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Roadside Assistance System Used for Eavesdropping
pegr writes "El Reg has a story about how a US appeals court has 'put the brakes on an FBI surveillance technique that turns an automobile driver's on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device, after finding that the spying effectively disables the system's emergency and roadside assistance features.' Seems the right to get the service you pay for trumps the 'right' of the FBI to spy on you, using your own vehicle's systems!"
-How is it infringing on their "right" to privacy if the FBI had obtained a warrant to listen in on the service? For starters, there is no "right to privacy".).
yes, there IS a "right to privacy". the supreme court has interpreted the constitution as such, many times over the years.
-The Bill of Rights enumerates a number of rights that, taken in summary, give what amounts to a "right" of privacy, but no specific right to privacy itself. ).
Amendment IX- The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
in other words, just because they don't spell it out certain rights, it doesn't mean you don't have them.
Have been developing systems like this for years.
A few telematics systems lets you silently call upp the vehicle and eavesdrop using the handsfree functionality, but most don't. Some of the protocols supports it, while the vehicle implementation of it does not.
What a call center operator can always do, however, is silently track your car. It usually works by calling up the vehicle over Verizon's WIN4 net, transmit authentication codes and a request to track the car's progress. Every five-fifteen minutes thereafter, the car will call up and transmit a GPS log to the call center.
Remote door unlock is often also a trivial matter.
No, you cannot call up and hijack the vehicle from the ordinary phone network since all WIN4 subscriptions have an areacode of 500, rending them unreachable from any ordinary phone. Calling out to them is a long and tedious process. On top of this, every vehicle usually have a unique passcode generated when the car is built. A list of these passcodes are then sent directly to the call center who uses them to access the cars.
No, you cannot reprogram the 800 number dialled by the vehicle in case of a crash or other event. The number is setup in the WIN4 network. No matter what number you are trying to get to from the handset, you will end up at the same DNIS.
My $.05
Try again, you still need a warrant. Might I suggest reading the PATRIOT act at some point?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I asked the dealership where the onstar equipment was, and they said it was buried deep in the dash somewhere, totally inaccessible. I had the vehicle home and 5 minutes later found it underneath the passenger rear seat. It's not labelled "ONSTAR UNIT", but it was pretty obvious. You pull the cover back and there is a nice motorola built case with two data cables going into it and a 3rd coax connection (for the antenna).
The Onstar stats say they recover 500 vehicles a month. Thieves really are idiots. All you have to do is disconnect the onstar box, or, at the very least pull out the antenna cable.
I was considering disconnecting the unit after my year was up, but then my wife's cousin who consults for onstar was telling me that they will perform 'public safety' services even if you don't have an active account. He said if you're even in a bad neighborhood, just hit the button and say "I don't feel safe", and they'll guide you out.
Interestingly, the onstar documentation doesn't come right out and say it, but it implies that they can use the onstar system (with built in gps) for reasons other than helping you. I can envision a situation where one parent might 'kidnap' their own kid and the other parent could get a court to use the Onstar system to locate the vehicle (or something like that).
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