Slashdot Mirror
FCC Wants to Track Wireless
pin_gween writes "According to an article on ZDNet, the FCC wants the ability to track Wi-fi accessible phones like the ZyXel phone. The FCC's June report talked about several ways of realizing a caller's location: 'creating an "inventory" of every Wi-Fi access point in the United States, engaging in "mapping and triangulation" of those access points, compiling an "access jack inventory" for wired VoIP users, or even mandating that Net phones include GPS.'"
these guys have been watching too many spy movies. this could kill the industry. i really doubt it would happen on a large scale. perhaps under a warrant or soemthing.
always mosh clockwise
I'm an American citizen our God blessed government who drops cluster bombs on iraqi children needs more powers to spy on us to stop us becoming terrorists. We need to be implanted with chips to scan our thoughts and to manipulate us into flag waving compliance. I have nothing to hide in my thoughts. Bush is doing a great job. We need the Patriot Act to protect us from ourselves. We need to spy on each other like Cuba to stop each other becoming terrorists. We need to torture and rape those who won't support President Bush. We need to give more powers to our wholesome wonderful government.
http://www.infowars.com/
They want a list of EVERY access point?
I can't even imagine the immensity of that task. There must be millions of APs in the US, and the list would change on a day-to-day basis.
Without SSID broadcast, it wouldn't even necessarily be possible to discover them all.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
The article states that there will occur a "mapping and triangulation" of the access points. Triangulation may have worked to sniff out the spies in World War II, but nowadays it's ineffective for one simple reason: the number of branches to and from each node is too high.
I've worked (someone with a job on /.!) with WiFi access points for some time, and we constantly came across this hurdle. It's interesting that as technology develops, the capacity of both surveillance and anonymity increases.
Food for thought.
I dunno about you, but I WANT my phone to have GPS. Simply so they can locate me if I call 911 on my wireless phone. I think that would be the most elegant and potentially useful idea. Registering all Wi-Fi access points is WAY too intrusive and complicated. Simply making wi-fi phone providers insert an inexpensive GPS locator into the phone makes much more sense, and the phone makers can turn it into a feature! (Wardriving with your Phone! W00T!)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The question is more like WHERE? Where in the world do you store all this tracking info.
Hopefuly they will just opt for gps and then manufacturers will include a "debug mode" like on almost every dvd player to turn it off. If theres no debug code cutting a few leads and bridging some wires will do the trick for extra anonimity :) Rember if they think they can track you but they cant its even better then if they cant track you at all.
http://www.uwarfare.com the Best Seattle Counterstirke Community
The government wants to be able to control information. Sure, they are clueless as to how impossible that is, but that also means that they will try. It could easily kill lots of innovative businesses.. Perhaps thats the idea, the current GOP-led government is clearly obsessed with suppressing competition for their big corporate donors. The Dems are not angels, either..
Yes, Ultimately, it will mean that many businesses are started elsewhere, not in the US, but isn't that the case already?
The power elite cares much more about maintaining their hold on power than our 'national' future.. (nations are a quaint concept, but one which is useful in divving up the rights to you) Don't see what I mean?
Look at education.. they are clearly trying to defund the public education system (whats the point of training people for jobs that will be elsewhere anyway..public education was for training workers for industry, and without industry, it serves no purpose..prisons are more like where we are going..or 'recycling' like Leu's fate in George Lucas's early film, THX-1138.. America is being looted.. while it still has wealth..
'Milieu control' is what information blockades like China's are used for, filtering out information that causes 'cognitive dissonance'.. (Festingers' now-proven theory, also worth looking up)
Milieu control: its also a hallmark of cults and totalitarian regimes.. look it up..
I did RTFA, but I didn't feel like searching through a PDF for the answer to my question. How do they plan on identifying someone's location in one of these 911 incidents that they are so sure will happen?
To triangulate a broadcast location, don't you need at least 3 reciever stations in the immediate area?
If so, wouldn't that mean that you would already be in a decently populated area (we are taling about calling 911 in public, right?) where someone nearby should be able to find a land line while you are bleeding in the street?
Sounds like maybe 911 shouldn't be available with these phones, or that it should be a known risk in buying one that it may contribute to your death when operators have no idea where you are.
Vol~
even *if* this is just about 911, i'm all for a warning label on the box explaining that you can't be automagically found using that particular wireless phone. if that's a problem, find something else.
eric
You appear to be presuming this is about terrorism and the Patriot Act. If that is what it is about, the document would have said so. You must learn to trust the government and stop confusing your self with the between-the-lines stuff.
Folks, if you didn't see this coming, you haven't been paying attention.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Reminds me of a quote I read recently...
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
The Bush administration makes me feel like I'm stumbling through a bad dream.
