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Can the NSA Really Track You Through Power Lines?
mask.of.sanity writes Forensics and industry experts have cast doubt on an alleged National Security Agency capability to locate whistle blowers appearing in televised interviews based on how the captured background hum of electrical devices affects energy grids. Divining information from electrified wires is a known technique: Network Frequency Analysis (ENF) is used to prove video and audio streams have not been tampered with, but experts weren't sure if the technology could be used to locate individuals.
While I also doubt that this is possible today, I am sure the NSA is looking at placing the respective sensors. Then we will have to do "analog routing" and mix in mains hum form several places to obscure where and when things have been recorded. Maybe we should start to offer recordings of local grid noise. Would not be that difficult to do.
Well, fighting fascism is difficult. But there really is no alternative for anybody with at least a shred of noncompromised personal ethics. The price of doing nothing is just way to extreme.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Don't be fooled by world peace
Or an economy that's stable
The c.i.a.'s just got more time
To watch you
Through your cable
They would control you
And take away your brain
You can defeat them
If you switch your box
Over to "game"
Due to the amount of signal processing that goes on with modern television, its highly unlikely. MPEG compression probably stops it at the source since its instantly fuddled with and massive amounts of the data they use is lost right then and there.
If you were actually afraid of the NSA finding you, as a whistle blower, getting around this form of tracing is trivial.
Use a UPS for power, unplugged from the power grid. No power line tracking.
Or the more old school way that people have done for a while, record it and leave before broadcasting it. Locating the source of the recording doesn't mean much if the target is already 800 miles away.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The skeptics are creating a straw man by framing the issue as whether the NSA could do it reliably, consistently, and at all locations. And then tear it down by saying it's too far fetched. Well, d'uh. But that's the typical response for anybody who doesn't actually study and understand how attacks work in real-life, and how you leverage multiple pieces of evidence to zero in on an answer.
The supposed informer said that they could do it even faster if the informant was taped at a known location (that is, one of a set of locations already known to be the site of taping). That suggests that they can in fact use ENF to help pinpoint location, in tandem with a bunch of other information. And of course could use ENF to to help verify locations by measuring ENF of suspected locations.
So, sounds entirely plausible. Heck, if Google (and other companies) can send trucks around the country to scan WiFi, why couldn't the NSA do something similar for ENF? We don't say that Google's WiFi database is impossible simply because they can't be 100% certain that a particular MAC address is still (or ever was) definitely associated with a particular street address. We intuitively accept the limit accuracy, precision, and general reliability of such methods without discounting the value altogether.
Tracking someone through landlines has been a Thing for many years now. Ever hear of a "lock and trace"? You can SORT OF do the same thing for power, by embedding a signal in a given substation. It's nontrivial, and it's horribly complicated, but it IS feasable. As for the "hum" thing, that's just standard TEMPEST, been a Thing now for going on thirty years, where you can fingerprint electronics via EM signatures and you can read those EM signatures via physical phenomena including audio hums and induced currents in surrounding circuits. This is why the LASER mike was actually developed, not for actual sounds (standard shotgun mikes do wonders there, because the glass reresonates sound just fine), but to get a good frequency signature on TEMPEST EM leakage. So, in sum, they're not specifically taking a van out and following lines to see what location an interviewee is at, but a lot of that is that they don't really need to because they can get all the information they need through older technologies that approximate the capabilities
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
How hard would it be to send signals from the power plant or substations across different parts of the grid creating a signature that could be detected in recorded hums?
When electricity is generated there is a signature that can be determined with an oscilloscope. A three phase system generates (heh) a different waveform than a DC or AC generator. This signature can be used to detect failures in equipment.
To use it for tracking someone down? Hmm... Every country may have a signature. Within the country there are regional differences in how is generated (hydro-electric versus coal vs wind, e.g.). The differences are related to mechanical and other considerations. It's conceivable that every power station has a unique signature either naturally occurring or artificially added. In any case, knowing the rough geographic region can almost certainly be ascertained from the waveform signature.
Or I could be talking out of my ass.
Lossy digital compression and processing filter this out. This is especially true on consumer electronics used today. If people were still using all analog AC powered equipment, maybe.
