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Tracking Via Anonymous SIM Cards
Noryungi writes "The New York Times reports that Al Qaeda operatives were tracked using the ID of the GSM phone chips sold by a Swiss company named Swisscom. Very interesting."
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How is this a big deal, they can track cell phones... not news.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Psst.... Theres a black helicopter over your house right now!! Seriously, I dont like PATRIOT and the other crap pushed on us by the paniced public any more than anybody else, but saying the Navy shot down that plane is just ignorant.
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
It does say that the investigators became suspicious after listening to the call. It doesn't say why they were listening in the first place. They might have been investigating the guy for drug deals, heard the suspicious call, looked a little closer, and uncovered links to terrorism. The only evidence against that is the phrase "Investigators, suspicious that the call was a signal between terrorists", which implies that the suspicion caused the investigation. That could easily be written off as creativity on the part of the journalist.
Incredible claims require unquestionable proof, I think. Yes, there is clearly reason to be suspicious of how the government conducts these taps, but I disagree that you've found a clear admission of indiscriminate eavesdropping.
If you want a cell phone that can give your location to authorities, buy one with a built-in GPS receiver that transmits your location. There was never any legitimate need to upgrade the infrastructure to allow for tracking any cell user at will.
As far as I was aware, that infrastructure was in place from the very beginning.
In order for a cellphone company to properly give you service, they have to arrange for a series of cell towers over a wide range of space. These towers provide your signal. For uninterrupted service, the service-areas of each tower must overlap to a degree.
In order to bill you properly when you are roaming, the towers must be able to check your location against your home calling areas (for people with plans where this still exists). Which tower you're using at any given time is a matter of record.
If the argument is that they don't have your location down to a 10-meter square block, you might wanna guess again; by watching the way that your phone moves through the spheres of influence each tower generates it becomes mathematically trivial to triangulate your position with a precision that GPS would find envious.
If you're drudging out the `Navy shot down TWA 800` theory I'm tempted to classify you as a troll. Please don't bother frightening Slashdot with your Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt lines about the lack of privacy we now have post 9/11 -- you never had it to begin with.
Perhaps you should read it again, then. Investigators were not listening to random calls taken in by a broad net. Prior capture of other terrorists had yielded all sorts of phone numbers, addresses, and other contact and location information. Intelligence agencies then homed in on these particular phone numbers, recorded everything, and then analyzed it later. This is not "routine monitoring," this is targeted intelligence gathering. This is like saying that because the CIA tapped the Russian embassy's phone back in the 60's, the CIA was engaging in routine monitoring of all phone calls in the United States. That's ludicrous, just like suggesting routine monitoring of all cell phone conversations.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
alert to the phones' vulnerability, had largely abandoned them for important communications and instead were using e-mail, Internet phone calls and hand-delivered messages
So now that technology has been shown succesfull in stopping "terrorists", and those "terrorists" have moved to email/VoIP, get ready for another push in legislature to regulate those mediums more tightly. It doesn't matter that the corporation put those chips in their products by their own will. Traditional phone companies will see a spot to shove their foot in the door and lobby their representatives to regulate the up and comming internet telephony industry in order to stiffle the competition. So there is "antiterrorism" working and corporate money working in the minds of the government. What else is new...
a lot of people are calling this an invasion of privacy. This is hardly that.
Al Qaedia and its operatives have been identified as enemy combatants. Effectively, there's already an international 'warrant for their arrest'.
This technology, if had to be used in the US, would require a judge to approve a warrant for this type of information gathering. There'd have to be specific evidence that the individual was commiting a crime or likely to. Al Qaedia already falls under this category, IMHO.
Even further, this was a COMBAT action. In other conflicts, (see: wars) this is the same as using radar to identify enemy positions based on the metal used in their vehicles, etc.
And EVEN FURTHER, knowing where you are is essential in a cellular phone network. To forward the voice packets, the phones have to know the signal strength from your phone to the nearest towers. it figures your motion and signal degradation to determine the most likely cells to send your data to. knowing your approximate location is just a function of cellular technology.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
this is a nice example of the parallel existence of privacy and legitimate law enforcement. note that i say parallel, not tradeoff, the latter being the superficial way the alleged "tension" between the two is described. we can have both, and stronger than they are now.
... our methods seem gentle in comparison.)
i'd like to think i'm a decent pro-privacy civil libertarian, but i also admit getting a kick out of the law and order episodes when they so often trace someone's movements thanks to bridge tolls or telephone calls or ATM cameras or whatever. cool, hey presto and the bad guy is tagged. here, it's those bin laden cretins, no tears shed; and so it happens in real life). (the israelis once assassinated a man by detonating an explosive in his cellphone -- they waited to hear his voice and
now we have trackable cellphones (which are becoming ubiquitous), rfid chips, red-light cameras with OCR, etc. pretty easy and non-paranoid to imagine the automated abiity to track anyone anywhere.
