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How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
Lauren Weinstein writes to point us to his essay on the realities of using an idle cell phone as a bug, as a recent story indicated the FBI may have done in a Mafia case. From the essay: "There is no magic in cell phones. From a transmitting standpoint, they are either on or off... It is also true that some phones can be remotely programmed by the carrier to mask or otherwise change their display and other behaviors in ways that could be used to fool the unwary user. However, this level of remote programmability is another feature that is not universal... But remember — no magic! When cell phones are transmitting — even as bugs — certain things are going to happen every time that the alert phone user can often notice."
Like a poster on the earlier story commented, why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone? My mom has them, and every time she's on a call, or even on an incoming SMS, the LEDs go berserk!! They don't even need batteries and power themselves off the cellphone radiation. Pretty foolproof method, IMHO.
I have a pay-as-go phone they are not anonymous. In many places (e.g. Germany), you have to register your details to get it, in other places your purchase details are used from the credit card to register it.
When I bought one with cash, just after I bought it, I received wrong number calls, but the people involved didn't seem to want to hang up like normal wrong number calls.
Them: "Is Mark there?"
Me: "I'm sorry, there's no Mark here, you must have a wrong number."
Them: "I'm sorry, are you sure you're not mark"
Me: "you have a wrong number"
Them: "Oh my mistake, thanks again erm Mr erm...." pauses to see if you'll complete the sentence.
This happened again and again and again, different scripts, but always a wrong number guy who just wouldn't go away. Until one day my wife answered and said my name.
Her: "No this is ???????'s phone"
After that I never received another wrong number call.
Now I put that down to random chance, since I'm not worth spying on. But then my wife got a new pre-pay mobile, again she paid cash, and sure enough she got the same pattern of calls. We were talking about it yesterday, when the phone rang, and it was woman this time, who again was a wrong number, but didn't seem to want to hang up.
Many different phone numbers used each time, we're building a list.
Just use a pay phone. Get rolls of dimes from the bank.
Slightly off-topic:
An easy way to warn you that your GSM phone call may be intercepted: look for the cipher indicator icon. It typically looks like an open lock. If your phone displays this icon, the base station has turned encryption off for this call.
This typically happens when the They have ordered the phone company to spy on you, or when reception is low.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Hello,
Just as an experiment, I tried placing my cell phone into an anti-static mylar baggy and the signal went from 100% to 40% (or five bars to two). Repeating this with tin foil with a small opening to see the LCD (about 1cm^2) reduced the signal to 20% (or one bar).
I am wondering that if someone wants to have a private verbal conversation sans listeners on the cell phone, all they have to do is place their cell phone in metal box?
This would seem much more convenient than having to pull the battery out, as well as reduce wear and tear on the contacts or thin plastics of today's cell phones.
Perhaps someone who is a bit more familiar with electronics could explain whether or not a "tin foil hat" (or a metal box or foil bag, ala Enemy of the State) for a cell phone would work?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
With the new phones you could probably go further then that. Have it randomly listen in and then parse the conversations heard for keywords and if a keyword happened within a set time then listen in more.
Compress what you want and then send it as burst transmission.
The first time it happened, I did what you were saying and write it off to chance. That was after 8 of these odd conversations in the first 2 months, by about the 5th I noticed they all were trying to talk me round into giving my name, so I was really angry when my wife answered my phone and gave my name.
After that it has so far been 10 months of no wrong calls.
I asked her why she told a total stranger my full name, and she said it was the way he persisted in talking, the conversation naturally led to a point where my full name was the gap in the conversation.
Then when *she* got a prepay and it started with her, the very first call she got was in front of me, she said you have a wrong number and when he didn't hang up the penny dropped. I signaled to her remind her about the previous time she'd handed out my name.
I put my head up to listen in, and it is totally clear to me that he was trying to talk her into revealing information. If her phone supports recording, I'll try and record some of these calls and put them up on the web so you can hear for yourself. She's had 10 so far in her first 2 months of having the phone.
