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Systems That Can Secretly Track Where Cellphone Users Go Around the Globe
cold fjord writes with this story about the proliferation of companies willing to sell tracking information and systems. Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people's travels over days, weeks or longer ... It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official ... said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide. "Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world," said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International.
The concept that we don't track you illegally worldwide is a wonderful fairy tale, but we do track you.
Now stop using it in the bathroom. That's just gross.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is good technology, but not as good technology as that thing where people call the bad guy and have to stay on the phone with him for 20 seconds in order to trace the call. If I can offer one recommendation: they should work on making that like 19 seconds. Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I probably should not have loaned out my phone to that bearded gentleman carrying the AK-47 who was heading to the Sudan. I need to rethink that sort of generosity.
Mobile networks can see countries and Cell ID's of the phones. It is, however, rare to have the data that maps Cell ID's to locations for every cell tower in a country, especially given they can change frequently.
It would be easy to identify the Cell ID of a specific cell tower, if you were near to it, but that's a different use case.
This really doesn't bother me.
I just assumed that if you can communicate bidirectionally that they roughly know where you are.
Isn't that partially why receive-only paging services still exist, because those that don't want their location tracked still want to be able to receive notices?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does anyone know for certain whether airplane mode prevents the phone from contacting towers?
It seems like it ought to, being as the point of airplane mode is to not have the phone radiate. But these days you never know...
If anonymity with a cell phone was important you'd be spending that subscription fee on a new burner every week.
We can also spy on tin-pot dictators and their minions*, both foreign and domestic.
*oh wait, that would be us!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hardly out of reach to someone with a few bucks to use a HLR lookup service, and you don't need dictator level cash to get ss7 network access!
I just could have that super-spy technology be responsible for one long running phone conversation that did not contain the following: "Hello? Are you still there? Crap. Gone again."
There are no such thing as privacy as long as you have a cell phone, use a credit card, drive a car with a license plate, anything related to a internet connection, your face visible in public places for cameras to track.
Hardly a surprise anymore.
When I read about such techniques in a presentation from the 25C3 conference in 2008 it was not news to me even then. http://events.ccc.de/congress/...
Any tin-pot dictator or any person with enough money.
Governments love that surveillance technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. What they fail to understand is the same technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper for *everyone*. Mobile phone videos of police, customer service call recordings, etc are already starting to make a difference. There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Why is this groundbreaking - when the government can just force the cell phone company to hand over this information at will? And it's free that way. I found it amusing during the Aaron Hernandez case, when they came up with detailed information of his whereabouts - to the second - after the fact that he was suspected of murdering someone.
Riiiiiight. As we all know, liberals are the prime supporters of religious nutjobs.
Yeah. Makes lots of sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As the cost are high and data is insane 15 TO 20 A MEG
I'm shocked.
Who knew that a system that lets you receive a phone call anywhere in the world can be used to tell where in the world you actually are??????
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Here is a website where you can see how your android phone tracks your movement. You have to be logged in, which means it's about as private as a gmail account, however private that is. Tracked me in Europe last month, where I only used the wifi and GPS (but drew point-to-point crow flies lines, as compared to USA highway lines) https://maps.google.com/locati...
Gently reply
Dammit, I went trolling for cold fjord and some old boot got caught in the line. Now I'll have to throw the boot back and try new bait.
Supposedly, this is a technology oriented site. All it takes is to put 2 and 2 together and get 4 to know that cell phones can be tracked and are tracked.
That eeevil corporations and government can track my phone is of course, no surprise. However, how easy would it be to fool such systems, and make them think they're tracking me, when in fact they are tracking someone else, I wonder?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
But technology is good?
No duh.
The communication device in your pocket is a TWO-WAY radio.
If you want to be able to talk to the world, expect the world know where you are so the world can listen.
Of course the cell phone provider knows where you are; they have to literally beam a signal to you.
So, no duh they know where you are, they have to.
The point is that both the systems know too much and are too free with giving it out (and retaining, and so on). They're simply not built with privacy in mind, when they could be.
That last bit is easy to see if you envision a system that doesn't track you as closely, but sends out its "you have a call coming, please contact the nearest tower" messages over such a long distance paging service, integrated into the system. I mean, you could well build such a thing and then telcos don't need to keep close track of which handset is where, nevermind storing those rather detailed cell tower records for a couple years.
Then, as long as you don't get called, you don't need to be tracked. Of course, "interested parties" could use trickery to make your phone spill its location by setting up fake calls and such, but if you'd have an open source phone with open source firmware you could again put a stop to that: You'd at least have the tools to stop bleeding so much. With the current crop, you won't have that even with FOSFirmware access; it's designed out of your hands.
I say that it should be possible to design an alternative phone system and even do it as a FOSSFH project that works as well for voice, point-to-point data (eg end-to-end encrypted voice, not "internet access") and perhaps packet data plus whatever other features (mesh operation, call groups, push-to-talk, whatever) on top of ISM bands with much better privacy features. Now all I need is a few enthousiastic people who understand what's possible and what's at stake here.
But I'm safe if I disable location services on my iPhone right?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
It swings both ways. If they want to track my every move via a cell phone then I'll use it as an alibi when I go out and commit crime then tell them I was home the whole time because I purposely left my phone on the kitchen counter.
What kind of bullsh*t article is this? This would have been news in 1997.
To the article writer: You know which governments have this ability? All of them do. Not all of them pay for a service, but the providers still collect the data. When push comes to shove the governments can either buy the data or force the company to give it up (in an extortion deal threatening to cutt off the company from its users). This capablity is pretty non-news by todays standards.
If you substitute "progressive" for Liberals you might be on to something.
It's Official: Leftist-Islamist Alliance against the West
RADICAL ISLAM'S ALLIANCE WITH THE SOCIALIST LEFT
The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Funny. Not three quarters of a century ago, it was the big marxist-judaist conspiracy that was going to bring the world to its knees with war and strife. Today it's the marxist-islamist conspiracy.
My money is still going to be on the nationalists again when it comes to the reason for war. Then again, once the bombs fall it doesn't really matter anymore who is right.
Only who is left.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.