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CBS Reports 'Suspicious' Cell Phone Tower Activity In Washington DC (cbsnews.com)
"An unusually high amount of suspicious cell phone activity in the nation's capital has caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns that U.S. officials are being monitored by a foreign entity," reports CBS News:
The issue was first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, but a source at telecom security firm ESD America confirmed the spike in suspicious activity to CBS News. ESD America, hired preemptively for a DHS pilot program this January called ESD Overwatch, first noticed suspicious activity around cell phone towers in certain parts of the capital, including near the White House. This kind of activity can indicate that someone is monitoring specific individuals or their devices... According to the ESD America source, the first such spike of activity was in D.C. but there have been others in other parts of the country. Based on the type of technology used, the source continued, it is likely that the suspicious activity was being conducted by a foreign nation.
The news coincides with a letter sent to the DHS by two congressmen "deeply concerned" about vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocol underlying U.S. cellular networks, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Trailrunner7. Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Ted Lieu are asking if the agency has enough resources to address the threat. "Although there have been a few news stories about this topic, we suspect that most Americans simply have no idea how easy it is for a relatively sophisticated adversary to track their movements, tap their calls, and hack their smartphones."
The news coincides with a letter sent to the DHS by two congressmen "deeply concerned" about vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocol underlying U.S. cellular networks, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Trailrunner7. Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Ted Lieu are asking if the agency has enough resources to address the threat. "Although there have been a few news stories about this topic, we suspect that most Americans simply have no idea how easy it is for a relatively sophisticated adversary to track their movements, tap their calls, and hack their smartphones."
Everyone is being wire tapped oh shit...
"Based on the type of technology used, the source continued, it is likely that the suspicious activity was being conducted by a foreign nation."
Is that because the US based three-letter-agencies just tap in at the service provider level?
They are gonna catch Obama now!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
C'mon, does anyone really trust Washington Free Beacon or CBS?
Also, purchasing a smartphone is a de facto voluntary surrender of every right to privacy you may have ever had, so tough shit.
It's just the President's Russian friends making sure he's safe from Obama's wiretaps.
is the preeminent spying, wiretapping, snooping, eavesdropping entity on Earth. Hell, we invented most of it. We should be proud that our snoopiness is so great that everyone wants to imitate us. What could possibly go wrong?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/mysterious-phony-cell-towers-could-be-intercepting-your-calls
Late to the party guys?
Every country on earth, barring North Korea has an embassy within pissing distance of the White House and Capitol and CBS "discovers" there's espionage. What grade did these people graduate from?
I'm shocked to find out this is going on in this establishment.
the united states already has secretly deployments of armorments preventing these types of attacks. the attacks are thus normally conducted by the United States itself, sometimes in cooperation with foreign nations, or the government allows the attacks to occur.
Signals Intelligence is secretly scanning us all from space, giving us electron spin resonance scans.
There's no attack we aren't prepared for.
Why is this in the media? To spread false fear onto the population.
https://www.drrobertduncan.com...
It's clearly Putin spying on his bitch Trump and laughing at Trump's uneducated supporters. Which one of you Trump supporters are up for a golden shower?
This is precisely why the travel ban is necessary. There just isn't enough information available to properly vet anyone coming from the countries on Trump's travel ban. We can make the process of entering the United States take ten years instead of two and we still won't have enough information to discriminate threats from innocent people. Unfortunately, the terrorists ruin it for the real refugees. This is precisely why the Muslim ban is needed, because there are very real threats to our national security and recent history indicates that a very disproportionate amount of those plotting terrorist acts are Muslims. It is a testament to our law enforcement and intelligence agencies that we haven't had another attack on the scale of 9/11. However, there are always individuals who are engaging or plotting insidious activity against the United States, which is precisely why the travel ban is needed to keep them out. This is the compelling state interest to justify Trump's travel ban against predominantly Muslim countries.
