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Feds Can Locate Cell Phones Without Telcos
schwit1 sends along an Ars Technica report covering the release of documents obtained under the FOIA suggesting that the Justice Department may have been evading privacy laws in their use of "triggerfish" technology. Triggerfish are cell-tower spoofing devices that induce cell phones to give up their location and other identifying information, without recourse to any cell carrier. "Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that 'triggerfish' technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all. The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices..." The article does mention that the Patriot Act contains language that should require a court order to deploy triggerfish, whereas prior to 2001 "the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology."
Yeah, patriot act, rights violations, unecessary power, etc etc...
Where can I get one?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
any time, I just flushed it down the toilet. Trigger this fish tracking...
I saw a poorly disguised cell tower in a shark suit just yesterday.
I said it had to be a cop.
step 1, remove batteries.
or get a potato chip (mylar) bag and stuff it inside. (who know that the movie "Enemy of the State" would be so handy).
ONE time, but some of the sites i log into have ANOTHER time. Time in another time zone that I DID NOT SET on those profiles. Fuckers! (if it's them...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Can a program be written to notify if it's information is being 'given' out? Anyway, this is one more reason to NOT get one (cell phone). I was finally going to break down, and get one. With this report, it one more reason to just say no.
Wouldn't they have to know in general where I was with my cell in order to even setup this device? And good luck picking me out of the traffic jam as I and a hundred others yak away.
If it goes through the air, it can be tracked and located. This includes, to some extent, information that originates on the wire, but is then sent into space.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
The sentence "Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that 'triggerfish' technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all. " is weasily.
How does triggerfish lower the evidentiary bar required to authorize law enforcement to use special sensing technology to search for a cell phone?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
McNulty and Co. used "trigger fish" to collect info after the Barksdales moved to disposable cell phones. The devices would collect info without the use of pen registers and obviated the need for a lot of paperwork such as search warrants.
But this is like going through the trash. It's clearly an end-run against privacy laws, but I don't see where the deviousness is. If you carry a cellphone around that emits radio waves, you probably don't have a great expectation of privacy if you leave it on all the time. And it's not like the triggerfish are recording the conversation.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The article must be in error. Bush passed the patriot act to allow this to happen without warrants, not to impose the need for warrants, right?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Cause I'd like to see a giant rollback on that one, and a restoration of our innate civil rights and liberties, thanks.
1/20/2009 - the day America is BACK!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
and I didn't RTFA, I already knew..
Looks like we're going to need A LOT more tinfoil!
I wonder why they didn't use the Hawaiian name, "humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua'a"...
*shrug*
I have not carried a cell phone (on or off) for about a year.
How will they find me?
Privacy is not explicitly spelled out, though. I mean, there are the ninth and tenth amendments, but they're exactly the kind of thing you'd expect politicians to ignore due to their unambiguous, but unspecific language (and ironically, one of the more prominent "pro-privacy" rulings pretty much ignored the tenth amendment). Whittling at the weapons first, that's what's unexpected.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Look, this kind of thing will continue until the people say enough is enough. If you want this to stop, the only realistic course of action is to expose them.
It's that simple. The courts won't stop them. The apathetic public won't. Their superiors certainly won't. The only way to stop them is to utterly and completely expose them, and leave them totally naked before the court of public opinion. You've got a camera and a computer right? Start using them. Conclusively prove what we've known all along -- that this isn't about stopping the terrorists, it's about pursuing a political agenda that hasn't really changed since the 1950s. Do that, and you'll be doing more to protect the average person's civil liberties than a hundred FOIA requests or a thousand injunctions, or a dozen oversight committees. Kill their reputation, make them a political liability and an embarrassment both domestically and internationally, and nobody else will want to touch them. They'll dry up under the bright lights of the camera.
And stuff like this IS embarrassing, as it should be for every American. It shows just how far we've fallen; to the point now where China sits on the United Nations Human Rights Council and we do not. We have no international credibility right now. We need to rebuild our justice system, and it's gotta start by permanently removing the malefactors responsible for these decisions from the system -- they can go work in retail for all I care, but remove them from the criminal justice system and do it post-haste.
Apparently, cell phones are designed to transmit everything they know: phone numbers, call logs, etc. Why are cell phones designed to be so insecure?
Surely there are cell phones that are not so lame, unless the government is requiring anonymous access for snooping purposes.