I also have a phone for work calls only, but I signed a service contract when I bought it and haven't made any international calls on it, it's never had a wrong number in the 12 months I've had it.
Just to remind you Microsoft has the power to install just about any software in your computer with the automatic Windows Update method. To give a different set of "updates" to a given IP address would be trivial.
If we are talking Windows Genuine, then, delivering something to a specific Windows registration code should be trivial.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Use their own designed encrypted systems, or buy $5000 comms talkies from the russians.
They use high tech RF mapping signature maps to see where there are dark spots
in the FBis monitoring systems.
If your making billions in profit each year, you can afford to spend $5-10m in custom design hardware from china
or fly 1000s of flights to map the intercepts.
Only part time low lifes use mobiles, because they cannot afford anything greater than $200USD, which means they must
be very small time crooks.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You're being watched because you're within six degrees of seperation with a terrorist.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The calls I make from my home phone have the time of the call and the phone number called recorded.
The calls I made from my mobile had the time of the call, my location and the phone number called recorded.
All the websites I visit, have the domain name recorded.
All the emails I sent have the time of sending and the receipient recorded.
When I pay by credit card, the location, time and amount of the transaction are recorded.
When I cycle into town, I go past about six cameras - I'm recorded by each one.
All of this information is available to the State without any form of judicial oversight. A policeman on a whim could keep a very close watch on my life.
So I'm not being paranoid here - this list *IS* the list of the monitoring conducted on all of us.
I've committed no crime. I'm totally innocent.
Why am I being monitored? why does the State have to keep records of who I talk to and when I talk to them and where I am when I talk to them? am I suspected of something? I'm not. So why? because I *might* do something? that's outrageous! and in fact it's proper tantamout to suspecting me of something - it is suspected that I *might* commit a crime, which is just a weaker version of we *do* suspect you comitted a crime.
What people don't realise is that although the State has always recorded plenty of information on us, the game has changed because of computers. Computers plus surveillance isn't just more of the same; it's something utterly new and *different*.
"Nice conspiracy theory, but you do realize that you're identifiable without your cooperation if you have a cellphone, don't you?"
I don't think they are interested in me or my wife, (not that they know she's my wife). I think they are profiling all telephone calls for patterns of interconnection.
We both make international calls to the far east, and I think we score highly on some equation in a computer somewhere. International calls from prepay phones in foreign languages where the phones were paid for in cash and the extended guarantee wasn't accepted and the top up cards are all paid for with cash.
If you only know us from our mobile phone logs we must look very suspicious if you were a spy agency involved in call profiling.
OK, this has come up a lot in many conversations.
First off, cell phones have batteries internally, much like the battery your mobo has to keep it's settings.
Why would cell phones differ? Take your main battery out, the time/alarm/etc settings are saved, doesn't that give you any clues?
The phone is powered at any given time, it's not a matter of whether the screen is lit or not...
They could, and can, and do, use cell phones as bugs, there's nothing new to that.
Personally I wonder if it's not just a case of Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It could be that someone just wrote down the wrong phone number for someone named Mark, and your obstinacy to not give any detail tripped _their_ paranoia.
I'm saying it because something similar happened on my normal (non-mobile) phone line. And the Deutsche Telekom certainly had all my data there, so there would have been no need for such a masquerade.
Anyway, someone with an extra-thick arabic or maybe turkish accent repeatedly called, first to ask to talk to Achmed or something like that, then gradually after a few calls (spaced a couple of weeks apart) it turned into trying to bully me into "admitting" that I'm Achmed. (Dunno what gave him _that_ stupid idea.) And, yeah, demanding to know who I am, if not Achmed. By the time it turned into screaming at me in his weird language, I told him I'll call the police if he doesn't leave me alone.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They're not necessarily bill collectors.
