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NSA Abandoned Project To Track Cell Phone Locations
barlevg writes "The Washington Post reports that NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander testified before the Senate about an experimental NSA program to track location data from cell phones in 2011, but abandoned it because it lacked 'the operational value' it needed. It was not made clear what 'operation value' they were seeking. Alexander said, 'the data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes.' He added, 'This may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now because when we identify a number we can give that to the FBI, [who can a warrant for the data it needs]. That’s the reason we stopped in 2011.''"
If it's anything like location data in Twitter, the reason they probably stopped is because the majority of location-tagged information exchanges from cell phones are made by teens, and the NSA was probably sick of sifting through conversations debating the relative merits of Justin Bieber vs. One Direction.
Yeah, kind of like they "abandoned" Total Information Awareness and just adopted another program that did the exact same thing. This is more of the PR pushback after they've been getting torched for the last year.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well one question is how they're collecting the location data. If it's from GPS geolocation, that's garbage (my phone's geotag data is usually at least an hour out-of-date) and easy enough to evade or spoof. If they're doing it via cell tower triangulation... that might actually work.
Unless you turn off your phone completely or use "airplane mode," they can still get a approximation based on what radio tower you are connected to (much like what google assisted gps does). But why develop an expensive 3rd party program when you can just get the cell phone companies to easily cough up any information they need? There is no need because the capability of such things already exists and easily accessed hence why they cancelled the program due to it being redundant.
No, that's not what's being said here. First, GPS has nothing to do with. Phones have GPS systems now, but the foundational problem of a cell phone network is "which tower do I send information to?" A cell phone must be trackable to some extent in order to receive calls. This is done completely with received signal quality (RSQ) metrics and pinging. GPS is not used. You can track a person more finely by noting the strength of several "visible" towers and their relative geographical location.
Alexander is basically saying, "we set up a system where phone companies would feed us location data based on triangulation of multiple tower strengths (whether raw or pre-processed is unclear) just to see if the NSA computers could handle the basic networking of the task. In the end we decided not the both with the program (although they could), because right now if you need something you can just pass the info off to the FBI, which does the legal legwork all on it's own."
The operational value that's not present is the ability to know any given person's position in real time, without waiting for warrants. If they have the time to wait, there's another LEA that can do that for them. They decided to spy on people's location just enough to prove that it can do so later, whenever it feels the need.
I don't know any different, but someone's bound to express doubt that the program went nowhere.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
So we can translate this as "We've abandoned using a cell phone's geolocation functionality, which is garbage, and now tie into all cell towers and get up to the minute accurate cell phone information, which we grab constantly and archive forever."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's just that the data wasn't as accurate as the data that they get from the microchips they've implanted in our dental fillings.
Better turn off your wifi and your cellular radio too. Both of those combined is accurate enough to know where you are within a few meters. Plenty of accuracy to stake out your building in person, or order a drone strike.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I would be somewhat surprised if the NSA does not already know nearly every person's activity down to who they had lunch with every day for the last few years, what they ordered for lunch, and whether the waiter reported the tip as income. They should have software that guesses pretty well who is sleeping with whom, and who's a drug dealer. If you carry a phone in your pocket, all they need is the SSID data your phone has seen to know where you've been. If they get GPS data, they can probably de-fuzz it, turning off the military obfuscation of your position, and track you to with about a yard. Combined with knowledge of all your credit card purchases, and they should have a decent idea of what you've been up to. Even cash should be pretty well tracked by now. Every machine capable of detecting a $5 vs a $20 should also be capable of scanning the bill's serial number, and that includes ATM machines. Combine that with the coming trend of web-cams aimed at license plates on all major roads connected to the internet...
If the NSA does not do this, then how incompetent are they?
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The NSA have directly lied and also more often twisted the meaning of words out of their common use, which is properly tantamount to lying.
This makes accepting *anything* they say problematic.
At this point the NSA can no longer meaningfully communicate with me.
As these guys routinely lie about what they do can we believe that they have dropped this program?