The chip they put in your brain when you were an infant.
Unfortunately, its removal will cause instant death.
Full access to the software stack. Implement the controls you want in the way you want. Complete control is at your fingertips.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If that isn't privacy then what is?
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The 10th amendment is pretty specific, but you are correct in saying that it is completely ignored.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Whittling at the weapons first, that's what's unexpected.
And the Spanish Inquisition, because no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Can I call the feds when I get lost and find out where I'm at?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
http://www2.rohde-schwarz.com/en/products/radiomonitoring/product_categories/signal_intelligence/overview/
Click on the GC128 datasheet. They have a firmware for that device that turns it into an IMSI Catcher. There is
also a portable suitcase version of the device.
IMSI Catchers basically work by impersonating the cell tower of the network the subscriber is on, forcing his
handset to it by protocol and higher signal strength and then (this is important) flipping whatever calls are
made into non-encrypted mode. Some phones have a debug mode that will show you whether encryption is activated
or not so if you're making a call and encryption is suddenly off - you know what to do at least I hope.
Basically an IMSI catcher is a still a device that is used on the levels of industrial espionage or espionage
by foreign services that don't have access to the normal national monitoring - which incidentally _all_ (cell)
phone networks are hooked into. The claim US intelligence services are not plugged into their telcos and have to
go outside for surveillance by using a device like this is what it is: Disinfo.
Maybe they can tell me where I left it.
I eagerly await the application of this technology to my car keys.
Have gnu, will travel.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
These IMSI catchers DO require a court order for local and state governments to use and more importantly to present to the phone companies when trying to retrieve subscriber information. Common carriers will NOT hand over subscriber information on an IMSI without one and the standard for LE to show probable cause remains.
I don't really see what all the fuss is about. Its hardly like the Feds are going to be spying on ordinary citizens.
I don't see this method as catching persons of interest to national security (e.g. in this case spies with the KGB, etc). It will probably catch some AQ guys.
The thing is, there are some people that are really sneaky. You suspect they are guilty but can't quite catch them. Usually the Feds have had to do some B&Es, install bugs, etc. There was a Mafia case on A&E where the FBI said that's how they got some evidence with a court order. Even if this isn't court ordered (below the radar), you can at least get some info on the where and when.
It seems to me, this is also a weakness (intentional or otherwise) in the Cell Phone protocols and transmission methods.
Frankly, if this takes some bad guys off the street, I'm a happy man.
As far as I know, phones don't transmit call logs. But the reason they transmit it's serial number and phone number and GSM IDs, is because they need to have a unique identifier to hand off call from one cell tower to another, and that ID must be traceable to an account in order to bill it properly. So you can't really opt out of this even if you controlled the hardware, although I suppose you might be able to filter the towers that the phone will talk to.
The rest of the privacy invading features are intended to provided a more accurate triangulation for use with the e911 system. This could be evaded except it's against the law to manufacture/distribute a phone without e911 support.
Grr. Parent is about as on-topic as most posts below...
The EFF has been suing AT&T for piping all our location information directly to the NSA, while Bush has claimed it to be perfectly legal. Can we stay on topic for a change? This is important.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Your feds don't have any right here, in France. Bleh!
Sarkozy is a [This message was caught by Hadopi, the internaute is now banned from the Internet]
whereas prior to 2001 "the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology.
It shouldn't have to. What part of "surveillance of American citizens without judicial oversight is illegal" do they not understand?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The right to bear arms has been supplanted by the right to bare arms. Enjoy.
What?
Unlike older generations of phones, 3G GSM standard requires base stations to authenticate themselves. Finally, a reason to go out and buy that iPhone.
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It violates rights assured you under the Patriot act....
Also, doesn't/wouldn't this constitue spoofing or man in the middle? Isn't that unlawful access to a network? or put another way, if I did it would they worry the legality before throwing my A$$ away? It also makes me wonder if acting as a proxy with such a device would evade the wiretap/recording rules.....
any illusion of security at the cost of, oh, wait, maybe not.....
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
That is a more important right. A right to go about your business unmolested by the government, or capricious government employees. It is also a codified protection of your right your own property, the terms under which the government is authorised to violate are specified there and elsewhere in the document.
The right to privacy, if it exists, is innate. Not really enumerated anywhere in the document, although it shouldn't have to be. Now the question of what happens when this right comes in conflict with others' rights, enumerated or not, is a matter for public debate, and possibly legislation.
