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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."
It was probably a prank pulled by someone else at the festival.
Or a publicity stunt by the "activist"
Take SIM out of GPS/GSM device. Install in cheap phone. Pass around between your friends to call sex lines (do they still exist?) order contraband, make srange calls at 3AM to various powerful political figures.
Then see who's ass they go after in law enforcement.
Have gnu, will travel.
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...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
My first guess is they're from some U.S. unit.
What makes you think that? What makes the US the more likely suspect over, say, the Spanish? What what it happening in Spain, and the Spanish text on the device...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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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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.
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...
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
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.
To me, this stinks of home made stunt to get attention. The guy's reddit name, the shit build quality, the lack of any detail as to how it was found... etc etc etc. It's a millennial cry for attention, for whatever reason.
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.
You are completely incorrect. There are LOADS of places that you could stick this thing. There are even places that you could stick this thing where you could power it from the car's electrical system, or use the car's electrical system to charge the battery when the ignition is on.
It's not all that difficult to open a hood. Sometimes you can stick your hand up from below the bumper cover, in between the radiator core support and the grille, and reach the mechanism. Other times you may need a tool, but it's easier to open a hood than it is to open a door.
Do you know where your antenna mechanism sits? There's a bit of a compartment between the inner fender liner, the outer fender, and the firewall. On some cars it can be accessed when the front door is open.
Some cars have plastic inner fender liners between the metal fender liner and the wheel, and often those are almost toolless to remove and install.
Most cars have a metallic inner bumper behind a layer of plastic or styrofoam that's hidden behind the bumper cover. On many cars one could reach that area from below even easier than reaching for the hood latch, and with little more than an AC condenser coil and some lights there's no reason for a mechanic to go poking in there, so a tracker would probably go unnoticed for some time if placed there.
Lastly, if they'd used a more automotive-looking project case they could have just attached it right next to the PCM under the hood, even tapping into a 12V wire to power it.
This was placed where it was placed because someone was in an awful hurry. It was probably a busy public place, and they probably couldn't use cover-of-darkness, so it was either in a well-lit area at night or during the day. I don't expect that whoever did this had much of a budget. No project case, not even heatshrink wrapping to make it look like it belongs, just some amateurish use of black duct tape that would stand out as not belonging to even casual people. Plus the whole poor placement aspect should mean that they weren't especially well trained to do this either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not every government agency spends megabucks on top equipment when the off the shelf stuff is sufficient.
If you want to track someone and want plausible deniability then it's a lot better to use cheap off the shelf stuff and wrap it in tape. It's no big deal to defend that you lost a $100 device that anyone can buy, it's just written off as operational cost.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.