Slashdot Mirror
Surveillance Case May Reveal FBI Cellphone Tracking Techniques
glittermage writes "The WSJ reports on an ongoing case about alleged 'Hacker' Daniel David Rigmaiden, regarding the government's tools used to track mobile devices with or without a warrant. The judge may allow Daniel to defend himself against the government's claims by putting the technology into the light. Sounds good to me."
The judge could just as easily deny him an opportunity to defend himself based on unspecified "national security" fears.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Doubt it. We have too much wealth to protect from the communists, I mean terrorists.
From TFA:
According to a Harris document, its devices are sold only to law-enforcement and government agencies.
Harris isn't the only one building these (other brands look a lot less like 1960's era gear) and we don't have assurances from these other manufacturers that they aren't being sold to private individuals or investigative firms.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's confidant, not cosmonaut.
Then again Bea Arthur looked like the monkeys the Soviets sent into space. It's a natural mistake to make.
http://www.spyanycellphone.com/
I'm not a shill. Just had a great laugh over this advertised website at the bottom of TFA. The kind of thing you must share with the rest of the cubefarm residents.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can be bugged very easily. A sound bug can be no bigger than a pin, but it is not necessary to plant one. Directional microphones are very effective, and can be used from several hundred metres away if necessary, but it is much easier to use the telephone. Either a home landline or a mobile can be remotely activated to serve as a microphone, bugging the room even though the handset is down, or the mobile switched off. The resulting sound can be cleaned up to surprising quality."
The FBI apparently uses similar technology that they call a "roving bug". Apparently this is the big secret that they don't want to reveal in court - that they can remotely modify the firmware or baseband firmware of various cell phones and then record all communications and utilise them as remote bugs, even when the phone is turned off.
Hrmm. There are several parts of the FBIs story here that aren't internally consistent.
It's pretty well known by now thanks to Hollywood and TV shows that police can track mobile phones by triangulating signal strengths at different cell towers. Heck, phones do it themselves these days. The fixes can be fairly accurate in urban areas. There's no need for the phone to be making a call in order to be traced this way, because as the article points out, towers can talk to the phone any time they want.
Presumably, phone companies require a warrant of some kind before performing this type of trace. This leads me to wonder if fake base stations like the Stingray devices have any use at all beyond avoiding phone companies legal processes. I could buy the explanation that a fake base station lets you get slightly more accurate fixes on the phones location, except that apparently even with these devices the best they were able to get was to a particular apartment block and they had to do old fashioned detective work to get closer. "Nearest block" is about as good as modern smartphones can do by themselves.
There are a few other puzzlers in there. The government claim they can't reveal the devices capabilities without compromising future investigations, and then go on to state quite clearly that the devices can't intercept calls or data and that's why they don't feel they need a proper search warrant. This makes sense. Some kind of roving fake base station in an FBI van wouldn't be able to route calls successfully. And the GPRS/3G protocols don't terminate data encryption at the base station, but rather further back in the core network. But that implies the person being traced would be able to notice - if the data connection stops working, or calls fails to place, it could be a sign you're being traced. Time to switch the phone off. That could even be automated by a smartphone app. Is that trivial workaround what they're afraid of?
Another puzzler. The 3G/UMTS protocols have the handset authenticate the network exactly to protect against fake base station attacks. How does the StingRay device handle this? Presumably, the major networks have all been required to hand over their root keys/certs so the FBI can emulate them. It makes you wonder how secure these keys can really be, if there are cops running around with the keys inside a box. If one of these devices got lost or was somehow sold to the wrong people, how hard would a key rotation be? Presumably you'd have to replace the SIMs? Again, this seems like a lot of problems that could easily be avoided by tracing the target device with the direct co-operation of the phone companies.
I'd like to think there's a purely technical reason for the use of these things, but given the FBIs prevarication over exactly what kind of warrants they are getting, I'd be worried it's more a legal dodge.
Owned by News Corporation, talks about hacking. Pot, kettle, black.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, what did they expect?
They aren't trying to catch a pedo here, but somebody w/ the knowledge to break into computer systems. Of course he will challenge the law in every single manner he can think of to win his freedom. You can call it an attempt to get off the hook, except what the FBI is doing is in violation of the 4th by not obtaining legal permission to use their technology and furthermore it's unethical, these people are paid to protect us, not spy on us, if I need protection that only the FBI can provide I'd ask!
How can they intercept a communication by playing "phony cell phone tower"? Is that not ILLEGAL!!??! Without a warrant none the less?
How many laws are being violated that no one is even mentioning?
don't build it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times on intelligence gathering. He has an article today that dovetails nicely into this Wall Street Journal article. Savage reports that two senators are concerned that the government is using secret means to surveil US citizens based on a ruling from the FISA court -- rulings that are secret. This is tantamount to having a secret law; something that is anathema to the Constitution.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
How can they use the device if the battery is taken out then? Never turn your phone off and leave the battery in, if you want it to be truly off. Of course, you'd need a device that has a user replaceable battery, not an iPhone or alike.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I don't see why the technical possibility of this is such a shocker. I mean cell phones are radios. They broadcast signals. Not just to one place at a time, but everywhere, even to places that might not be directly within line-of-sight of the transmitter.
People need to understand: YOU ARE CARRYING AN INDIVIDUALLY IDENTIFIABLE RADIO BEACON ON YOUR PERSON WHEN YOU TAKE YOU CELL PHONE ANYWHERE OUT IN PUBLIC WITH YOU. HOW ELSE WOULD YOUR PHONE COMPANY BE ABLE TO BILL YOU?
Why is this news? Sure the *TRAFFIC* containing your telephone call to and from the handset is an encrypted digital signal, but from point A to point B, ANY CELL TOWER needs to know which handset gets which call.
Thus defacto privacy is technically not even possible. The system depends on being able to identify a handset.
Whether you want to cry boo-hoo-hoo about people actually taking advantage of that fact is irrelevant to the fact that it is on the table at all times, and impossible to distill and decouple from the very premise of owning and using a cell phone.
If you don't like it, don't use cell phones.
(as to whether the government should *EVER* leverage tax payer dollars against presumably ordinary law-abiding citizens is another matter)