Slashdot Mirror
Australian Police Use Telcos For Cell "Tower Dump" of All Connected Users' Data
AHuxley (892839) writes The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Australian federal and state police are using a no warrant cell phone tower metadata access technique called a "tower dump".
A "tower dump" provides the identity, activity and location of all cell phones that connect a cellphone tower(s) over time (an hour or two). The metadata from thousands of phones and numbers connected are then sorted. Australian law-enforcement agencies made 330,000 requests for metadata in 2012-13.
AHuxley links to some U.S. views on the same kind of massive data grab: The Wall Street Journal says they caputure innocent users' data; the Chicago Police Department is being sued for information on its purchases of equipment associated with this kind of slurping; and the EFF asks whether warrant protection for users' data will be extended by voice-comm companies as it has been for ISPs. I wonder what people would think of an occasional "postal zone dump" employing the same kind of dragnet but for communications on paper.
C'mon, guys, when they aren't even on the same continent, you ought to realize they have their own laws. I know you think American law applies everywhere, but maybe you should try to find some more relevant perspective.
John
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.
It's too easy for governments now.
Thus far, all that's come of the wave of revalations from Snowden et al is government's growing willingness to gather our private data in plain sight. With apparent impunity.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
" and the EFF asks whether warrant protection for users' data will be extended by voice-comm companies as it has been for ISPs." Uhh, ISP's do not have such a protection. The NSA scrapes every bit of information passing through ISP's facilities. AT+T, Verizon, anyone?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Apparently those involved in organised crime are using the cheapest possible pre-payphones and sim cards swapping from one to another throughout the day. So police are looking for the odd phone out, coming from locations where tracked suspect persons are. So tracking all calls and eliminating the non-suspect ones to leave the ones they are looking for. So tracking the criminal activity associated with pre-pay phones and sim cards is a little more tricky than the movies make out.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I wonder if anyone would notice a postal zone dump, would it even be relevant anymore? It would probably only turn up pizza ads....
Wouldn't the analogous "postal zone dump" from the summary be a collection of all the stuff you see on the envelopes, from a post office, for a few hours? I'm not seeing the problem.
So I guess I'm confused, was he thinking LEO don't do that already, or that it's wrong somehow. I'm not seeing how that's wrong. In fact that's making me think collecting that data from a tower is more alright. Why carry a powered radio in your pocket if any of this concerns you? Likewise, if someone reading the stuff off your envelope bothers you, don't send mail.
This is sounding more like information security policy and less like a privacy problem.
The US Postal Service already does this...how do you think they get your letter to where you want? The "Meta Data" in this instance for a letter would look something like...I don't know. The front of your envelope. In other words, not "protected" information. And think...they'll be able to know your name...your address...who your correspondence is with, where they live (or at least where you hope to get them a letter) and how much you paid in postage!
Meta-data is not secret, not private, not protected. If govt organizations can "get it" so do all of the corporations you already despise dealing with. (looking at you Verizon and AT&T) What makes them any more trust worthy? Sure they need it to connect you and make your call, but they certainly store that information as well, to what end?
This is a real misconception. Phones do not broadcast their exact location to the towers in any wireless technology (although it is talked about making this easier in 5G). There are billions being spent by networks on geolocation algorithms (tools for optimization engineers) and right now you have no way of getting a better approximation than maybe half a mile square without using other sources of data.
What you can say about a user from call traces
1) a call is being made
2) who is making the call
3) the control signalling (handover requests, nieghbour cell measurments etc) to maintain the call
That's about it.
Sorry for pointing out what might be a detail (it's still an intrusive act), but this is slashdot after all.
I wonder what people would think of an occasional "postal zone dump" employing the same kind of dragnet but for communications on paper.
You don't have to wonder about this, because this is how it is now. The headers of all snailmail (the wrapper of the packet) are machine-logged. Those of us who are technically savvy always suspected this, since we found out that scanning is used for routing. Some of us, like myself, even mentioned the possibility to our postmasters and were told that they were simply throwing this data away after collecting it. But anyone who knows anything about anything knew that this was massively unlikely.
So, given that this is already happening for literally every piece of mail being sent, just like it happens to literally every piece of email which traverses a long-haul link, why do you wonder? That's how it is right now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All Connected Users' Data
You need an apostrophe after the final s in Users to show that it is the data of more than one user.
This is fourth grade English. Come on. Proofread before posting.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I'm wondering about the idea of having a group of friends who swap their cell devices. You'd have to change a lot of your comm, but if you use the cellular system just for bandwidth, you don't really care about your cellular identity except for you phone number. If you can migrate your friends to contacting you via internet comm, you don't need to have the same cellular identity from one day to the next.
Toss in dynamic proxying through SSH, and you aren't exposing your comm fingerprint to your cell provider. Use OwnCloud to swap in your files and contacts (a bit of data overhead there, maybe keep most of your heavy content data on a separate device that tethers to whatever cell phone you happen to be carrying).
They'd still be able to analyze your tracking footprint to figure out who held which phone at which time, but it would make surveillance more expensive.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The Wall Street Journal says they caputure innocent users' data
You know, I'm sure the WSJ did not fucking say that, because for all the money they make they at least spend some of it on a decent spell-check or even, gasp, a human editor. I mean holy motherfuck. Here I am combing the streets, looking for work. You're making hundreds, maybe thousands. maybe even tens of thousands of dollars per hour from the traffic on this site. You can't even spell capture? I mean, in google-chrome-stable it shows me even in this box right here when a word supposedly mis-spelled, though often it's just saying that it's not a word in the dictionary, such as motherfuck. Motherfucker, though, that passes.
And don't bother blaming the submitter since this part came after his quotation section. You fucking douche bags. Get it together. I don't care about beta; it's your site. But as a thinking person I'm offended that your hacker mentality has not permeated over into the literate part of your fucking brain: never stop improving, motherfucker. I wouldn't be half as good at writing code now if it weren't for the self-criticism and absolute discipline that my early days as a fiction writer instilled in me.
You fucking turd, seriously. When do we get to start rating the actual posts? Or is this whole feedback thing just a marketing technique for you, totally out of tune with Rob Malda's vision?
This sort of thing is why I seldom carry a cellphone anymore.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
After all, Obama imposed financial sanctions against Russian officials and Putin's inner circle, can't even use MasterCard or VISA. So, it's only a matter of time before the hard currency those guys have dries up or they get tired of money laundering. Probably won't be a direct trade, some political savvy will be applied to make it look like neither bowed to pressure, etc. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
It wouldn't surprise me if the Australians already had something like the U.S. Mail Isolation Control and Tracking system. The U.S. postal service takes external images of every piece of paper mail sent through the U.S. postal service. Think of it like metadata for paper mail. An investigator just fills out a form and they can access scans, no warrant required.
Gee... can't have those damn 'goyim' (cattle) talking to each other, without their Jewish 'masters' listening in! Oy vey... The poor Jews... I wonder why they don't want to live in Israel. Why are they in every white country on Earth? Why have they opened our borders, and forced us to watch as millions of third world parasites force their way into OUR lands?
"I wonder what people would think of an occasional "postal zone dump" employing the same kind of dragnet but for communications on paper?"
As in a dump of all the OCR data from the systems at the mail sorting centres? Some would assume that has been going on for as long as it has been possible to do it.