NSA Abandoned Project To Track Cell Phone Locations 70
barlevg writes "The Washington Post reports that NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander testified before the Senate about an experimental NSA program to track location data from cell phones in 2011, but abandoned it because it lacked 'the operational value' it needed. It was not made clear what 'operation value' they were seeking. Alexander said, 'the data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes.' He added, 'This may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now because when we identify a number we can give that to the FBI, [who can a warrant for the data it needs]. That’s the reason we stopped in 2011.''"
Re:Sounds like.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sounds like.. (Score:2, Informative)
Unless you turn off your phone completely or use "airplane mode," they can still get a approximation based on what radio tower you are connected to (much like what google assisted gps does). But why develop an expensive 3rd party program when you can just get the cell phone companies to easily cough up any information they need? There is no need because the capability of such things already exists and easily accessed hence why they cancelled the program due to it being redundant.
Re:Sounds like.. (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's not what's being said here. First, GPS has nothing to do with. Phones have GPS systems now, but the foundational problem of a cell phone network is "which tower do I send information to?" A cell phone must be trackable to some extent in order to receive calls. This is done completely with received signal quality (RSQ) metrics and pinging. GPS is not used. You can track a person more finely by noting the strength of several "visible" towers and their relative geographical location.
Alexander is basically saying, "we set up a system where phone companies would feed us location data based on triangulation of multiple tower strengths (whether raw or pre-processed is unclear) just to see if the NSA computers could handle the basic networking of the task. In the end we decided not the both with the program (although they could), because right now if you need something you can just pass the info off to the FBI, which does the legal legwork all on it's own."
The operational value that's not present is the ability to know any given person's position in real time, without waiting for warrants. If they have the time to wait, there's another LEA that can do that for them. They decided to spy on people's location just enough to prove that it can do so later, whenever it feels the need.