I'm Alice, and I'm Brett, and this is The Prosecutor's legal case.

Welcome back to The Prosecutor's legal briefs. I'm your host, Alice, and I'm joined as always by my cell bright cell like co-host Brett.

Wow, Alice, you're really reaching back there. You know, Alice, this is this is one of my favorite episodes whenever we get to do this and basically sit and listen to someone much smarter than me.

That's when I like doing this podcast. I'm very excited about today's episode.

I am too, Brett, and I like how you are very good and nuanced and saying someone's smarter than you, so it's not to implicate me, but I'm going to throw myself in there.

Today, we have a guest you guys are all going to just eat up. So many of you have written to us about questions you have about federal investigations about FBI, about how the magic of cell phones work and how that can help solve crimes.

Well, here today we have a very special guest, special agent Jay Bernie with the FBI's cellular analysis survey team.

You may have heard it as cast. Jay, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Oh, thanks for having me guys. Appreciate it.

I mean, there's so much and is it okay if I call you Jay? Everyone should know that typically people have to call you special agent Bernie.

Oh, please, no, please, Jay is awesome. Thanks.

We know Jay well. So, you know, I've had the pleasure of attending several of his trainings where he trains up law enforcement on how cell phones work. So this is a special treat for us.

Exactly. So you're hearing from the expert. I mean, he is the one who goes around and makes sure that law enforcement know how cell phones work. It's actually a very specialized unit.

And we're going to hear all about the magic of cell phones, how he uses what he does, what type of training he gets and just kind of demystify the process for us, because so often we'll hear on the news or in some sort of, you know, podcasts.

Well, they got cell phone data and they got their guy, but how there are so many steps in between. So kind of with that, Jay, can you give us a little bit of a background of how you ended up where you are today, because I bet you a lot of listeners are going to want to follow your path as well.

I've been in the bureau since 2007 and initially stationed up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a little bit colder than where I am now, but up there working on violent gangs, safe streets, task force working a lot of violent crime issues and things like that.

Really, my interest in cell phones and that kind of technology started before that for 10 years prior to coming into bureau, I was in active duty United States Army for 10 years spent four years as a tanker doing tanks and stuff like that, which was fun.

And in my last six years, I worked military intelligence specifically at the National Security Agency, where I kind of got introduced to a lot of cell phone satellite communication, social media kind of stuff that was kind of up and coming at the time, but that's kind of what really peaked my interest in all of this and really made me start to love it.

And about 2015, an opportunity came up for me to join the cast unit cellular analysis survey team with the FBI.

And so jumped on it, obviously, I love this stuff. So that's kind of what got me started and interested in doing cell phone analysis and digital information.

So what exactly is cast, you know, we hear that term a lot to end a lot of people don't even know what cast is or what it does.

Yes, so cast again stands for cellular analysis survey team, the unit specialized unit in the FBI stood up in nine by a bunch of really smart dudes who figured out we could use cell phone towers and sectors to find general locations of information.

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