If you were interested in watching the fallout from the jury’s tour of Aaron Hernandez’s North Attleboro, Massachusetts home and four cell towers in the immediate area, you’re out of luck — day seven of the trial has been postponed due to yet another massive snowstorm in the region.
If you’re Aaron Hernandez’s lawyers, however, you’re stoked. You now have more time to construct a rational explanation as to why Aaron Hernandez’s cell phone activity pinged off said towers, triangulating his location the night of Odin Lloyd’s murder to the approximate area of Odin Llyod’s home and the industrial park where Lloyd’s body — along with a joint and shell casings containing Hernandez’s DNA — were found. The prosecution believes this data also puts Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz in those same locations, as well.
The defense once argued home security video footage showing Hernandez exiting his basement with a glock in his hand “could’ve been an iPhone,” and now Hernandez’s phone might ironically end up being the smoking gun. Let that sink in for a second.
This is a bombshell for two reasons.
1) Aaron Hernandez’s movements on the night of June 17, 2013 can be retroactively traced back to a number of locations associated with the pickup of the victim and the location in which he was killed.
2) Everyone’s movements on any night since you’ve owned a cell phone can be retroactively traced and obtained by a third party, creating a virtual map of everywhere you’ve ever been.
Both are news to me and equally terrifying.
The law governing the tracking and dissemination of your pinged location basically says that your provider can only allow access to this information in a small number of instances, like if you go missing or your customer proprietary network information (CPNI) is integral to solving a federal crime. You as the consumer can waive your privacy and allow applications to “geotrack” your phone’s location, which the FCC made clear in this 2013 ruling, but private investigator firms purport to have access in rather flimsy scenarios.
[International Investigators] Why else would clients request a cell phone ping?
- To locate a runaway child
- To find missing persons
- To provide evidence of a secret affair or illicit activity, to catch an unfaithful husband or an unfaithful wife
- During an insurance fraud investigation to detail activity and behaviors
Where the person goes, their cell phone is not far behind, in fact, it’s usually glued to their hand, in their pocket, or vibrating in a handbag. And, professional investigators have access to data bases and resources to obtain cell phone numbers for every use. So even if the cell phone number is unknown, we will be able to find it if it is registered in their name.
Pinging cell phones may sound funny, but it is a sound strategy to find the truth – and that’s what we do!
-T. Wilcox, CEO, International Investigators
As much as we value fidelity and honesty as a virtue, uncovering a “secret affair or illicit activity, to catch an unfaithful husband or an unfaithful wife” sounds like a horribly inappropriate reason to essentially play god and go back in time to locate a human being’s whereabouts. Sure, the moral of day 6 of the Aaron Hernandez trial is still “don’t kill people” — that never changes — but it’s not wrong to also take away the valuable lesson that someone knows where you are at all times, either.
How Hernandez’s attorney’s attempt to discredit this information will be interesting, to say the least.