- E -
Japan-A-Madness
http://jmad.blogspot.com/
Automatic routing of cellular 911 calls was introduced because manual routing worked very badly. California used to route all 911 calls from cell phones to the California Highway Patrol. As cell phones became more common, CHP dispatch was overwhelmed. By 2002, the CHP was getting over 8 million calls a year, most of which didn't involve freeway incidents, which is most of what the CHP handles. Call hold times on 911 were reaching 10 minutes during peak periods. The CHP was running a huge call center, which basically asked where callers were and forwarded their calls to some local 911 dispatch center.
That's the background for cellular 911. It's convenient that the dispatcher gets the location of the caller, but the real benefit is that the call gets sent to the right dispatcher.
If 911 routing isn't automated for VoIP, where should the calls go? Some call center in Bangalore? If the VoIP provider doesn't have some clue where the caller is, that's about all they can do.
There's worse stuff than this going on. The extension of the "Commmunications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act" rules to VoIP is much more of a Big Brother thing. If you aren't aware of how this works, the basic concept is that wiretapping has been built into the phone system, and wiretaps are now delivered to law enforcement over T1 lines. The US wiretapping system is run by Verisign. That's being extended to VoIP.
The really bad ideas always start out in the clothing of good ideas and then just sort of creep down the slippery slope.
The problem with these tools is that the people using them imagine themselves to be unambiguously the good guys. And the sad truth is that often they are the good guys. But they don't understand that they have no way of assuring that the people running the show tomorrow will be the people running the show today. People don't live forever. People don't hold the same job forever.
Even without a political attack, there's still the issue that you have to hand over the tools you build today to the government employees of tomorrow. Even if you just look at political party issues, the mildest of all possible concerns: if you're a Democrat, do you trust the Republicans with the spy tools you've made, or if you're a Republican, do you trust the Democrats? And when you add in the possibility of enemy infiltration, influence through bribes, and outright attack to take control, it gets scarier in a variety of ways.
Any time you centralize the power of the Good Guys, you risk that in a single stroke, the Bad Guys (however you define them) can take central control of everything. One of the big protections of the United States, rarely talked about, has been the non-centrality of the "root password". That is, even if someone took over Washington, they would not necessarily control all the states.
As things get more and more centralized, and all these walls between agencies are broken down in the name of "efficient prosecution", the walls are also broken down that prevent "efficient toppling".
What I find ironic is that the people who want this power are also the biggest supporters of the Second Amendment, which was never historically about hunting and always about protecting the right of the people to retain the power to overthrow the government if it ever got uppity. (I seem to recall that some--e.g., Jefferson?--thought this would probably need to happen every 20 years or so...) Yet these tools they are creating for surveillance are designed specifically to assure that no such overthrow would ever succeed, nor even be attempted. Maybe that's even good. But if it is, we don't need all those second amendment guns. And if it's not, we don't need the cameras. Without even making a value judgment, I'll just say it seems just-plain-inconsistent to me.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
This requirement sounds much less like validating a 9-11 call location, and a whole lot more like "target acquisition" for a Hellfire-equipped UAV.
Could it be possible that the Dubya regime is finally planning to "bring the war home, all the way home"?
Dubya's goals changed from "...no place to hide, we'll smoke Osama bin Laden out..." to "...Osama's just one person, and not significant anymore...".
It also changed from "...we'll liberate Iraqi's and their WMD, while imprisoning Saddam bin Laden..." to (what now?) "...we'll leave the Iraqis with a complex, unworkable constitution and a fighting force (on paper) capable of maintaining a balance of (civilian) terror with the jihadists...".
One of Dubya's most scary invectives was "If you are not with me, then you are with the terrorists". The term "terrorist" has evolved from one being associated with Saddam bin Laden to a much broader definition, including DMCA violator, **AA thief, and liberal democrat, or labor union organizer, or racist anti-illegal immigration vigilante.
This doesn't matter much, because to get somewhere indoords, you presumably travel through the outdoors. ;)
So if you walk from A to B, "they" will know your path from leaving the door on A until entering the door on B. Not hard to figure out where you are if "they" don't get a signal while you're indoors somewhere.
Noticed how the conspirationalist "they" becomes more and more fitting to the matter at hand? Imagine I'd left off the apostrophes and just wrote they and everyone reading would know what I mean. How long until that time? As a citizen of the former communist East Germany, I tell you: "they" was commonplace there. "They" is just what people from inside the country call what outsiders would name "the regime". And as the actions of various US branches of authority converge, it certainly will be called "the regime" from the outside not too far from now.
It's an idea that is taking a long, long time become developed and it is very slowly coming into clarity among the power elite. The idea that the more that you use technology to focus the systematic application of violence for the control of society, the less of this violence can be used against those who create the technology.
