Slashdot Mirror
Echelon Used to Capture Terrorist
An anonymous reader writes "Echelon was used to track and capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." Ahh, bitter sweet victories. The article kind of explains what Echelon is, and pretty much says that those disposable phones really don't have much security at all.
Considering This and This, He may already be dead.
I find the entire thing suspect personally.
You say you want a revolution....
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wasn't part of the Taliban, he was part of Al-Qaeda. They're 2 seperate entities, like Southern Baptists, and the Amish...
What we can do is start and maintain a dialog with any phone that is turned on. This in turn enables the triangulation. The phone does not indicate this to the user in any way unless you put it next to your speaker/tv/etc that picks up the transmission.
In fact this is done every two to eight hours (operator specific) in order to determine roughly where the phone is so the network can route incomming calls to the phone.
TCAP-Abort
TCAP-Abort
...what, you mean like using it to leak commercial information to your nation's companies for commercial gain? already happened! ask the french! http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/sisaus.htm
I doubt he was using a disposable phone -- probably it was a Swisscom prepaid SIM. Swisscom SIMs can be purchased without ID and unlike many other prepaids can be used to make international calls. That by itself is not unusual, but using such a SIM in Pakistan probably got the attention of the American government.
For those who don't know what SIMs are -- they are consumer-inserted subscriber ID cards found in all GSM phones (normal cell phones outside the US).
>
> In order for Echelon to find Mohammed they had to scan the voices of him and thousands if not millions of others. By design using Echelon on the bad guys requiers using Echelon on the good guys as well.
Really? You know it was a voiceprint, compared against the voiceprints of everyone on the planet? What's your clearance? And since when was I, along with 250,000 geeks reading this today, cleared for this? :)
You don't know how it works. I don't know it works. (And anyone who does know how it works, ain't talking!)
It's just as likely that the network was "looking" for KSM by using cell numbers, or other data that had nothing to do with voiceprints. It's also likely that once the network found something "interesting", humans probably put a few pieces together, looked more closely, and eventually concluded that yes, they'd found their target.
But supposing you were right - did you know that cops look at everyone when they drive down the block? It's true! They have to scan the driving habits and car colors and license plates of thousands of people before they find the guy who stole your Buick last weekend, or the other guy weaving down the road half-drunk.
And as anyone who watches FOX TV (purveyors of fine car-crunching cop video mayhem since 1986!) knows, there are even video cameras in patrol cars that run all the time! The cops are video taping everyone! Oh, the horror!
Of course, nobody objects to this - it's called routine police work. Your car, my car, everybody on the street remains on the video tape after the shift, but the cops have forgotten about us by the time they're half a block away. And there's no guy whose job it is to watch every second of every patrol car's video tape as the cops come back from each shift, in case someone missed something - there can't be any such guy, because cops have budgets, and it'd be an utter waste of manpower.
By the same logic, it's highly probable - virtually certain, I'd wager - that Echelon works the same way. This Slashdot post may end up in a database. (I mean a database other than Google :-) So may our phone calls. But unless the network is already looking for you, it's No Big Deal. Echelon may be vastly more powerful than the one that brings you "World's Funni^H^H^H^H^HWildeest Police Videos", but it isn't interested in you - and while it's vastly better funded than your local cops, it's still limited by the number of humans it can hire, train, and pay.
Finally, there's a huge signal-to-noise problem, which makes it highly likely that Echelon works hard to keep people off the humans' radar than putting themon it. With crime, you don't call the SWAT team for every break-and-enter or domestic dispute. Likewise, you don't want waste your intel analysts' time with wisecracking Slashdotters (unless they need a humor break :)
I agree with the first poster - it's very hard to describe this as "bittersweet". This is precisely what Echelon is for.