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NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
tramp writes "The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Of course it is 'only metadata' and absolutely not invading privacy if you ask our 'beloved' NSA." Pretty soon, the argument about whether you have in any given facet of your life a "reasonable expectation of privacy" may take on a whole new meaning. Also at Slash BI.
No, it absolutely will not. People need to get through their heads that just because your rights are violated, that doesn't mean expecting them not to be becomes unreasonable. If someone breaks into your house every day, it doesn't become "reasonable" for them to do so, or unreasonable for you to expect people to stay out of your house.
The logic espoused by the quoted idea is the same as saying if police were to start strip searching everyone without cause, it would be reasonable simply because it always happens.
Stop that.
What else is there to say.
Anyone surprised by this? I imagined they were doing that anyway
Fear the unknown !! ... a date which will live in infamy !!
...the only recourse will be using the Second Amendment to protect the Fourth.
This is getting out of hand.
I'm not saying its ok, but what did people think was going to happen when they started carrying around devices that store and report their physical position every few minutes. Somebody is getting that data. If its not the NSA, then its a phone company or an advertising company or police officers or etc...
Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.”
The dude is quite the contortionist... the statement basically tells us absolutely nothing.
On second thought - it tells us everything.
#DeleteChrome
Precedent is a bigger component of the law than logic is.
Don't mistake the way you'd like things to work from the way they actually work.
Depends on how you define metadata. Nowadays the line between privacy, metadata and your last name, habits, shopping, etc seems to be a single "SELECT" line involving one or two tables.
The information is obviously a valuable law enforcement tool. Just like phone records, like wiretapping (under a judge auth.).
At least my perception, way before snowden and all the latest leaks, was that this was actually happening. This is just a confirmation.
Would be great if, as in wiretapping, this would be supervised by justice, and used only in criminal investigations. Sound naive ...i know
If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide.
Everyone who ever wanted their government to "solve XXXX" has gotten what they wanted: a powerful government.
Of course, a powerful government is an out-of-control government, but we can't expect those who want the government to hold their pee-pee to THINK of that.
I like the idea the folks in Utah had to cut off the water supply from the NSA facility so they're unable to cool their hardware and it melts. An across-the-board move to shun them and their conspirators in Washington would send the clear message that they had better change course and obey the law before the American people compel them through more drastic measures.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Interesting spin
"One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year."
You are supposed to infer from that, that only Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones are the ones tracked. When it's not, it's Americans at home too, the tower ids are in the metadata he's already admitted they collect.
“there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.”
Police Officer : "Did you murder that woman?"
Knife carrying suspect, caught as scene of crime, covered in victims blood: "I had no authority to intentionally kill that woman"
or in gaol or hanging separately:
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.
Dragnet.
So, if you are visiting a country and want to go to church and unknowingly that church is a Right Wing AntiAmerican White supremacist group, you'd be put on the watch list. Or Muslim and go to a mosque near your hotel that has radical elements.
An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Jesus Fucking Christ. So Americans, as soon as your step outside of the country, the NSA says that your rights no longer exist.
Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny.
Got that TOR users?!
Every time...every single time a story like this is posted we get a wave of this:
"you idiots...fuck the government...privacy is dead"
Who are these people? Are they real people or bots? Why does the fact that governments spy mean we, the people who run this country, can't hold them accountable?
It's completely totally up to **US** to demand our government do its job & obey our rights
Thank you Dave Raggett
We have the technology, power, ressources to track anyone and anything anywhere in the world...including USA and other countries and we can be more powerfull and more advanced than we are right now. I'm not afraid of that...contrairy, I adapt to it and that's not the problem. I'm more afraid of the person or people behind that power. We're talking about the people in the military and the current government. It's not a surprise or secret that lots of those stories are about corruption.
Take the analogy of a gun. The gun remains a gun and can be a tool of authority and defence and power to peace... put that in the wrong hands and you have yourself a mass murderer and a completely different story
Why are you letting this to continue? :(
It's about finding CI operatives following our HUMINT guys in the field. That doesn't mean the way they're doing it is okay, just that the purpose has been misrepresented in every article I've seen.
