WEEKEND EDITION- Jan. 6 Geofence Dragnet and LA’s General Hospital Being Turned Into Homeless Housing

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,

(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. It's the FBI's biggest investigation ever, looking into
who was in Washington on January six and who stormed
the Capitol. It has also included the biggest ever request
of phone data from geo fence warrants. Google has provided
data from over five thousand devices as the FBI has

(00:47):
tried to narrow their search to pinpoints suspects. Google also
has a three step process for these types of warrants
to help protect as much privacy as possible and only
to provide info of those most likely to have committed crime.
We're only learning more about this now as lawyers for
one suspect are looking to throw out the g offense
evidence in court. For more on what to know, we'll
speak to Mark Harris, contributor to wire to offense warrants

(01:11):
have been around for a while and there it's where
law enforcement can ask a technology company just to give
then the identifying info for phones that it was in
a certain area. And you can imagine, we've had ones
in the bank robbery. 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,

(01:33):
could be could be the criminal. So we've had them
for a few years. But this is by far the
biggest um defense warrant that's ever the most productive. It's
given the most um it's given the most results, and
that's obviously because there are lots of people at the
Capitol that day. So what the d o J and
the Department of Justice and the FB and I asked
for was a four They set up a g offense

(01:55):
of a four acre area that was the Capitol building
itself and the immediate to roundings 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 some sort of
trespassing because they're 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

(02:17):
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 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 narrowed it down. They

(02:39):
haven't filed charges against five thousand, seven twenty three people.
What they have done, they fear't charging them about thousand people,
and so they go through this three step process um
to narrow down the initial production of those enormous thousands
of devices down to a more manageable number. And they
do this in all g offense cases. Yeah, exactly, real
quick before we get into that, because Google's response to

(03:01):
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
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,

(03:22):
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.
So Google always insists on the three step process. While
they have the big old drag net where you just
get everything in there. Number two they then try and
exclude any numbers that that they know not to be

(03:47):
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
would be um particular device ideas that had an in track.
Maybe 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,

(04:09):
you know, dots on a map, the blue dots on
a map that intrigued them. So that would be the
three step process, and they would only get the email
and account recovery telephone number for the for the third group,
the smallest group, and so we went through a similar
process here. They originally asked the five thousand seven D
twenty three, so they got those. Then they took away

(04:29):
any phones that were also in the capitol in the
morning or in the evening when the rioters weren't there,
So in the morning before the right happened, and in
the evening after it was all cleared out, So it
took away those because they've presumed they would be like
capitol police or congressional staffers. And they've only gotten down
to five thousand, five and eighteen, so there was still
a lot of devices in there. And then what the

(04:54):
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
near the barriers, we want to get only those people
whose little blue dot was entirely within the GFEN. And
you know, when you're using your phone, you're looking at
your maps and you have that blue circle around you.
Sometimes it's a tiny dot. When you're in lots of

(05:15):
great GPS reception and lots of WiFi and cell phone
tiles around. That means the blue dot gets small because
it knows where you are. And sometimes that dot 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 have the ones. The whole circle is inside the

(05:35):
g fense. So we're pretty sure, we're not We're not positive,
we're pretty sure it's about a sevent likelihood that that
dot was actually inside the g fens at the time.
And that's got the numbers right down. That got them
down to like um under just under fifteen hundred devices
that work that I thought were pretty much definitely in
the g fens. And one of the other interesting things
that they can tell and they have the information about,

(05:58):
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 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

(06:20):
location history in the days after, who had their airplane
airplane mode on during the the insurrection, the capital riots.
So that was another interesting factor that they looked at,
you know, maybe people trying 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

(06:41):
know is that Google didn't have their location data live
when it was happening. They only had 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 town. But there were lots
of people there maybe overloaded anyway, They were like set
and T devices that they only got the data on

(07:01):
a few days later, um, presumably when people pop their
phone back out of airplane mode. So those were all
in the mix. And then yeah, you're right. The FBI
also said, will look as well as these fift 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

(07:24):
delete everything I did in the last week, And the
FBI asked for those people in particular, and 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 have 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

(07:44):
these limits on it, and they ended up in the end,
they ended up getting the recovery email and telephone number
for one thousand, five d thirty five devices and a
lot of times, a lot of times these geo fence
warrants are are very kept secretive. I mean even this
process for January six right now is still being kept secret.

