GSM/GPS Tracking Device Found On Activist's Car At Circumvention Tech Festival

vivaoporto writes A GSM/GPS tracking device was found this March 4 on an activist's car attending the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain, a festival that proposes to gather "the community fighting censorship and surveillance for a week of conferences, workshops, hackathons, and social gatherings, featuring many of the Internet Freedom community's flagship events." They are now asking for the internet tech community for help in order to identify the device. Below verbatim is the plea for help published on the Tor Project website. The fine article also contains pictures of the device.

"On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.

If you have information about this device — please send information to jacob at appelbaum dot net using gpg.

The device was magnetically mounted inside of the left wheel well of the car. The battery is attached by cable to the tracking device. The battery was magnetically mounted to the frame of the car. The tracking device was similarly magnetically mounted. The device itself has an external magnetically mounted GPS antenna. It has a very simple free hanging GSM antenna. The device included a Movistar SIM card for GSM network access. The entire device was wrapped in black tape."

Comments

Re:Russian or Asian

[oodaloop]

The U.S. has devices like this, believe it or not. They're simple, effective, modular, fixable, etc. Tactical units love 'em. My first guess is they're from some U.S. unit.

Stingray

[YuppieScum]

Not the submarine, but the cell-tower spoofer.

This would be ideal to find out who it's calling, and changing what it's sending...

Re:How did they notice that?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Google translated local article:

On February 8, after crossing the French border patrol agents of the National Police (CNP) was stopped at the toll Jonquera. "They told me it was a search routine, but it was very strange for an hour and a half because the vehicle was out of my field of vision, an agent took it and then came back to me" claims without understanding the reason for this police action.

On March 1, in the city of Valencia, where he traveled to participate in the Circumvention Tech Festival , the second incident occurred. Only when it was parked and unloading your belongings appeared agents also the CNP, which was asked to identify her and those who accompanied him. The girl identified out that while "the police were placed around the car." "The two incidents in a time interval of three weeks I did and suspicion was when I decided to inspect the car," he concludes with a certain tone of indignation. The activist said that it will soon agree with your attorney when you decide what steps to from now.
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Re:How did they notice that?

[gigaherz]

The news article (in Catalan) says she searched her car after two incidents where the local police approached her for identification in unusual places, as if they knew where she was going. The second time it just seemed way too suspicious so she decided to search the car.

Re:Russian or Asian

[Anonymous Coward]

The text in the unit is in Spanish. It has an ID...

Not considering a misdirection it seems to be a standard issue for Spanish secret police.
They would buy the same material as the one in which they would have been educated, namely USA secret ops or FBI training.

If the ID is sequential there are, at least 2200 units like this roaming Spain...

U-bloc GPS Chip

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who owns it but the module with 2209 written on it is a U-blox GPS receiver. I recognise the circuit around it from their reference designs.

http://www.u-blox.com/en/gps-modules/pvt-modules.html

Re:how was it detected then found?

[gigaherz]

The original news article (in Catalan) says she was stopped while trying to cross into France, where they took the car, and "routinely searched" it for an hour and a half before it was returned. Afterwards a month later she was approached by the same police body in Valencia, right after she parked outside the conference. That's when she decided it was too much to be just coincidence, and searched the car.

In Soviet Russia

[Thor Ablestar]

The device looks very similar to the numerous GSM/GPS trackers that are sold in Russia in every security equipment store. When the police is busy with Bolotnaya square activists there is no other method to find your stolen car.

Re:...or a publicity stunt

[AmiMoJo]

Do you know who Jacob Appelbaum is? He is one of the core Tor team members. He has represented Wikileaks at HOPE and given lectures based on the Snowden leaks, which he had access to. He has been targeted multiple times by the US authorities, including getting a court order for his Twitter account and repeatedly stopping him at the US border. He has had several laptops and phones seized.

There is a huge amount of evidence that he is being targeted quite openly by various "security" services. This development is interesting but unsurprising.

Re:Have some fun

[AmiMoJo]

These types of SIM card usually don't allow you to make voice calls. They are machine-to-machine (M2M) SIMs that only do data, and sometimes text messages because SMS tends to be lower power and more reliable than data.