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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.
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
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.
Or I could be talking out of my ass.
As long as there's no hum signature, you should be okay.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
The electric noise would only be useful for a very rough approximation of where someone is located and largely depend on interference on the grid. At best you may find the county or town where someone is located, but it won't necessarily be conclusive since it's important to also match that to the correct time slot.
The noise brought in as location information in CSI etc. is often depending on more distinct noises that are well-known. A subway station has one set of specific noises, a harbor has a different set. Sometimes among the general noises there are some distinct parts that can help pinpointing.
But if someone records the noises of an out of place location and then use that as a background then it will throw investigation off track. It's impossible to realize straight away that a certain noise is good or misleading unless a repetitive pattern is heard because the noise is looped.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Add to it the arcing that occurs from bad insulators on the grid - sometimes they cause a lot of RFI - and they are local. Just go out and listen to a high voltage power line when the weather is humid - there's usually a buzzing on the line caused by surface currents on the insulators.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Some recording studios have done this to clean up their power.
Why wouldn't they just run DC?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
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
The way I've seen the DEA track down grow-ops, is to use a helicopter outfitted with FLIR and fly over neighborhoods at night. The houses with decent sized grow operations lit up 'like a Christmas tree' compared to other houses around them. The heat from the lights would transfer through the windows, and exhaust vents of the house.
The other method that I've heard is that people with very high power usage or big power fluctuations at set times per day get flagged for further scrutiny. They basically use information about a residence's power usage over the course of a given time to help look for patterns that might indicate a grow operation is occurring (probably based on information they have from known grow locations)
I've always heard the cable company claims of the mystery van that roamed the city streets and could detect whether a house was stealing cable/pay-per-view or not. I find that a little unrealistic as well. Later in life, I heard another explanation that made more sense, which was related to putting advertising out on channels that required subscription (like PPV), and seeing who called in for information/contests/etc. and comparing caller information with their paying subscriber list. This seems way more feasible, possible, cheaper, and realistic than the "mystery vans". This method is similar to how cops get some people in mass to show up to be arrested, they call them all and tell them they won something (cash, TV, or whatever), and to come down to X address to pick it up, and they have police there waiting to arrest. I've seen on TV them able to arrest 25-50 people that they wanted for back-child support without having to locate and apprehend each person individually.
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.