(08:04):
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 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.

(08:26):
I mean, all your defense 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 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.

(08:48):
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 days, so it is quite an opaque process.
M 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

(09:10):
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 in when
that when the individual tried to get the garfense 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

(09:31):
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,
how the FBI operates and how Google response to that,
Mark Harris, contributor to Wired, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thanks it was a pleasure to talk with you.

(09:55):
Finally for this week. What do you do with an
iconic Los Angeles landmark that has become too old to
operate normally and too much of a treasure to tear down?
Ellie County would like to turn the old General Hospital
building into affordable and homeless housing, but to do that,
there's a ton of work to be done. The county
has already committed two d and fifty million dollars into
removing hazardous materials, upgrading electrical and water systems, installing air conditioning,

(10:20):
fire sprinklers, and so much more. The eventual goal is
to have a healthy village with as many as four
hundred units with beds for housing and medical and mental
health care. For more in the future of Eli's General
Hospital will speak to Doug Smith, Senior writer at the
l A Times. It is a huge undertaking and since
a general hospital closed in two thousand and eight for

(10:42):
various reasons. It was almost it was by then eighty
something years old, almost ninety years old, and it didn't
have the systems that modern hospitals needed, didn't have air conditioning,
it didn't have the electrical system, couldn't support the modern
medical technology. And then after the Reach earthquake, the seismic
standards for hospitals were upgraded and it didn't meet those standards.

(11:06):
So a new hospital was built right next to it,
and general hospital just kind of closed. Some of the
ground floors were still used for wellness, community and research training,
but most of its nineteen floors were just left empty
and they've deteriorated. The ceiling pot tiles are falling and
there's dust everywhere. The electrical outlets are open, and nobody

(11:28):
can go there. So it's been very hard to find
out what to do with it because it's a gigantic building.
You know, when you walk inside, you feel like you're
entering an Egyptian pyramid, it's that big. And so it
couldn't be reused as a hospital there was had been
replaced and went to do with it. Well, the idea
of housing became more tenable as a homeless crisis and

(11:51):
what's really an affordable housing crisis in Los Angeles became
more severe, and so first Supervisor Gloria Molina and then
Supervisor this release started to pursue the idea of using
it for housing in a health and community related context.
So the plans are finally now taking shape. There will
be RFP, a request for Proposals will be developed and

(12:14):
offered in January for a developer to come and figure
out how to convert basically operating rooms, wards and laboratories
into housing. And um, we don't know exactly how that
will play out, but it could be anywhere from three
fifty to seven hundred units of housing, depending on whether
how many of them are single units or how many

(12:36):
of them are multi bedroom units for families. Yeah, and
that's part of it. The huge undertaking of how to
convert what was once a hospital into a space for housing,
a space for all these other services and whatnot. And
so you mentioned the article to the prep work, just
just the prep work is expected to start next year,
after the county committed two fifty million dollars to take

(12:58):
the first step, But it was to some of that
stuff you had mentioned, removing as best those other hasidious materials,
installing air conditioning. I mean, you can't have anything built
now without air conditioning and fire sprinklers. So all of
that stuff is barely going to get started. And then,
as you mentioned, then there's the proposals and all that
to really figure out exactly what's going to be going
on there. Yeah, the county's approach on this is that

(13:18):
it is kind of unusual. They decided to first prepare
the building just sort of quite empty it out and
create an empty structure that a developer, an imagine and
developer could look at and say, we could do this
with it. We could use the operating rooms for this
purpose and come up with the individual plans. But even

(13:39):
just that prep work, and which also includes a significant
seismic upgrade, it's gonna cost two hundred million. You know,
when you walk in, it seems like an Egyptian pyramid
or something that it is one of the best city's
best examples of Art Deco architecture. Tell me a little
bit about the art there, because that's also some one
of the reasons why they haven't torn it all down

(13:59):
too before hand is they want to preserve some of
that stuff. As they mentioned, such been such a landmark
for Los Angeles. There's statutory on the outside. It's all
of medical theme. The Hypocritus and the Galen and the
sort of the big figures in the history of medicine
are represented in statues. And then there's a in the entry.