Triangulation isn't that hard any more. Not finding the source is a red flag. I would wonder if this was leaked to the news get a certain reaction.
You know. We can't keep you safe without another 10 billion.
For that matter, most Americans simply have no idea how easy it is for their government to do the exact same thing, without so much as requesting a court order.
Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the government agents in question are contractually obligated to lie to courts about such activities, and they apparently take their contracts with their hardware providers more seriously than their oaths to uphold the law.
It's a very special kind of hypocrite who can lament the very ignorance they fought to ensure.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Why is Snark Required?
> An unusually high amount of suspicious cell phone activity in the nation's capital has caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns that U.S. officials are being monitored by a foreign entity
and
> The news coincides with a letter sent to the DHS by two congressmen "deeply concerned" about vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocol underlying U.S. cellular networks
WHAT A COINCIDENCE! I am sure that the two events are completely independent! Certainly that there is no way that this is a false flag to push whatever legislative changes through that they want to push through! Certainly the CIA and the NSA would never do such things to get their way!
Do they have such a low opinion of the public that they think that this is not completely transparent?
TFA says the exploit can be used remotely "thousands of miles away". So which is it? Local or remote? The article contradicts itself.
circa 2014:
‘Interceptor’ cellphone towers found near White House, Senate
By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Thursday, September 18, 2014
Mysterious “interceptor” cellphone towers that can listen in someone’s phone call despite not being part of any phone networks have turned up near the White House and Senate.
A company that specializes in selling secure mobile phones discovered the existence of several of the towers in and around the nation’s capitol.
“It’s highly unlikely that federal law enforcement would be using mobile interceptors near the Senate,” ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith told the technology website Venture Beat on Thursday. ...
Goldsmith told the site he passed along the information he’d uncovered to the Federal Communications Commission.
Hmmm...
Trump is in a position where he needs to prove his wiretapping claim--and fast.
I find the timing in which the CIA was hacked, very interesting as well.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Than getting caught by your mom?
Cellphones don't have wires to tapp.
The NSA has taps on the hardware, but other agencies do not. If people are trying to do things outside of NSA control, they would need to come up with their own taps.
The US has let security go to shit over the last decade. Foreign workers for "cheap" is a big problem, low moral from shitty treatment by administrations (happened long before Trump so don't bother with the dumbass blame game), corrupt administrators, and of course shit morals at companies executive levels.
Of course it "could" be a foreign agency, but lets be real. If the other agencies were doing their jobs it would have been caught long before public attention on it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I've said it many times, and you can check my history, that if the average American knew how much their cell phone leaked data, they would not only refuse to own one, but refuse to allow them on their property.
I don't have anything to hide. I don't do anything illegal (that I know of, but look how many laws there are, and I'm sure I break some without knowing it), but the point is that cell phone data is only used to build a case, and only vary rarely does it exonerate someone. It isn't' your friend. It's a snitch, a government informer, that you pay to spy on you.
Last, we buy these things to make our life more convenient. However, as far as I see, all it does it make it easier for Rachael with Card Services to try to scam you or for others to interrupt you. I think in the years I've owned one (shackled to me for employment, really), I've used it exactly once when I could not have used a VOiP or POTS. (The car broke down and I called for a tow truck.)
I do have to wonder what's up with these folks in DC. Odd and not a lot of facts yet.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
United States of America
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So they're saying that based on the type of technology that's being used it's foreign. ...But they don't say what that is.
They go on to mention some warning about SS7, which indeed is vulnerable, but fail to correlate the mention with it being the "tech that's being used".
Seems far far more likely this is just the US spying apparatus doing it's thing and deflecting blame onto those scary Russians we've all been conditioned to blame.
I'm so tired of this. Our propaganda laws were repealed and I don't trust any government to act in good faith concerning propaganda, including ours.
We have to be exactly this critical with every news story that comes across. We HAVE to split hairs now, that's where the lies are. When I see a bunch of circumstance and non-sequitur being used as valid information we're being told to draw an opinion on it screams of this exact abuse that we're now open to legally.
