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Leave Your Cellphone At Home, Says Jacob Appelbaum
An anonymous reader writes "N+1 has an interview with Jacob Appelbaum (who is part of the Tor project) titled 'Leave Your Cellphone at Home.'" Jacob has a lot to say about privacy, data security, and surveillance. He ought to know. Among other things, he's had his email seized, been relieved of his phone, been the subject of a National Security Letter (video) and generally had his travel disrupted.
There, fixed that for ya. Amazing how they managed to get darned near 100% of the population to agree to carry around a tracking device with nary a peep. All it took was to be very careful to NOT talk about the tracking ability, keep news accounts of the police using the cell data off the front page and make the tracker shiny and useful enough. Do those things and not only will everyone carry one they will pay an average of $50/mo for the privledge. Land of the Free indeed.
Won't be long now before they decide they have the hook set deep enough they can start making more overt use of the location/activity data without many people ditching their tracker.
The carriers WILL start renting out access to track data for advertising purposes. They know where and when you are. They will be able to link that beyond your phone. Won't take much computation to get that localized enough to have a good idea which PC you use and then tie it to doubleclick and google's cookies. Then they know EVERYTHING. Combine a tracking cookie to hard billing quality identification data and the possibilities are truly limitless. Sure they COULD do that with Amazon but there is too great a chance of a user revolt. But people won't/can't give up their iShiny.
What law enforcement will do with the data is so obvious and so dark there isn't much point in hammering it again really. Especially combined with security cameras everywhere. Who cares if the image quality isn't good enough for a positive id or you were wearing a hoodie. It gives a time/location and the tracker gives them who was at that spot in spacetime.
Bust a drug dealer and you have probable cause to grab a trace on everyone who came in contact with that person for the last month. Crunch the numbers enough and lots of patterns emerge. Not quite precrime but close enough. You show up as having been in the room with a number of dealers and that will be your ass. Or be around a few people who later get busted for burgulary and how soon until that is cause for a search warrant on your place? Being able to effortlessly work backwards from a bust and turn up clues like that will change the law enforcement game entirely.
And now you see why AT&T yanked all their payphones and for some reason simply refuses to compete in the landline business, even with billions and billions in sunk costs for all that wire going everywhere. Eliminate hardlines and everyone MUST buy a cell. It is already sorta odd to encounter someone who doesn't carry one, eventually it will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Wouldn't suprise me if they become the preferred physical identifier, i.e. 'your papers.'
Democrat delenda est
If todays phones are nothing more than tracking devices for the government and anybody with the right tools to know where we are at all times, then why are we paying for this?
I mean facebook is free and collects tons of information, yet we pay to use our phones and it collects our information the same way...
This isn't just with phones. Did you know that law enforcement agencies can see what you're doing when you're on the internet?? You should stop using the internet. But it's probably too late, anyway, because they've probably infected your computer with a program that monitors your every keystroke!
And that's not all! Did you know there're identifying numbers on your car, too? Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
And don't even get me started about how unsecure your fingertips are.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
You could just leave the SIM card at home and take the phone with you. The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments, and doing encrypted, TORed VOIP over a wifi connection shouldn't identify you like the SIM would.
Problem
"And don't even get me started about how unsecure your fingertips are."
Solution:
Hot irons
Bye!
I use CDMA you insensitive clod!!!
Put your device into wifi mode, only use open access points and communicate over tor?
More people should leave their access points open for the greater good. Or have one open and one closed for their personal use.
Too bad that's not the case =p
Anyone who thinks leaving a cell phone at home, powered off, or in airplane mode is an option obviously doesn't have a wife.
Not unless someone is doing something they shouldn't. Each device is assigned a unique 48bit MAC address at time of manufacture. Each one.
You buy a 24 bit prefix from IEEE (I think) and are then supposed to do your own accounting on the lower 24 bits to be sure you don't duplicate one. If you have ever looked up a MAC to see who made the device, that is how it works. The owner of the prefix is a published record.
Democrat delenda est
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're assuming perfect distribution of MAC-48 AKA EUI-48 addresses among manufacturers and their products, which is far away from true. 1/2 of the 48 bits here are assigned to a manufacturer. 24 bits there make about 16M unique addresses available to each manufactured device. The flip side to that is that every manufactured device gobbles up 16M addresses, whether they use them all or not. Every time someone releases a new device assigned its own NIC address, another 16M addresses die, even if they only sell 1 of them.
That means the important part then is that there are only ~16M Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) blocks, the other 24 bits here. Those are getting consumed at some rate, bigger manufacturers will need more than one of them, and therefore want to ask for a larger block of them. The IEEE is already aiming to reclaim them after 100 years and otherwise tightening standards for keeping companies from getting more OUI "space" than they need. As they state there, "The total number of EUI-48 identifiers available, while large, is NOT inexhaustible.". It's similar to the situation with IPv4 addresses, where the capacity looked practically infinite at first, but waste forced the size of the average block allocations down hard over time to keep from running out. Now you have to use 95% of the addresses you've already got before you can get more OUIs.
MAC addresses have started to move from 48 bits to 64 in order to make this problem go away, because then you're at a "atoms in the universe" scale. I believe that's going about as well as the IPv6 migration. We're a long time from the 48 bits running out, but it's not as impossible as you might think just from computing against 2^48.