(14:20):
There is a mural on the ceiling that you know,
it makes you feel like you're looking at the Sistine Chapel.
It's obviously not by Michelangelo, but it but it just
has that feeling of awe that you're looking up at
this vast ceiling eural. As you walk into the hospital
what used to be the main floor of the hospital.
It's it's so huge that there's a color stripe in

(14:41):
the middle of band. It's about five feet wide. It
has different colored stripes as you walk through some of
them go right, some of them go left, And you're
told at the beginning, when they know where you need
to go, you're told to follow a certain color to
get you there. It's sort of how big and complex
the building is. You made mention in the article about
you know, some of the pretty nasty stuff there that

(15:02):
was done under an old eugenics law. A lot of
things for that happened to the Latino community as well.
You know, even when the new hospital was built, you
know a lot of people were displaced because construction had
to be done. Tell me a little bit about some
of that. Sure, the hospital has been a huge presence
in Boil Heights since it was built in nineteen in

(15:22):
the late nineteen twenties and open in nineteen three, and
it's it's always been a place where people in that
community could go and if they had they couldn't afford that,
they would get free medical care. But it also had
this other element of its history. Racial attitudes were sort
of became a part of its service, and so sometimes

(15:43):
Latino women came to deliver babies, and there was a
doctor there who thought that they were bringing too many
babies into the world, weren't educated didn't have a chance,
and so they saralyzed a couple of hundred women there
with their consent, but it wasn't clear if they actually
gave their consent knowingly. They signed forms and there, you know,
they were given a forms had signed this and it

(16:04):
was a consentence to sterilize them, and this became a
practice in the hospital in the seventies and sixties and
seventies under California had a eugenics law under which thousands
of women across the state were sterilized. The state finally
provided a fund to compensate them, but it didn't apply
to the women who were sterilized at County General because

(16:24):
the hospital was locally funded. He spoke to a number
of people though you know, this is some of the
worst parts of that history, but you spoke to a
lot of people too who where General Hospital was, where
they were born, where they went and they had a
broken arm where their family members were saved from having
you know, after recovering and after having heart attacks and whatnot.

(16:44):
And it was just a central place there where people
got their healthcare done. It was and we we spoke
to Monica Alcorraz, who has been the president of the
Highland Park Neighborhood Council, and she was born there and
her siblings were born there, her mother there when you
had an heart attack. And so the hospital is it's
hard to believe. It's this gigantic structure that you can

(17:06):
see from many parts of Los Angeles. It's sort of
present everywhere, but it's also an intimate part of people's lives,
including my own. My own father went there when he
had a heart attack in and they saved his life there.
And in all of this, what has been the community
reaction to at least some of this plan, you know,

(17:26):
changing it into homeless and affordable housing, because that's a
touchy subject a lot of times when you're bringing certain
elements into the community. All that, So what I know,
there's a lot of homeless encampments that have been seen
around the area as well. So how is the community
reacted to a lot of this? So Hilda solely did
a smart thing that Boil Heights and Lincoln Heights on

(17:48):
the North are communities that are really guard their heritage carefully,
and you could take a misstep and get the community
against you, as the owner of the former Series building
by proposing to make it a home for ten thousand
homeless people, but homeless solely built, a community organization that
has been looking at this for years and has been

(18:10):
involved in the planning of it. And my colleague Andrew
spoke to all the major people in the community, and
there's generally support for this project. Also because the project
will not be just the hospital, but it will be
twelve acres to the west that will be used for
housing for community spaces, and there's a childcare center that's
being built that will open there in December, and the

(18:34):
restorative Care village, which is a part of the larger property.
They've already completed sixty four units of mental health residential
care and hundred and twenty unit units of recuperative care
for people leaving the hospital who aren't ready to go home,
and and that there's twice as much space in their
recuperative care village that's going to be developed for more

(18:55):
services like that, including workforce development. So the community at
this point is very much behind the project. Of course,
it's one more big step when the developer makes a proposal,
and that could be a moment when there could be tension. Well,
we'll see, we'll follow this story. It's going to take
a long time to get there. Obviously, there's a lot
of work to be done, but with so much space there,

(19:17):
you know, it could be a smart play to help
these vulnerable citizens there. So we'll see, we'll see what
all how it all pans out. Doug Smith, Senior writer
at The l A Times, thank you very much for
joining us. Thank you appreciate it. That's it for this weekend.
Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday
through Friday. Join us on social media at Daily Dive

(19:38):
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This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by
Tony Sarentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
was your Daily Dive weekend edition. Bud that