Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
the NSA could be using loopholes in the law
Why use loopholes when they don't have any qualms about outright breaking the law?
As long as my wife doesn't know where I am then who cares about the government.
Gag orders are quite legal.
First Amendment rights can be suspended if it can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that it is in the interest of the common good. That is why it is illegal to yell "fire" in a theater when there is no fire - the possibility of people getting hurt in a panic balances your right to free speech.
Gag orders protect many national secrets that would cause the death of thousands, perhaps millions of people. They conceal the locations of government operatives, and protect the true capabilities of the nation's defense.
They are extremely beneficial when used correctly. Unfortunately, they are abused at a rate that is quite alarming by corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen.
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.