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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.
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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.
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.
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."
Not true.
The basis of triangulation is you get pings on multiple cell tower logs, it decides which cell tower serves you, but you show up in all of the traces.
With three or more point sources it's fairly easy to pinpoint your location, and when you turn on Bluetooth and wireless we get additional data that allows us to locate even your elevation.
And there's more, but I'm not supposed to talk about what we can do to your actual phone.
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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.
Mostly yes. It depowers the cell and wireless circuits, which is why it gives you longer battery life.
Assuming there isn't something running on the device level that wakes up the wireless or cell circuits for an ID ping every so often.
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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.
If you remember a little device from 2007 called iPhone - it introduced a "novel" idea: Let's find out where we are based on the nearby cell towers - we get a list of nearby cell towers and distance from them (can be computed: power & ping delay) and we ask a central data base where the tower location is and we triangulate based on that.
The Cell ID location databases are still active and public (and used for AGPS in the newer iPhones and other devices). And even if you cannot access it, by just driving around with a GPS-enabled device and some logging software you can build your own map.
And the cell locations are NOT changing frequently. It costs A LOT to have a tower in place: the only things that are changing once a tower is in place is the antennas (orientation and type/spread) and back-end network hardware (upgrades from 2G cards to 3G to 4G ...)
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If anonymity with a cell phone was important you'd be spending that subscription fee on a new burner every week.
Don't they do this with SIM cards? You buy a SIM card with x number of minutes with cash and then burn it in a week and pop in another one.
Or leave the phone at home but have it call you in your new sim and relay the call.
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.
rare to have the data that maps Cell ID's to locations for every cell tower in a country
I'd expect that data to be readily available at some point in the cellular system. Otherwise, how would they route an incoming call to a cell phone to the proper tower? As you move, your phone continuously 'checks in' with the nearest towers. Depending on the definition of 'where cell phone users go around the globe', that will probably satisfy most nosey governments.
If they need better resolution, they could craft a special SMS message tha would not cause your phone to display any activity, but would provide an acknowledgement with triangulation data to the message originator.
As far as knowing where the cell towers are; in the USA that's a matter of public record.
Have gnu, will travel.
There are trackable numbers for the SIM AND the phone itself. I believe it was IMEI in GSM phones. It's been a few years since I was in telecom, but I'm sure UMTS has something analogous.
Actually, that's part of the GSM protocol.
You can "ping" a device in th GSM network and that device will return a reply containing the current Cell ID and distance from the tower. And with some devices you can "ask" them to seek a different cell - and it will return that as the reply. The owner of the phone only sees the cell signal bar fluctuating.
Also over the course of a phone conversation, both devices will tell the other one the Cell ID at the beginning of the call and at every hand-over between cells.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
android if you power down the wifi it still looks for wifi networks around you unless you explicitly disable that as well
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??????
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
actually, when you buy in bulk TBs are cheap, and mem prices drop, especially when you have 100 GB/s pipes
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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.
rare? it's not rare as it's easy to build such maps.
google has such a map. nokia/ms has. and apple has as well.
but the tracking doesn't really work for "anyone". rather it works for people who are using an operator from your country(or if you can snoop on the data).
that doesn't mean that anyone could buy just some sw and track anyone, it just means usa can track all verizon users and finland could track all finnish people moving all over the globe(provided they keep their finnish sim in their phone and the phone on. all data they use through that sim routes back through finland too, through their operator).
I fail to see the news.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Minor correction. This technique was not introduced by the iPhone. Google Maps was doing this on Nokia/SonyEricsson J2ME candybar phones for years beforehand. When Apple licensed Google Maps they got access to the same technology. As far as I know Google invented this, although it's one of those ideas that's obvious enough to anyone who explores the problem that I'm not sure "invent" is a useful word to deploy.
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
Shoot...the telecom manufacturer I worked for demonstrated this back in the early 90s. Didn't need any logic in phone -- just service provider logic correlating relative powers reported by multiple cell sites.
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.
Well ...
As long as you can push a SIM-App to that Phone's SIM card, that program can periodically send updates with the current location (Network ID, Cell ID, power) to another network-connected device without the owner ever knowing. It's invisible even to the phone OS, as everything happens inside the SIM and radio module)
And all newer SIM cards (all that have a SIM Application menu, 2001 or newer) can do this, and your network operator (or anyone having the proper network access) can push something OTA to your SIM. You will just see your phone losing it's mobile network for a couple of seconds and reconnecting - that was the SIM's CPU rebooting with the updated firmware.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
And there's more, but I'm not supposed to talk about what we can do to your actual phone.
Who is this "we" that you keep mentioning?
I can neither confirm nor deny why I use we in referring to actions taken in prior decades.
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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
Paging protocols were never that efficient though. I did work at a company that had been a paging service company previously and had migrated into the software side, and apparently it was possible to set up the network to send-out pages several times since there was no feedback that a page was received, and pages weren't always queued up and sent as quickly as one would normally like, at least not quickly enough to allow for near-real-time use like you describe.
I do like the idea though, it would save bandwidth and battery life most likely.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Actually, how do you get ss7 network access?
Dont unpack and test your new phone near your everyday phone. If it is your home, hotel room or work, every phone that is was normally in the area is now of interest due to that one time test activation. Numbers called, callers and voice prints will find that new interesting phone later and allow a gov/mil to work back.
If that does not work, just map an area where tow phones walk towards each other and turn/power off and turn on again walking away from each other.
Any phone is a risk.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
But if you make the battery blow up, you can't track the phone anymore.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Nice idea, but you also have to deal with license plate recognition, EZ-Pass, tire RFID, shoe RFID, facial recognition, and the like.
actually, when you buy in bulk TBs are cheap, and mem prices drop, especially when you have 100 GB/s pipes
Disks may be relatively cheap especially in OEM quantities, however when the requirement is for multi petabytes then you cannot think in terms of a collection of single disks even in a RAID array you have to consider a Storage Area Network and the infrastructure to manage, backup and even do a recovery. When you start adding up the costs this does not come cheap.
Yes governments, especially those in first world countries can build up the necessary infrastructure to capture information and it comes out of tax payers pockets, but you only need one whistle-blower and that government has egg on it's face. Of course some governments don't care and are quite happy to build something like this even if it means their people starve.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
I think you are not understanding what powering down means.
powering down means it's powered down, not that the screen is off and it's in powersave - and in that powersave mode you can choose if you want to look for wifi networks.
of course when it's really off, you can't receive any calls either - because it is off and not in contact with the network.
airplane mode/powering it off cuts it off from talking to the network - unless someone messed quite extensively with your phone to the point of adding extra hardware...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're assuming I don't work for the government.
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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.