First they do not have any idea where SS7 is used in the Wireless Infrastructure. Hint it has nothing to do with cells. Second what is this suspicious activity?
Looks like it is just conmen trying to get money from the taxpayers and congressmen who as lawyers are totally clueless about technology and have no common sense trying to show how interested in current issues they are for their equally stupid electorate. And all journalists are experts in everything while knowing nothing.
How dare you criticize Israel! You are not even Jewish!
gdewilde@gmail.com
Now "we're" totally fucked. Everyone panic!
I find it fucking hilarious that stingray technology is even allowed and encryption technology isn't increased, because Russia.
Allow weeknesses to exist, expect them to be exploited by the darkness.
It's common knowledge trump uses an unsecured android phone, probably because the secure one doesn't have twitter access. He's just begging to be spied upon.
Stingray phone tracker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker Inter-agency communication has hit an all time low guys. DHS should have asked the FBI first.
There is literally no way you can communicate with another person where you can be assured that your communication is not monitored. Even face-to-face communication in code is compromised, if the other party is compromised. Cell phones only work by collecting a lot of data about the caller and the caller's recipient. If CBS is only now figuring out that D.C. is a hotbed of cell data leakage, they are fantastically bad at their jobs.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
It's the Chinese, duh. They make all the equipment. They have all the contracts. Hell, they own the buildings the FBI and CIA work out of. If you don't think the US is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese government, you're an idiot.
they should probably be looking at one of the 17 US intelligence agencies.
It's people playing Pokemon Go
Obama's still wiretapping Trump's from his secret hideaway high atop muslim mountain deep in the jungles of central park. He's listening and laughing to every dirty little secret Trump has. Later he'll post them to twitter for all to see.
If this was being done by the US government or it's TLA's. Or would we?
It's not like America's Commander In Chief would be stupid enough to refuse a secure cell phone just so he can continue his 3am Twitter on the shitter regimen.
Oh god. We're all doomed.
File this under, "no shit, Sherlock". I mean, has anyone gotten a load of the White House staff lately? We had a registered agent of a foreign government receiving national security briefings and holding the post of National Security Advisor before he was thrown to the wolves for being too obvious.
The president just signed a license deal to use his name on a string of Chinese brothels. I mean, what the fuck? I miss the days when the worst thing a president did was get a blowjob from a 20 year old and lie about it.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/07...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Excuse me nice gentlemen. I don't mean to interrupt but, I've been searching news articles to my cat. Have you seen my cat?
We all know Obama is doing this. Just waiting for Trump to figure this out, and regurgitate it back out to Twitter to feed his babies.
It is probably Israel spying on the US - again. They are a deceitful, backstabbing rogue state. The attack on the USS Liberty. The attacks on 9/11. The largest spy ring ever uncovered in America - quickly pulled offline by Fox news. Why does the US continually give these terrorists billions of dollars every year? Terrible. Just terrible.
make sure you start to blame a foreign nation well before it all hits the news. In this case, obviously it will be blamed on Russia, to make sure you keep the American population's anger targetted at something.
It must be horrible to be a foreign spy these days. Risking your life, working with the latest technology that only the brights engineers understand, only to spy on Trumps communication. And then again risking your life while using the latest technology to try to communicate the stolen information back to the mother country only to hear "We already knew that, we read it on Twitter this morning".
The reason your cell phone dies so quickly at DC area airports is because there are so many governments and US agencies playing spy with their cell phone spy tools.
because all gear is made in China that has backdoors connected to systems in China. No need to tap or intercept guvmint comms because Russia already has interactions with high level people appointed by Trump.
mfwright@batnet.com
This has been going on for years.
When I worked at FDIC, my phone often geolocated at the pentagon, which was miles away. This location was precise, not vague.
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Cut it out, Obama!
The boats been spotted several time and was travelling between delware and florida. Mystery solved. NEXT PLEASE