I've seen this done for years in cop shows. I don't know how practical it would be in real life. I assume that it would heavily depend on the frequency response of the microphones being used in the interview. Most microphones used today for remote shoots are the "noise cancelling" type. Studio microphones are not necessarily noise cancelling, but if the interview is being shot in a studio then the NSA knows where you are anyway. Everything today is tape delay so this would only be useful if you interviewed in your own home, something totally stupid if you are exposing government malfeasance. I don't see this as being anything but threats of reprisals against whistle-blowers (we know who you are, we know where you are) in order to try and stop the next Snowden.
EMF is used by the police to track down grow-ops. The light ballast leaks a crazy amount of interference. In the UK they used scanners to see if you were stealing cable TV. Some power companies do have internet through local lines. In my area they have tones at specific frequencies inserted into the power grid that control street lights, power down air conditioners in brown outs and can turn off EV charging stations on grid reset. Smart meters and switches can be reset from a laptop in a truck as my power company did during the ice storm. Before sim cards cell phone companies used an electronic signature to verify your phone was not spoofed. I think you can record an electronic signature to see if a person is using the same equipment but the location is harder to find unless you are listening to everything ... oh they are!
They would have to have data recorded 24/7 about load distribution throughout the entire country. And if the person leaves the country to rendezvous with a reporter? Are they recording the electrical loads in Mexico? Brazil? Poland?
Perhaps they are monitoring EMF using receivers around the country, recording them and using triangulation. But how does this help them? If I blow the whistle to a reporter I am not doing it in my home town. Most people would go somewhere else to a neutral location. So then the tape surfaces weeks or months later and the NSA or whoever triangulated the location to a parking lot without any surveillance. They could do some old fashioned sleuthing but hopefully a whistle blower will try to cover their tracks.
I thought that was just the proactively homicidal NSA computer from John Varley's 1984 novella, Press Enter
Assuming that an individual can be located within a moderate sized population area then one might find him simply by the size of his electric bill in the past. For example if he usually has had an electric expense of $75. plus or minus six dollars then the size of the homes needed to be looked at drops to a few unless his electric use is smack in the center of the bell curve. In a suburb with 7,000 homes maybe only 70 have a typical electric bill of $75. dollars. Also time of day for electric demand might further narrow the search. We might find his hourly, historic power bill and study only the homes that follow a similar time pattern. Then we have past mode of payment, regardless of the name used. He might have a habit of always paying cash or always using a money order for example. If we find a home that matches all of the above past habits then we would have him cold rather easily. Another little trick is to look at people who pay power bills but have no driver's license or do not own a car. Bad guys know all too well that most people who do not drive will never interact with a cop whereas all drivers end up talking to a cop even if someone only dents their fender. Investigate just a bit and finding people can be rather easy.
Don't most modern video cameras run on batteries? Just record using the battery only.
used to prove video and audio screams have not been tampered with
I thought this was going to something involving power lines, clamps and testicles. Never mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess I'll only have my old mobile home generator plug that I bought at the junkyard with cash in when I give my interview exposing everything I know about the government and their overlords the GREYS.
TFA says it would be difficult to tap every transformer to get the data, but what about if the NSA is able to inject signal they can recognize later?
Capacitors?... with high frequency processing, seems to be non-informative. I guess they know if something is on, and what might be on. The question is, can they tell if someone is smoking the dreaded reefer?
Information collection via power lines has been developed a long time ago against hard to reach targets, such as, for example adversary's strategic forces (icbm), nuclear plants and warehouse, headquarters and other similar high value targets. Many times such objects are disconnected from internet (but have local computers) and if such targeted computers are using electricity, then they can be targeted. If you remember, a while ago, there was DSL internet delivered via power lines. Be sure that such internet delivered via power lines is one additional avenue, a tool, in NSA's toolbox. One of many
It depends on how you look at it. The power line frequency is anally retentive and set to 60 Hz. What I really mean is 60.0000000 Hz. When you have two waves of 1 million watts, and one of the waves is out of sync with the other by 0.0000001 Hz, then you are losing enough power to microwave a sandwich (to where the cheese is boiling). Line noise on the power grid is hell. If there is a slight phase shift (due to bearings or whatever), then you might be able to pick out which generator is producing what. Of course, in order to do this, you need to have a reference implementation to compare. Its difficult, but not impossible.
Many times in business and ever more often in government circles the belief that something works is more important than the truth. The truth normally being ... seriously, what ever made you think that might work? Did you skip all of physics? The truth is most likely that some NDA droid convinced some useless government drone that this might work. Said drone then told his, laughably called such, superiors and they increased the possible results from slim to 99% certain. Typical up scaling of the results by management to get funding for a project that most likely should have died. But, what else are you going to do while you wait for Utah to survive a power cycle?
