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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.'"
The war on terror has claimed another victim.
mandatory ankle bracelets they can use to track you all the time.
Can I just ask one question? WHY? Is tracking wireless really necessary?
This is just yet another attempt to monitor what we're doing and where we are. Who says that the transmitter in the phones would only transmit the location?
"(As a side note, I think it's cowardly for FCC officials to refuse to have their names mentioned, but it was a condition of attending the event.)"
Yeah, if you cant stand in front of a conference type event that you evidently called for, and have the press print you as a source, I think thats seriously pathetic.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
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.
This could be used as a tool for big brother, not just 911 calls. You are as naive as a child if you don't see the dark possibilities in this. The FCC commissioners probably only see a new toy to play with in this tracking technology, and have no concept of the monster they are creating. Those who will exploit it are counting on the FCC to not "get it".
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
We (enterprise) have a hard enough job tracking our own and our rogue points. And it's not like users ever want to have a mobile access point for presentations at non-wifi locations.
And what about every laptop that is automagically converted into a wireless bridge/access point with a few clicks?
On top of which, what is it really necessary to track every wap? To "triangulate" a connection they'd still need to trace the origins of a voip call over the IP connection to figure out where the call was made. A wifi access point map doesn't give you much if you haven't got a way of sourcing the call.
If you compare what they're attempting and what they're saying, you'll find two different things.
If they were just trying to locate 911 callers, this could easily be done with a caller-enabled location system. When someone dialed 911, and only when someone dialed 911, it could report the location.
But what they're looking to do is much more. They want a system to enable law enforcers to quickly locate any individual person in the country. In other words, locating 911 callers is just a rather transparent excuse.
Do you know how you can tell that the federal government just wants more power to fuck with the commoners? Look at things like this, the USA PATRIOT Act and like the and tremble. The government talks about homeland security, but the borders are still open, we're still butt buddies with Saudia Arabia (mainly on the receiving end in more ways than one), the government pushes for things that mostly target the general public and the push is always for more and more power while *gasp* not doing anything consistently pro-security with it.
This is a good example of why I vote libertarian in every election. The government doesn't need to be able to track cell phones because it already has the powers it needs to control the influx of terrorists: deportation, border security and wire-tapping regular conversations. If our government cared less about not offending people and more about really using its basic powers first to fight major crime and terrorism, we wouldn't be wasting our time reading about this stuff.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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
If the answer to the first question is 'no', the next question is "Is anyone getting sick of the lies being told by our governments as a matter of routine?"
Guess you missed the news about the DEA seeking the arrest and extradiction of Marc Emery then ...
... and before anyone replies back with something like "but he was sending seeds to the U.S." ... the point is the tenticles of the U.S. extend to most ALL CANADIANS and to that of citizens of numerous other countries around the world - the DEA and other various U.S. law enforcement agencies actually have OFFICES and conduct investigations in Canada, and many other countries globally.
http://www.cannabisculture.com/
Emery is a CANADIAN citizen who has NOT been in the U.S. for over a decade, and operates his business from within Canada, including his web servers, etc.
Yet, despite all of that, the DEA has sought his extradiction
Point of my tirade is that moving may not help; in large part due to technology, such as being described in this Slashdot news item.
Ron
Except it's a false dichotomy.
They want you to believe they need full-time, universal access to your location in order to locate you when you dial 911.
That's obviously false. They only need your location to be reported when you dial 911.
The way it should work:
1) your phone is able to determine its current location at any time
2) if you dial 911, your phone sends along its current location information
It's that simple. The idea that it's a choice between safety and freedom is a lie, and a pretty barefaced one at that.
The U.S. government engages in more surveillance than any other country in the history of the world. The U.S. government spends more on surveillance than any country in the history of the world, and U.S. taxpayers are not allowed to know true total amount.
The departments of the U.S. government such as the CIA and NSA and FBI function as a world-wide secret police. Sure, they have openly acknowledged purposes, but much of what they do and how they do it is hidden from U.S. citizens. There are departments of the U.S. government that do secret police work whose names are even secret. United States taxpayers are expected to pay, and vote, and they are expected to accept that they won't have the full facts of the activities of their government. United States citizens are not allowed to know enough to base their vote on the facts.
Historically, U.S. government surveillance has had some political or economic benefit for those who wanted the surveillance.
--
If you support dishonesty and violence, don't say you are Christian.
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~
If you want to be located when you call 911, maintain a land-line. Where is the goddamn rocket science here, people?
You know what? If you don't have a land-line and you have to call 911 and can't speak...well, maybe you die. It happens. Sucks, but it happens. I hate this society...we've become obsessed with throwing huge wads of cash, effort, and legislation at the stupidest problems. 700,000 people die each year of heart disease; zero people a year die from terrorism. We spend billions on one, not on the other...and when Little Timmy dies because he choked on a marble 'cause mommy wasn't watching him, we get "Timmy's Law" which solves a Darwinism problem.
Please help metamoderate.
What the FCC is suggesting is clearly within reasonable bounds of methodology to insure successful commerce and increase national security. What with all the terrorists running around, we've got make sure we're safe. Personally, I'd like to see more of this kind of thing happening but not just tracking phones, tracking people too. The way I see it, the world is a dangerous place and you've got to make certain that the wrong sorts of people are carefully watched. Considering that I am not involved in anything that could be flagged as suspicious by law enforcement, I am confident that my reputation as an honest American will ensure my privacy.
The main problem with the griping about what the FCC proposes is that people don't want to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Instead of making sure they keep their noses clean to keep the FCC from taking an interest in their activities, they expect the nanny state to go the extra mile to create the illusion of privacy. That's the problem with most people these days. They have no sense of personal responsibility and expect the nanny state to do everything for them. This line of thinking is what costs lives to terrorism. If everyone let the government keep track of everywhere they go and everything they do, then the only people who would have anything to fear would be the true bad guys. Every other citizen would be safe and they would know that [tt]heir privacy was assured since they took it upon themselves to walk the straight and narrow.
Come on people! This stuff is simple. Instead of expecting the government to do everything for you take matters into your own hands by letting the government track you! It's not that hard to follow this line of thinking. I know that the Bush administration has definitely moved in a much better direction by stepping up surveillance. We haven't had one attack since 9/11 here and it's because we've given up the illusion of privacy for true personal privacy that WE control ourselves by NOT being criminals. Why is this so hard for everyone to get?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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.
This is especially bizarre given they are calling for universal tracking -- they want to know where we are and who we are but they won't even let us know who they are, yet they speak in the name of the public! This isn't just ironic; it's downright Kafkaesque.