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Speculation On Large-Scale Phone Location Snooping
An anonymous reader recommends a speculative blog entry by Chris Soghoian up on CNet. Soghoian makes a convincing case that the NSA could be using loopholes in the law to gather real-time location information on the mobile phones of millions of people. There is no hard evidence that this is happening, but the blog post sheds light on the dense undergrowth of companies populating the wireless space that could be easy pickings for a National Security Letter with a gag order attached. "While these household names of the telecom industry [AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint] almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of."
"with the dirty work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of."
That would be the NSC.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
... with the battery out, until I need it. I also keep a roll of aluminum foil with me in case I need to make a hat.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Gag orders themselves are not legal:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I can think of no greater service the press performs than to inform the population of a pending trial/investigation.
The right to investigate the government's actions is reserved to the people. Period.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
that's how i used to view owning a car, but after a while people stopped inviting me to get-togethers...
but seriously, there's relying on your friends when you accidentally leave your phone at home or in the car, and then there's treating your friends as walking pay phones. perhaps it's not as bad as telling people that you quit smoking and then bumming cigarettes off of everyone else. but it's still a pain in the ass trying to reach someone who doesn't have a cellphone.
i guess it all depends on your social life. maybe your friends are cool with it, or maybe you just don't need to use a cellphone very often. but i couldn't live without my cellphone. since getting a cellphone in high school i've lost the ability to remember people's phone numbers. this led to a rather embarrassing situation at the hospital when i couldn't tell the nurse what number to dial to reach my girlfriend.
this led to a rather embarrassing situation at the hospital when i couldn't tell the nurse what number to dial to reach my girlfriend.
Did you have clean underwear on at least?
What would be the motivation for *real-time* tracking of millions of people? How many watchers do you need to watch a million people?
...is read your EULAs!!!
Oh look, here on page 13, "You hereby agree to the NSA spying on you without any legal notification of any kind."
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
the NSA could be using loopholes in the law
Why use loopholes when they don't have any qualms about outright breaking the law?
I was recently hired by a company that works on classified information. Cell phones are not allowed, by DOD policy. The risk lies in the ability of [??] to remotely activate the phone and eavesdrop on the microphone. This wasn't a joke, several people believe the capability already exists.
As long as my wife doesn't know where I am then who cares about the government.
I'm absolutely against this sort of terrible thing, but, um... it is the kind of contract with more immunity to outsourcing.
This is my sig.
Is this because you don't want the NSA to know that you go to KFC, or is it because you don't want the FBI to know that you don't go to Taco Bell?
Just think, every time you borrow a phone, you expose yourself to voice analysis by the NSA.
I wish I had delusions of importance. Or was actually important.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Every other day, I tie my cell phone to a well trained swallow (european - it's a small phone) and let it fly around with it all day. Worst case, it nests in the eaves of a meth lab, in which case I present the DEA with the swallow.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
With the spotty performance of the GPS on my 3G iPhone, I don't need to worry about the NSA ever finding me!
blog |
If you can vote, please vote for Congresscritters and a President who explicitly endorse an end to this bullsh*t.
It is easy to keep a secret: tell no-one! Two people can only keep a secret if one or both of them are dead.
Sure, the NSA could try. Maybe even under a legal smoke-screen. The problem is the gag order wouldn't stick. Too many people would need to know, or see the traffic. Somebody, somewhere would leak. Lots of good, anonymous ways. And it is not as if they're comitting treason.
Besides, I don't think this would yield much. Anyone concerned with surveillence should have their cells turned off unless making a call or expecting incoming/gathering txts. More concerned invidividuals will use disposible phones.
Unfortunately, this is just one facet of a larger problem with no especially easy solution.
Trouble is, a lot of modern high-tech, networked systems generate huge amounts of potentially creepy data just in order to work. Your cellphone is useless if the network doesn't know what cell you are in, who you are calling, and what cell they are in. Nor does it work if the network doesn't know which handset and SIM are yours. Credit and debit cards only work because the system knows who to transfer money from and who to transfer it to. Hell, the internet isn't going to work all that well if systems between you and your destination don't have the information they need to deliver packets.
Now, none of this means that we should aggregate and make use of these data, indeed, I think we shouldn't. However, because all these data necessarily exist for the system to work, they are constantly just sitting there, yours for the collecting. That makes legislative or cultural safeguards extremely difficult to build, even under the best of circumstances(ours are not the best of circumstances).
Unfortunately, I don't know of any good way out. In some cases, it might be possible, with sufficient will, to build systems that don't generate so much compromising information(I hear very interesting things, for instance, about using clever crypto tricks for electronic currency). In others, that may not be possible. While you can, at a cost of latency and bandwidth, make tracking your activity on a network a nuisance(see tor), you would be hard pressed to defeat an opponent who can see the whole network, and you certainly can't match the efficiency of unobfuscated traffic.