there are so far as i know few constitutional problems if the data collected is publicly observable information, i.e., no expectation of privacy even if the sophistication of the technology to collect, process, and digest that information would astonish most of us (this does at least rule out Big Brother in your home). the old model was that evidence could be collected only with periodic intrusive methods like breaking down doors or inserting wiretaps, moderated by warrant and the exclusionary rule and so on. what no one expected, though, is the situation now where *unintrusive* methods continuously collect everything one might need. the fourth becomes an anachronism, and the patriot act seems quaint.
the only answer i see, or rather the inevitable path ahead, is to intelligently moderate access to and use of the data. the constitution is only the floor, congress went much farther with the anti-wiretap law. draw the "border" between leigt investigation and fishing expeditions. frankly i don't think we can do a good job of it, but it's the only route i see ahead. all these "public eyes" can not be shut, because we *like* too many of them and even a few innocuous steps may prove to open the door wide.
Doesn't this strike you as one of those things that maybe the government should not be advertising to the world? Let the idiots keep falling victim to the same blunder but who knows maybe it's just me :P
Read the "Facts about TWA 800" and found just ignorant speculation.
Unique to this crash was the intense participation of the Navy, which immediately dispatched its best deep salvage vessels to the area, and kicked out the New York Police Department divers, who had legal jurisdiction in the area.
Who's better equiped to pull up large debris from the ocean floor? The NYPD, or the Navy?
Most unusually, the Navy searched out 20 miles to either side of the known debris field, even though the 747 could not have glided that distance from its altitude of 13,700 MSL even if left intact.
This is probably the most ignorant thing of what I've read so far. Read this again and see if this is some how conspiratorial. A 747 could easily glide 20 miles if it's engines went out at 13,700 feet. Whoever wrote this must be under the impression that if a plane's engines go out the plane just drops like a rock.
The Navy justified this extensive search by claiming that they could not locate the aircraft flight recorders, the "black boxes", even though numerous private boat owners reported hearing the locator pings on their sonar and fish finders
Great! Because we all know how easy it is to find something on the ocean floor. It's one thing to pick up a "ping" it's another thing to actually find something the size of a toolbox.
And really... linking to a conspiracy website to support your views adds tons of credibility.
Of course, it's real easy for us to criticize the Nazis or Al Queda as inept because they left paper trails. The fact is that they were not entirely stupid (just look at the horrible things they did manage to accomplish). They probably did a lot to cover their tracks, leaving a lot of investigators bashing their heads on their desks during the search. In the end, though, the good guys simply did a better job (and spent a lot more hours) uncovering the tracks than the perps did in hiding them.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Well, the phone call that did them in was a minute of silence. That seems about as secure a conversation as you could have.
The loss of privacy in closed systems is very real. Most printers can be uniquely identified by certain features (invisible to the naked eye) that are created on the printouts. And I am not talking about the currency counterfeiting options. We can be sure that if email was implemented using appliances, every mail message would have a unique ID. Microsoft Office embedded a unique ID in every document it produced and that feature was only disabled due to a huge outcry by their customers. Has everyone forgotten the original P4 ID, and how it was to be used for tracking (called "authentication")? The only way to guarantee privacy is to have open systems which will ensure that a universal tracking system cannot be successfully implemented.
I'm sure that the investigators who uncovered this mistake by Al Queda spent a lot of time bashing their heads on their desks as they ran into dead ends. Like most police work, this "lucky break" probably only came to light after a lot of fruitless efforts. These investigators made their luck out of a lot of legwork and late nights.
We like to pretend that Al Queda is inept because it helps us sleep better at night. That fact is that in this case the good guys were simply better (and more persistent) at uncovering tracks than Al Queda was at concealing them.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I knew what that link was going to be before I even clicked on it. That's a valid point but also a completely ignorant one.
There's a huge difference between a warship off the American coast and one in the Persian Gulf in the middle of a warzone with an unidentified aircraft approaching it and refusing communications. The crew of the USS Vincennes attempted several times to communicate with the "bogie" ("bogie" means unidentified air contact -- "bandit" is a confirmed hostile contact) but received no response on any of the standard guard frequencies. At that point the Captain had a decision to make -- wait for the contact to get close enough to identify visually (hint: if it's hostile by now it's already fired it's weapons and your fucked) or engage it. Considering that he was in the middle of a war zone (the Iranians had attacked US shipping and warships several times in the preceding weeks) he decided to engage it. I would have done the same in his shoes.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a warship off the American coast would hardly be in the same situation. I can hear the conversation now in CIC:
Radar Guy: Captain, we have an unidentified contact that just appeared over JFK international airport. It is on a direct course for us sir.
Captain: Shit! It must be hostile. Go to battlestations and bring the weapons and radar online.
First Officer: Should we attempt to communicate with them sir? They are still 40 miles away.
Captain: No! There's no time for that! Weapons free! Engage the target at will!
Pa-leease.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So when some of us, after plenty of good reason, don't trust our government, we're made fun of and told to put on our tin-foil hats. But when Al Qaeda is beaten even after taking precautions of using phone "chips" that they bought anonymously, we laugh at them for not being cautious enough.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.