Outside of Democratic USA, NSA tracks you!
When a crime or attack of some sort happen there will always be someone who hits a few suspicousness markers, even if they had nothing to do with it. So all this data allows the NSA to always arrest someone.
Most people won't be able to resist a serious interrogation and could very well confess to the crime, while the terrorist will resist torture claiming innocence. I'm not saying they will confess to being a terrorist, instead the NSA will claim a bomb was set off at barren terrain and claim they suspect you of experimenting without intending to harm. "Just confess to this little thing so we know there's no terrorism brewing". And the NSA labels you a terrorist because the bomb caused people to die, I'm not saying it happened, but anything that can go wrong will, at some point, go wrong.
I don't want to be that person spending the rest of their life on Guantanamo Bay because the NSA wants to make the people feel safe.
Instead of spending money to do real detective work they take the shortcut of making everyone a suspect, only innocent if they feel like proving it.
They also put computer chips in every keyboard so they know what we are typing. Be careful. ;)
I guess they forgot the part where Batman has it destroyed it because it poses a danger to society and goes against everything he believes in.
Between precedent and law stands PROTEST!
So given their track record, I have no right to reasonably expect any branch of our government to give a fuck, right?
Looks like it may be time to break out the Faraday cages.
Just checking - the carriers are all tracking our movements as well, and using the data for profit.
I understand the outrage over the NSA doing it, I'm just checking to see if we're all fine with the corporations doing the same thing for profit as part of our wonder free-market society.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Simple solutions - stop using cell phones and start using tablets that are wifi only and then use them only on hotspots.
Bow to Israel, or we will know that you did not. Our eyes see everywhere.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents
my plan is simple...actually it's Thomas Jefferson & other founders plan...
what government policy is effecting the behavior you don't agree with?
what do *you* specifically want to change?
identify that, then use your powers as a citizen to advance policy that would be different
this work happens every day on every possible policy...I used to be a social studies teacher & the idea is that theoretically only a person who didn't finish high school or a non-US person should be asking "how" our system works...
Thank you Dave Raggett
try living with a younger sibling. my sister rummages though my stuff when I am not in my room. i'm like, Sally get out! Stop taking my clothes and toys. lol. Glad I have a password on my Windows 8 desktop computer.
Plus, my parents sometimes read my mail. WTF?? those bills you sill head, not love notes.
yeah, i know that was kinda off topic but I had to share.
. . . and we can talk about bomb-making while I examine 3D printer plans for plastic guns. And maybe discuss security issues for American embassies and POTUS.
They have an airport Reagon Intl. in DC? Did they name it after the actor or after the president?
Oh wait. Never mind.
I'm shocked. SHOCKED, to find out that gambling is going on here! Your winnings, Sir...
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Hmmmmm?
Sonic transmission of data does not make infection possible. If it were possible, systems would crash all the time from random noise picked up by microphones.
So many times I've read US comments on Slashdot regarding privacy and how awful it is in the UK because of our camera coverage.
Ha! You were getting stiffed the whole time too! You weren't even getting the remote chance of video evidence to protect the innocent, just a blanket government surveillance of your online activity to protect against a largely government-engineered threat.
Now that we're both screwed, can we quiet-down on the finger pointing across ponds, and start pointing elsewhere?
I see you're new here :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I use my old iPhone 3GS as an iPod touch. No SIM card, no service, no signal to trace.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The US government was the first nation in the world to pass laws DEMANDING that every mobile phone sold in the USA constantly provided location information, whether 'on' or 'off'. The excuse (the sheeple always need one, apparently) was that a '911' caller might not have chance to give their location, and that the 'emergency services' thus needed this mobile phone ability.
For a time, as a result of this, Hollywood film and TV producers had to cope with the fact that the characters in their scripts would find it now impossible to be out of contact, or get lost, and thus endlessly had scenes where people 'lost' their phones, or ran out of charge, to create the needed circumstances for the narrative events. However, at least 4 or 5 years ago, the NSA, via various governmental agencies, got in contact with ALL the large studios and asked them to stop reminded their viewers that mobile phones constantly tracked their locations.