Barring a more or less apocalyptic collapse of modernity, we are going to have a damn difficult time building technology that doesn't, just in order to work, know rather more about us than we would like. Nor will it be very practical to directly legislate against particular abuses, the tech changes too quickly, and a disconcerting proportion of legislators are thick as posts when it comes to technological issues.
If there is any hope at all, which I'm not sure that there is, it would be in doing what we can technologically(cryptographic cash + encrypting everything we can + avoiding potentially backdoored systems) along with encouraging a culture that rejects surveillance.
I was recently hired by a company that works on classified information. Cell phones are not allowed, by DOD policy. The risk lies in the ability of [??] to remotely activate the phone and eavesdrop on the microphone. This wasn't a joke, several people believe the capability already exists.
Having the cell phone remotely activated is the least of their concerns. They're more concerned about YOU activating it, or using it to store something.
I have a friend who works on classified stuff too (as does just about anyone who works in DC/Maryland.) They have a room that is for use of classified systems and materials.
Cell phones etc are kept outside because everything that goes in, stays in, so that it can't be used to bring something out. For example, he took a USB mouse in, and had to buy a new one to replace it- they wouldn't let the USB mouse out, because it could be used to hide stuff. Maybe it had been modified with memory, or opened up and something classified stuffed inside the case. Etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Here we go again. it isn't what they have to hide, it's the things that you don't want to tell people. Just because it's the government *gasp!* it doesn't give them the right to force everyone into revealing what kind of underwear they're wearing. You might not value your privacy and have no problem giving out information, but at what point will you start to have a problem with it? At that point, you're no different than those of us who prefer to give out no unnecessary private information at all. And still, neither group has anything to hide. Does it make sense now?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Back in the day, upon finding a friend's phone unattended, I used to change their language to something unintelligible. These days, I leave the language alone and go straight for the GPS tracker setting. That's right, I opt my friends in for tracking by the government. Pretty funny!
305,063,243 Americans
talk 0.11 hours per day on the phone or 6.6 minutes on average per day or 2,409 minutes a year
or 734,897,352,387 total minutes a year
Using GSM cellphone audio compression technology of 5.6kbps or 336kbpm or 246,925,510,402,032 kb/year or
30,865,688,800,254 KB/year
or
30,142,274,219 MB/year
or
29,435,815 GB/year
or
28,746 TB/year
or
28 PB/year
and if you assume people mostly talk to other Americans you only need to record half of the conversions
or 14 PB/year
1TB drive currently costs about $200 or
$3 million dollars to store all the made calls in the US in a year plus overhead.
At this point, I think it's pretty clear that people need a secure way to perform key exchange with friends and have the keys stored and the conversations decrypted off of their mobile phone devices.
Why aren't such systems in the consumer space yet, and cheap?
I think one can reasonably take the position (like I do) that I might be annoyed if something private about my life were to be released. My credit card number, for example, or conversations I have with friends and relatives. But I wouldn't be ashamed or otherwise hurt.
I may not want it to be released, but if it were released, the only major harm would be my annoyance.
Demand privacy. Do not require it, or you will become a slave to it. You can't be blackmailed if you have no secrets...
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Privacy advocate(n): Someone so boring no one would bother spying on them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
but i couldn't live without my cellphone.
You know what? I think you would be ok if you didn't have a cell phone.
* GPS (It knows where you are)
* No way to remove battery (You can't turn it off)
* No multitasking/process monitoring without jailbreaking (You can't see what it's doing)
* No video capabilities (You can't record the police-- which is one of the few dangers to the state, these days.)
Interesting that a device so compelling in so many ways is crippled in such specific ways.
Oh, and of course... it's AT&T.
See, people like to think that nobody else knows about them. At least, when they don't want anybody to.
But the truth is that when you are in public, there's this horrible electromagnetic vibration generated by a large source (called the "sun") which generates EM radiation. Almost without exception, some of these EM rays will bounce off you and be detectable by other biological units that contain passive EM radiation sensors. (eyes)
Once so recorded by biological units, the information about your whereabouts is thereafter not private at all. Said biological unit might be your wife, who may or may not appreciate the red-head's hand that you are holding at the fancy restaurant you told her last week was "too expensive" for a Friday night date.
Get over it! The problem isn't the PRIVACY of your data but its TRANSPARENCY.
When your county's land ownership is a matter of record as a piece of paper at the county office (circa 1960) the fact that it's "public record" is no big deal, because there's a certain amount of privacy in the fact that, to find out who owns your house, somebody has to physically go to the county office, talk to the extremely overweight clerk (the one in the white sweater with breasts the size of small watermelons) in order to view the deed for your street address, and then write that down to know who you are.
But it's different when there's a website with your house ownership, phone number, social security number, and just about everything else known about you, available with a mouseclick or a google search. I just searched my home address, and found that google dutifully returned my name, and both of my home phone numbers. It took me another 2-3 minutes to search and get my SSN.
Privacy? Fat chance. And anything that uses the airwaves is, by definition, part of a public resource. You are no private with your cell phone, cellular card, or wifi card than you are with the sunlight and your wife.