I'm currently stationed overseas, and I got into a car accident while on leave in the States. The other party decided to sue for damages (I love living in America) and my insurance company played the "he's overseas serving the country, are you honestly going to force him to come back to deal with this?" card, the judge agreed, and delayed the trial until my tour's up, which at the time was more than two years.
My wife has been getting calls on her cell phone (she's still in the states) that go like this:
"Is binarytoaster there?" "...No, he's overseas." *click*
It's honestly that fast from the way she puts it - they just ask if I'm there, and upon getting that answer they just hang up. Never say who they are, never leave a number, nothing. Been going on for at least a few months now.
She was completely confused by why anyone would do this, as was I, until I remembered the lawsuit. So they might not be collectors, but they're still just as annoying.
Yeah, but some aren't. I had an interesting run in with some credit card scammers earlier this year. I got a call from my credit card company about 10 minutes after I bought lunch one day. It was from the fraud early warning system, which I'd gotten a few times now. These were usually due to me flying around the country, or taking extended road trips, or making very large purchases ($900 in appliances, $1500 in furniture, etc.). I wasn't too worried about it.
.com that was based in the same state as this old address, and donations to a charity of a few cents.
This time, though, I it asked if I could verify a purchase for "theme park tickets," "appliances," and some other things. I told it no, and an amazingly easy 15 minutes later, my account was frozen, all the obvious charges were rolled back, and a new card was on the way, along with some paperwork for me to flag other charges that the CC company missed.
The scammers had my old address apparently. I knew this because they tried to order a convection oven (who'd have figured?) and have it shipped to my old address. My guess is that this is the address in whatever database that got cracked. When I did get my next statement, I noticed a few charges to some random "music store"
It turns out that credit card company had cancelled far more of these "song" purchases, and "donations." The thieves had made, over a few weeks, donations of varying amounts from a few cents to about $2, and random song purchases of about $1. It seems that they were trying to establish that I was "normally" spending money in the area where I used to live, and also verifying that my card was still legit.
So yeah, some criminals are dumb. Others are not. The fraud detection systems we have are pretty good though.
Michael C. Hollinger
Using prepaid cell phones seems like a fantastic way to gain anonymity, but at at least here in teh US, pre-paid phones are considered a 'red flag' for evil doing. Remember those poor guys in Minnesota a few months ago? They purchased a hundred or so pre-paid phones, for legitimate sale on Ebay, and were arrested. The logic was pre-paid phones are only used by terrorists and drug dealers. In a way, using a pre-paid phone may attract more attention than just using a standard phone. Very sad, but very true. The reality of the situation is there are only a few thousand bugs/line taps performed by intelligence services each year. They just don't have enough 'listeners' to do all the spying the like. Thankfully we haven't gotten to the point where there is an individual 'listener' for each man woman and child. It probably isn't far off. I'm glad teh article mentioned the 'buzzing speaker test', that was my first thought also, as I've noticed all my phones over the years have created that buzzing sound when they ring or transmit.
Et In Arcadia Ego
Actually there was a problem with OnStar employees doing this to some famous people and or their ex for kicks.
I am pretty sure that you can find kits on line that add an LED that lights up when you the mic is active or a switch that kills them mike
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone?
Because newer phones can act as voice recorders and transmit the data later. You don't really think that an ordinary cell phone connection would have sufficient quality do you? It would be much better to make a high quality voice recording and transmit it as a file late at night or while the target is actually using the phone to talk or upload their favorite pictures to Photobucket. Internet capable phones can do all sorts of things regardless of your subscriber allowing you to benefit or not. They are computers with a good chunk of flash memory.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This case had judicial oversight, but the principle is sound and here's an illustration.
A man living under the Franco dictatorship asked a sympathetic secret policeman how to stay out of trouble with the government.
The secret policeman didn't pull out the usual lie "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". The secret policeman didn't say "Just obey the law". The advice was far simpler:
"Be invisible".