Slashdot Mirror
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 If it's from GPS geolocation, that's garbage (my phone's geotag data is usually at least an hour out-of-date) and easy enough to evade or spoof.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.
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.
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.