Can they track you through power lines?
Yes, IR switches and monitor power cords to gain access into computers..
Ok, a few years ago I would have also said it was impossible. But now that I know the lengths they'll go to for information that's not even helpful to them... Give me a unlimited budget and complete legal immunity? Yea, I could do it. It would be pretty unconventional, and break tons of laws, but I bet I could get it to work.
I think my first wild guess would be, start buying up power transformer producers. I bet there's only a few in the world. Figure out how to make that hum unique in a way most people wouldn't notice. Treat it like a serial number. Since you sell every transformer, that would include the ones in video cameras. The hum would get encoded in the video. The hum would also interact with the local power in the home or whatever. They've already proved you can use home wiring as an antenna. So yea, far fetched but again, given an infinite budget? Totally doable.
Modulate the power frequency in a cycling and distinguishable patters, different 'sections' and the number and size determine resolution, and .. wait until they match.
Isn't this already used? Seems natural. Or some variation of this.
Oh, would anyone happen to know the cell encoding .. if it somehow communicates the timing of such built in, or a time code when last detected..?
Perhaps such is already implemented and see-able in the deep code.
Get a sufficiently powered audio amplifier, run a 60hz tone through it from a synthesizer/frequency generator, wire up the outputs to power your equipment. Some recording studios have done this to clean up their power.
Do you ever wonder why there is a 5O/6O Hz setting on digital still and video cameras? It's to minimize the banding and flicker that come from a mismatch between the ccd sampling pixel clock and the flicker of lights (especially fluorescent and LED) that are efficiently modulated at the powerline frequency. I wondered why this wasn't used to track Bin Ladin or Boku terrorist, though both may intentionally use analog technology which introduces far more warble than a digital camera's crystal oscillator.
That's a lot of effort to go through to trace an actor.
Maybe this isn't about "tracking" as such, but evidence gathering?
Afaik, in Norway, the police can charge you of crimes on the basis of cicumstantial evidence where simple items of gloves and tools are found.
The article is in German, so I am missing out on the content, but I was thinking that this might perhaps be about the authorities simply coming up with things to make up an accusation and start a persecution.
Ever heard of carrier currents?
That is you inject a second frequency over the top of the 50 or 60hz. Each power station could inject its own frequency, then when the NSA looks at your EM signature they could do a check for these carriers, once they find th carrier freq's they can then map the intensity of these signal and just like mobile phones they can triangulate where they all meet up. These carriers don't have to be injected at the power station directly but anywhere along the line, if they know where these signals originate they would be able to triangulate your location faulty easily.
All this weird stuff relies on the subject being unaware of it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I would think analog to be better for this than digital that gets run through filters before the data gets saved to disk as a single frame(analog being continuous feed giving them more to work with within a single frame.
telephone codecs etc would also just filter this out.
and hey, this doesn't really help one bit to catch some guy sitting inside a cave running their own generator. or someone who just runs it through some filters to improve quality.
though, that being said, I have no doubt that there's a few consultants selling technology to do this to NSA. being usable for anything in the real world or not being entirely different point..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
We need a new whistleblower-phone on kickstarter, that filters that range out.
It' s a small chip called "reduced accuracy normalizing system operation modulator" (RANSOM)
I think I saw this on the Discovery channel a couple of years ago.
An AC grid does not keep perfect time. It will vary by a few hundredths of a HZ when certain things happen, like increased load during commercials, dropped load as people go to work and even when wind speed suddenly increases making the wind turbines contribute more.
All these things make a unique time signature for that mains hum on any given power grid. If you have a nationwide grid, as found in most developed countries, this is the same everywhere but if you are on just a regional one, that will narrow it down for the spooks and they will know you are in that particular region too.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The thought of the NSA finding someone through her electrical usage of a plugin DILDO just popped into my mind hahahaha
How hard would it be to send signals from the power plant or substations across different parts of the grid creating a signature that could be detected in recorded hums?
It wouldn't have to come from the substations. It could be injected at any power feed (though the higher-capacity feed the better). B-b
It might also drive the power company nuts - especially if it was close to the line frequency, because that would look like a large and rapidly varying power factor.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There was BBC story a couple of years ago about the Met police in London recording the frequency of UK mains so that they can analyse the mains hum from recordings and compare the fingerprint against their records to accurately place the recording in time.