Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth Surveillance Tested In the UK
KentuckyFC writes "If you live in the city of Bath in the UK and carry a Bluetooth-enabled device, your movements may have been secretly monitored in an experiment designed to test surveillance techniques in prisons. Researchers from Bath University recorded the movements of 10,000 Bluetooth-enabled devices during their 6-month trial. They say the experiment was a test of a technique for monitoring the interactions between prisoners in jail that could be used to work out which inmates have become closely associated. The work was prompted by revelations that the Madrid train bombers who devastated the city in 2004 first met in a Spanish prison (abstract)."
.. the tracking feature in your current cell phone? The nature of "Cells" enables device tracking.. Thats how it works.. Cells monitor and could record differential signal strength and plot your movements easily. Even with the tracking feature "disabled" I; for one welcome ....
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
If anything, a criminal would carry a bluetooth spoofer. All it has to do is capture the signal of another bluetooth device, and just broadcast it as your own.
Maybe even set it up so you press a button, and it randomly picks another bluetooth signal nearby and starts broadcasting that one. Would entirely defeat the system, and cost maybe 20$ and a bit of time at radioshack.
firstly, you don't give up the rights, those charged with protecting them stop doing that job (the effect, of course, is much the same).
Secondly, the point is that this experiment was run in public without the knowledge or consent of the innocent people who were its subjects. Now, at the moment this is just academics doing what academics do, but mark my words, the police will try to get hold of this technology. My advice to the researchers is to publish their results, then destroy all the equipment and schematics.
It's already too late. The sun is setting on democracy in the UK.
Well yes of course, but let's not assume that lack of tech familiarity is justification for getting 1984-ed by the benign government. I can't believe the general public is being used as testing grounds for civil rights abuses in jails. It's very funny if you think about it. It's also the scariest thing the big brothers in the UK have come up with in a long time.
Right, right. Apparently, they're called "witness summons" now for people, though I have no idea what you call subpoena duces tecum nowadays. I'm sure that you have some procedure for compelling potential witnesses to a crime to appear and present documents -- like this data.
While two university students don't represent your whole population, the tolerance you people have of being watched by cameras all day does. Frankly, I find your countrymen somewhat distubring for supporting 24/7 pervasive surveillance.
And it's not a non-issue. It's a demonstration of a technique to track the coming and goings of non-criminal citizens for the purpose of determining who they associate with. So what if they claim the ultimate goal is tracking actual prisoners? They've demonstrated a far more useful purpose for it for a nanny state. Can you not imagine the utility this would have in tracking down members of protest groups? This is so much easier to sort through than video footage.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
In all this you forget that if the government really wants to track citizens to that level, it's trivial to triangulate someone's cellphone position even if they're not using it using existing technology, not to mention that recording someone's phone calls is far more useful than collating encrypted Bluetooth data and trying to work out who is saying what.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien