to
industries like a tech and finance, right there's always a
lot of money flowing around through there. But they do

(14:46):
have some estimates on how much some of these new
hires are making. There's a conversation data provider they're called
labor i Q. They estimate that salaries for new hires
are seven percent higher on average than the media and
paid for people that have stuck around in some of
these jobs in some of these industries. That's a big
pay disparity, it is, and that's across the entire economy,
across all occupations. When you look at some of the

(15:10):
really in demand jobs and tech or in finance, these
gaps can be much larger. For example, one job we
looked at in the story was the job of I
T managers. The gap between new hires and existing employees
and that occupation is twenty percent. So you know, that's
a difference of tens of thousands of dollars and some
of these jobs, which means that you know, if you

(15:32):
haven't switched jobs in the Great Resignation, you're probably leaving
a lot of money on the table. There's some names
that they put to this phenomenon that's happening. So we're
talking about the job switchers and the job stayers, and
in one part they call it salary compression. This is
when the gap starts to narrow on this but it
can move all the way to a salary inversion where

(15:53):
the new hires are making more money than the veteran workers.
The broad term that compensation professionals use is salary compression,
which is a little bit confusing in this context because
we're talking about a gap that's opening up, a gap
that's becoming bigger and bigger. But kind of when you
go back to what we talked about before, what you
think should happen in an ideal economy, veteran employees should

(16:16):
get paid more than the new hires. When that gap
starts to get smaller, you call that traditionally salary compression.
And in a really extreme scenario like what we're seeing
right now, where the new hires are getting paid more
than existing employees, that's called salary inversion. Is this greater push,
this kind of movement for pay transparency. You know, there

(16:37):
was this a great story about someone leaving their job.
She she went on Twitter and said, Hey, if anybody's
applying for my job, just know that this is how
much I got paid. You should ask for more and
for whatever perk. And you know, it blew up at
that point. But this is what's happening right now. People talk,
people are getting the hint of who's making what, and
how much and for the employer. I like the way

(16:58):
you wrote it up to. I mean, there's a very
very simple option you just pay everybody more. But it's
also an expensive thing and that's tough for a lot
of businesses to do. I mean, the pay transparracy thing
is huge because, I mean it's not just people randomly
posting their salaries on Twitter. It's also you know, some
governments are starting to force employers to post pay ranges

(17:19):
in the job openings. These job openings are public to everybody,
including to the people in companies that already have that job.
So you know, you could just look at that job
opening be like, hey, this ranges you know above what
I'm getting paid. That gives the employee, you know, some
leverage to negotiate for higher pay. And so when disparities exist,

(17:41):
but you have that kind of transparency, employers are forced
to close that gap. So so this move towards greater
pay transparency is really huge. And for some of the
companies that are noticing this, they're seeing it, right, they
are making some changes pay scale, which deals with you know,
compensation data, right, they provide some of that data to
their employees and everything like that. They're raising wages on

(18:02):
some things. Microsoft is a big company that took a
look at this and said, hey, we need to adjust
how much we're paying people. So they're increasing salaries for
you know, higher, higher performers. A lot of other companies
are maybe giving some bonuses or something, just so that
those existing employees, those people that stayed with them aren't
getting disgruntled, you know, aren't feeling like they've just been
left out in the lurch. Yeah. I mean, for the

(18:24):
last year, the big focus really has been on you know,
trying to find new workers, right, it's been on talent acquisition,
and I really think increasingly the conversation is going to
move to talent retention about keeping existing employees. You know,
raising everybody's pay is expensive, but perhaps it's less expensive
than losing your most talented employees and you know, having

(18:47):
to spend the next six months trying to look for
somebody who you can hire, who you're gonna have to
pay a big salary because they're a new hire anyway. Yeah,
and yeah, I know some employers are going to just
go with the let's stay quiet and see if anybody notices.
But you know, on the flip side of things right.
Being overpaid does have its risks. Once things do settle
down and once workflow gets back to normal, you know,

(19:09):
things happen. Sometimes they're the first people to get cut
at that point. So a very interesting look, something I
had been very curious about, and it's starting to play
out definitely now. Aki Eto, Senior correspondent at Business Insider,
Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much
for having me. That's it for today. Join us on

(19:33):
social media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter and Instagram.
Gave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us and
I heard radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast.
This episode of The Daily Dive is produced by Victor
Wright and engineered by Tony Sarantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez and
this was her Daily Dive

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