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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."
"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."
There are ways to poke around inside one of these if you can inject commands and read from the GPRS modem port. Many chipsets implement at extended AT command set. There are registers with IP addresses of the target server for the data sent.
Have gnu, will travel.
Or purchase a burner phone, call it from the devicevwith the sim and record the number on the caller ID. From there you can track down who owns the number.
Of course it probably sends GPS coordinates via sms. You could attempt to study the format and send bogus location reports like saying it is at the center of the fukishima reactor, the rim of some volcano, or in the middle of the ocean.
Just hope it is not a rental car and the car company starts charging you credit card for excess mileage or out of boundry insurance coverages.