Get used to it. Decide if it's worth it, and make up your mind.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Since when does anyone have the right to call me and expect an answer? Last I checked, the only person who gets to decide this is me, and most of the time I'm not interested in getting calls. Sure, friends sometimes complain that they can't call me whenever the urge takes them, but I point out that the phone is there for *my* convenience, not theirs, and that I'm the one paying for it so I'm the only one that gets to decide how it's used. They know that if they need to contact me, email is far more likely to get a response in a timely fashion than anything else.
Most of the time my cell sits in a desk drawer, powered off. I take it out when I think *I* might have a need for it, not when I think *someone else* might have a need for it. Since those occasions are fairly rare, I spend much of my day blissfully unbothered by people who think they just *have* to call me and interrupt whatever it is that I'm doing, because god knows, whatever they have to say is far more bloody important than whatever it is I'm doing at the time!
You jest, but isn't it a little sad that one must be an amateur cryptographer to have some privacy?
Why? Why is that sad? That has been true, throughout all of history. The more people you interact with, the less privacy you have. The equation has remained the same time immemorial.
That's because Privacy at the levels some seem to think they are entitled to now, is incredibly hard and basically does not work without much diligence.
What we can all be happy with though is the fact that larger amount of interconnected data render us not invisible, but instead anonymous. Yes people CAN track your cell phone, along with tens of thousands and millions of people in the same city. Yes you are watched by a hundred hundred cameras on your way to work. But who cares, because NO ONE can sift through all that data unless they have a very specific purpose, and even then the data is so lossy the value in it is practically nil.
Just look at England, a camera network set up specifically basically to spy on the public. The fact that it has no impact on the crime it was meant to deter and punish means that even when you try to keep the data organized, there is so much that you will fail.
So smile for the camera, because chances are it's the only thing that will ever see you. You are not important enough to watch, and if you were no systems are really good enough to watch you all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I feel the same way about email. I keep my email application closed except when I feel like emailing people. I don't have email so people can email me whenever they feel like it. Its so I can email them. And when I send emails, I don't even check what people have sent me.
Hopefully, the people I email don't work the same way. Then every one would turn off their phones^w email and no one would ever be able talk to each other.
It is obviously your choice, but if you think about, why would you have a cell phone at all? If its there for your own convenience, and all of your friends phones are for their convenience, and you don't expect them to answer when you call. The only reason you would have for a cell phone is to call businesses.
Or I suppose you could arrange phone calls over email....
This is not the funny you're looking for.
You can't be blackmailed if you have no secrets...
Lets say one day you protest something the government does that you don't like, lawfully exercising your free speech and rights to petition the government for a redress of grievance. Now you have popped up on the government's radar screen. They then go check the voluminous records they have started keeping on every American!
There are millions of laws on the books many of them are complex and hard for the average person to follow. How many of them have you broken and don't even know about it.
All the government has to do now is go back and go through your call logs and other electronic traces with a fine tooth comb looking for one to bust you with.
Your best friend is a member of several environmental groups, one of them the government suspects of environmental terrorism. You were in close proximity to this drug dealer, that mafia guy, some guy who got busted for breaking into homes.
Even though you are a law abiding citizen can you be sure that every single person you ever have come in contact with is, or was as well? That is the true danger of this. Guilt by association or proximity.
I hope this clarifies things for you somewhat...
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
The populace didnt think it was wrong either to letting the church or local govt know your religeons or history or gayness.
Then the psychos took over germany, had all the census data, and thought - wow theres a lot of scum around, lets purge.
The people rule, not the govt.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My favourite way to rebut the "if you have nothing to hide crowd":
If you have nothing to hide, why do you have a door on your bathroom?
Ages ago like in the 90s, when documentaries used to show all the fbi secrets, one showed how they used a relational map between criminals and friends, who knew who how often and for how long, this made a nice tidy pretty map, that could show hidden relationship layers or indirect 'friends'.
If facebook did this it would be amazing. Iam sure that old program has been expanded to every citizen and foreigner.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Because that's considered polite on our society? I've been in the bathroom when people walked in accidentally before. I survived the experience.
Why is this kind of non-news blogspam being allowed on /.?
"Well, they could do it...." is only acceptable when there is some evidence that "they" are actually doing it.
After all, the author of the blog post could be a child rapists and murder, but there is no evidence he actual is.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
These claims are often made by privacy advocates, but other sources have the opposite view.
However, even the EPIC acknowledge, that there was some contribution made by the CCTV surveillance: "Evidence from Europe, however, suggests that the benefits of CCTV are significantly overstated." They then skillfully juggle the facts: "While the average Londoner is estimated to have their picture recorded more than three hundred times a day, no single bomber has been caught," — omitting completely the case of the fairly high-profile recent case of German train-bombers. The EPIC-guys are not being entirely honest, and you should not be falling for it.
I don't think, a camera is any worse, than a policeman standing there watching. A society just can't afford so many policemen, so we resort to these cameras as productivity tools.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.