The excuse was the same you hear from politicians over the 'SNOWDEN LEAKS'. The TRUE information helps criminals (and 'terrorists) evade detection and justice. In other words, Hollywood is told it has a duty to LIE to the sheeple to help law enforcement.
Hollywood movies (and TV shows) now specifically LIE, and tell viewers that mobile phones are NOT location tracked all the time. Sometimes their plots have the lie that location tracking only happens when specifically requested of the teleco, and only for certain types of cell tower (see the recent move "The Call"). Sometimes they simply say that mobile phones have no location tracking ability at all (see the episode of 'Shameless' - US version' - where the expert 'hacker' is in mobile phone contact with a 'lost' person trapped in the back of a van, and declares they have no way of finding where this person is).
The more common Hollywood 'trick' is to say location tracking ONLY happens in the mobile phone has a real GPS system built-in. You mobile phone, BY LAW, is tracked multiple times each minute using sophisticated cell tower triangulation methods. This information is captured in real-time, and provided directly to NSA facilities. The same applies in every nation mobile phone services are available. Where third world countries have their networks installed by First World companies, the NSA/GCHQ etc location information is collected whether the governments of those third-world nations wish this or not.
Look, let me make this VERY simple. In Tony Blair's FULL SURVEILLANCE world (Blair formalised this project across the West as a shameless full-on initiative, not the pre-existing patchwork of embarrassed secretive operations), what can be done to spy on you is being done. The Xbox One has a military grade, state-of-the-art, time-of-flight motion tracking system, developed at a cost of tens of billions by Microsoft, purely to extend full surveillance spying into the homes of citizens (Bill Gates is a devotee of Tony Blair, and Blair's agendas for our planet).
One of the articles on this NSA cell phone tracking gave me the impression that turning your phone off triggers extra analysis. When you are in a location and you power your phone up or down the system looks to associate you with others nearby within some threshold of time and space who have done the same. I would expect removing your batteries would look similar.
if the "government" is doing something, it is somehow under government power
what, specifically, would you want to see changed?
you mention "armed forces and the local police will do all they can to 'follow orders'..."
so you would like local police forces to have different policies when dealing with protesters?
which city? during Occupy many cities had different responses...
if you identify the city then you can determine if police policy is controlled by the Mayor or a City Council
that's one example...just based on your comments about LE and military
so what is it that the government is doing you want to change?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Of course this is not true. Im reminded of the video I saw on youtube that claimed that power meters are secretly free energy devices. All this security apparatus and technology does erode old movie plotlines though.
re-evaluate the third party standing doctrine.
sheeple
Don't use this word, it's like farting during a conversation. People will be turned away from you no matter how good your point is.
Name just ONE Founding Father who, if he could transport through time and see the America of today, would be pleased at how it turned out. Just one. Even Alexander Hamilton would be shocked.
fool the algorithms
The line between corporate and government has been severely blurred. It shouldn't be hard for you find retired operatives making statements on how they were doing the bidding of corporations far too often when that was not supposed to be their job. If you mess with the wrong private people or corps, you'll start feeling that force. There are so many things to choose from that you have to be really severe to have them pull out the big guns. Most threats can be squashed with proportional measures... there is probably a whole handbook of guidelines on measured responses.
People wonder why the USA ignores any law and gets foreign governments to ignore their own laws... You don't need force, you can use the CIA and NSA to wield the extremely powerful weapon of information. Just look at how Wikileaks and Snowden illustrate that "soft" power to upturn any EU legal system; the ones who do the bidding would go to jail if their actions were not sanctioned; thus, providing the illusion that the system works.
The good side of democracy is the public is not so easily suckered by legal technical trickery (but instead by many other kinds) and if the people don't buy an idiotic technical argument it won't work. Do not let them talk you out of your own ability to reason. There are technicalities (the letter) and then there are distortions of intent (the meaning.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This makes me happy. I dumped my smart phone 3 months ago and I really enjoy the peace.
It would drive the NSA nuts if you would swap your cellphone with your brother or other relative on the other coast.
Wait , what is that black helicopter doing overhead?
The internet tells you how to defeat the tracking in your phone if you do not trust your relatives.
Bastiaan