The people who develop and engineer technology that is used to direct violence (directed violence being the police, the military, and the mafia, as opposed to random criminal acts) can ensure that this violence is never directed against themselves by building safeguards into the technology that prevents it from being used against those of the technology 'guild'. Technologists need to develop a new consciousness that transcends nationalism and corporatism and focuses on the idea that we should put the needs of the global tech community above the needs of the various governments, corporations, and religions.
High tech terrorism exists because the technicians are willing to give a higher loyalty to the religious fanatics who order other technical people to be randomly killed than they do to technical people that they are killing. This is wrong. We should protect ourselves first. Since we design and build the technology, we should ensure that the technology is not used against us. We should start doing this by refusing to use high technology against other members of the global tech community regardless of their nationality, religion, or corporate affiliation.
It's time for a very quiet, very discrete shift in loyalty in the global tech community. We need to develop the deep idea that our primary allegiance is to our own people, and our secondary allegiance is to God, country, and corporation.
Generals, CEOs, mullahs, and presidents can never make world peace or progress. They simply have too much gain from constant endless wasteful war. But since the modern means of directing violence is increasing based on technology, we, the designers and builders of this technology, have more control over the systematic application of violence than the nominal rulers of society.
Why should we care if the government, the police, the fascist mullahs, or the mafia is using technology against the people? Just as long as they are not using it against our people.
This meme is one of the primal ideas of the new Information age that is developing out of the excesses and breakdowns of the Nation-State Age.
Law enforcement should not have extensive powers of surveillence over law-abiding citizens whom have given no sign that they have broken any law. As long as there is fundemental disagreement in this country as to what is right and wrong, it is a bad idea to give our government the ABSOLUTE ability to impose the (currently) popular ideology on the minority. It's a good thing that people are able to rebel. Bad laws are often defeated by people breaking the law (see: civil rights of the 1960s and the Prohibition.)
I know this is a hard concept to wrap your head around, but if the government is given the means to completely wipe out all lawbreakers, it will be the end of democracy and the birth of a sickening (and yes, Orwellian) form of totalitarianism. Everything our legislators pass will instantly become a reality, and there will be no way to stop or reverse it even if it turns out to be a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Openness is bad because our productive society as a whole (I'm exluding "hardened criminals" here) does NOT have a unified moral code. Personally, I don't want to give the FBI the ability to, say, prevent sex toys from being sold if President Jeb Bush manages to sell congress on the "war on dildos." I don't want to give the DEA the power to eradicate all pot in the USA. I don't want to give the FBI the ability to investigate to find out if a person is gay, and then "accidentally" leak this information if they don't like that person's (perfectly legal) actions.
Maybe you disagree with all of these personal preferences, and that's fine, but just remember that it's not guaranteed that YOUR preferred rule of law will be passed by an essentially omnipotent "open" government. If you're not a Protestant Christian, for example, it's likely you will disagree with many of the laws that come out of a conservative-controlled DC.
But you will have no choice but to follow them at all times, because even the slightest rebellion can be detected and you will be arrested long before you have the chance to start a even a peaceful, Ghandi-like campaign.
By the way, I love the fact that you're in complete agreement with an obviously ironic post. Re-read it, and see if you can spot the sarcasm this time. Bonus points for every contradictory sentence you find.
From what I understand from friends in Eastern Europe (former Soviet controlled states), this is already happening. Even on their local television stations, "they" are referred to as the "Bush regime." Also, the people in these former communist countries swear up and down that Bush and his crew are communist (they explained to me that they mean this in the Stalinist fashion, not Marxism).
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Clinton gave us NAFTA and the DMCA. Those were different times, but Clinton was not really a friend of the people.
From a strategic point of view, it may well be easier to implant chips in the population after we have national health care. Just think of how safe the children will be then!
I think the U.S. has a kinder, gentler form of tyranny and oppression, compassionate fascism. Lobbyists are mainly controlled by big money donors. They more or less dictate policy to both parties. The conflict between the parties serves to distract the population from many important issues.
See...the problem is, that's retarded.
Sure, GPS works outside, with a mostly unobstructed view of the sky.
Ever use GPS in a canyon (urban or in the boonies)?
How about with large overhanging objects overhead?
How about indoors?
GPS is everywhere, sorta.
But the reality is that Wi-Fi goes a lot of places GPS does not.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Since many IP devices are WiFi enabled already, I propose a network of WiFi location beacons. Just like APs broadcast SSIDs, why not make cheap, autonomous GPS/WiFi devices that simply rebroadcast their GPS location via WiFi? Deploy them by the truckload into major cities and let the laptops and the WiFi phones of the world choose to listen if they want.
This would provide a solution to the FCC's stated desires (providing E-911 to VoIP), while avoiding the mess that a network-based location tracking system would cause. A client-driven system needs to exist so that location determination and transmission is under complete control of the client.
I'm interested in throwing ideas around about this concept - wifigps@gmail.com if you want to discuss at length.