The 10th amendment might appear specific to you or I, but get five hundred thirty or so lawyers in a room, and suddenly things are a little more cloudy. Somehow everything ends up coming back to the interstate commerce clause...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That doesn't mean the camera clears every drain, filter, pump and trap. It would be - difficult - to explain why you can't call in a plumber when sludge backs up into your tub and toilet.
The investigation also included checking more than two miles of sewers using underground cameras. Murder on Main Line
By the way, since ages there is also a technique/device called IMSI-Catcher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher
If you KNOW you are free. I you don't, you don't...
Shops track customers via mobile phone
Signals given off by phones allow shopping centres to monitor how long people stay and which stores they visit.
This is using the Path Intelligence mini cell box.
Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.
The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.
The device cannot access personal details about a person's identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.
The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation - measuring the phone's distance from three receivers. It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt.
The company that makes the dishes, which measure 30cm (12 inches) square and are placed on walls around the centre, said that they were useful to centres that wanted to learn more about the way their customers used the store.
A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.
In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that an unusually high percentage of visitors were German - the receivers can tell in which country each phone is registered - which led to the management translating the instructions in the car park.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) expressed cautious approval of the technology, which does not identify the owner of the phone but rather the handset's IMEI code - a unique number given to every device so that the network can recognise it.
But an ICO spokesman said, "we would be very worried if this technology was used in connection with other systems that contain personal information, if the intention was to provide more detailed profiles about identifiable individuals and their shopping habits."
Only the phone network can match a handset's IMEI number to the personal details of a customer.
Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. "There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual," a spokeswoman said. "There's nothing personal in the data."
Liberty, the campaign group, said that although the data do not meet the legal definition of 'personal information', it "had the potential" to identify particular individuals' shopping habits by referencing information held by the phone networks.
The receivers together cost about £20,000 to rent per month. About 20 the units, which are unobtrusive, cream-coloured boxes about the size of a satellite dish, would be needed to cover the Bluewater shopping centre.
Bluewater, in Kent, said it had no plans to deploy the equipment. A spokesman for Gunwharf Quays was not available for comment.
Owners of large buildings currently have to rely on manual surveys to find out how customers use the space, which can be relevant to questions of design such as where the toilets should be located or which stores should be placed next to one another.
Other types of wireless technology, such as wi-fi and Bluetooth, can be used to locate devices, but the regular phone network signal is preferable because it is much more powerful and fewer receivers are needed to monitor a given
What about the right to arm bears?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wouldn't it be clever if you could identify the triggerfish snoop, and spoof the responses to them.
There must be a way to do this, with an open source phone.
Can we stay on topic for a change? This is important.
You must be new here.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Isn't this what Stallman said? And people still rag on him around here.
SARAVA!
All you jackasses cheating on your wifes and husbands are now TOAST!
It's a very, very small part of the modern notion of what privacy means, and it doesn't actually address the current topic. Is your current location considered a piece of private information? The fourth amendment makes no such claim.
From actually reading the text, you could make the case that the intent of the amendment was to prevent undue inconvenience, harassment, and the general inability of a person to go about their business due to searches and seizures, which at the time of writing would have been manual and laborious, and in the case of documents would have required seizure, where today copying would be sufficient. This is a far cry from modern surveillance, where the target may not even be aware of such activity.
And anyway, if I'm not mistaken, the US constitution only covers government activity. You need separate laws to cover the actions of private entities. I don't know if these exist (I'm neither American nor a lawyer).
You can hardly get a clear call 5 out of 10 times, yet somehow they can track you?
If I was paranoid, I'd say that the interference is introduced by bored technicians just for fun.....to screw with us.
I can see some pimply faced CSR hitting a big red button to make a random call drop on the network and laughing with his looser friends waiting for quitting time.
WTF? Over?
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Who cares about TFA?
If you carry *ANY* RF transmitting device on your person, you can always be found via traditional RF Direction Finding techniques.
Period. Easy too.
With modern gear and more than one receive site, this is passive, undetectable, and fast.
Worrying about the Feds using this "spoofing" gear to get your cell phone to transmit a little more data to them, really misses the entire point.
Carrying a transmitter means you can be found. End of story, full stop. The Feds have that gear too. Who cares?
+++OK ATH