US Pushing Local Police To Keep Quiet On Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology 253
schwit1 (797399) writes with this story from the Associated Press, as carried by Yahoo News: The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
"Obama has said he welcomes a debate " (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Obama has said he welcomes a debate " (Score:3, Interesting)
If everyone starts to vote for Libertarian the problem will just be extended. Look at how the "insiders" have taken over groups like the "Tea Party" and moved them from grass roots "People" back to "Career Politicians with new branding.
I certainly appreciate the motivation, but if you are not addressing the right problem then the solution will also be incorrect. The real problem is that corrupt politicians have become entrenched in every possible political office. In order to fix things, the entrenched political power needs to be removed from every political office.
That is not to say 100% of the people in politics are bad, any more than to say 100% of the NSA's employees are bad. Consider it a farm where enough plants are diseased and festering that we have to remove the crop and burn it all, or risk immediate contamination to new plants sown. The farm is fine, the founders did a great job building it where we could do exactly what needs to be done and still be a farm.
Nope, it's not the only problem to deal with but it's at the root. In order to get rid of the people bribing and coercing politicians, new people with hopefully better morals need to expose them after a swap. It took a long time to break the system and it will take a while to clean it up and heal.
Hollywood co-operates with NSA (Score:2, Interesting)
The USA was the first nation to mandate BY LAW that every cell phone sold in the USA had to constantly provide location tracking information, and the laughable excuse given by Congress is that this facility would help locate some 911 callers. This functionality became a requirement MANY years ago, and has absolutely NOTHING to do with GPS.
After the new law, Hollywood modified the plots of its TV dramas to account for the fact that anyone with a powered mobile phone was locatable to within several meters using the cell tower triangulation methods that actually track the position of every cell phone owner in the USA. If the plot required a person to be 'lost', an excuse had to be found for the lack of a cell phone, or the inability of the cell phone to work properly (exhausted battery- not within the range of a cell tower). BUT THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED.
The US Justice Department contacted every major entertainment company, and asked them to STOP informing ordinary Americans that their mobile phones were constantly location tracked. And Hollywood complied- so now TV dramas constantly inform naive viewers that most mobile phones CANNOT be location tracked unless
1) special software has been installed on the phone
2) the phone has a GPS chip
3) AND the phone network company has been informed, and currently has a Human operator attempting to locate the phone.
Hollywood TV shows and films can actually have plots revolving around the use of a mobile phone, and at the same time absolutely denying that the phone has ANY location tracking facility. The US remake of 'Shameless' had a 'genius' 'hacker' character attempting to locate a person trapped in a container on a moving truck, and despite the fact that the 'lost' individual was in the USA, and communicating with the 'genius' 'hacker' by mobile phone, not once did the 'genius' 'hacker' suggest that the phone itself provided the location.
You see the same thing with 'crime' plots, where Hollywood agrees to NEVER show effective criminal procedures, even to the extent of NEVER accurately depicting something as trivial as lock-picking. But extending this dubious principle to general public knowledge about the true functionality of their electronic devices is despicable- and straight out of 1984.
Such NSA inspired programs join other NSA FUD like:
-the NSA FUD attack against Truecrypt
-the NSA FUD attack against the validity of properly erasing files by over-writing them with new, random data that the OS cannot distinguish from other, valid data. The NSA pays shills to hit forums like these with garbage about 'magic' forensic technology that directly recovers such deleted data from the surface of the HDD platter. The intention is to drive the sheeple to use subverted, corporate deletion tools that actually leave most of the data untouched, making it likely the NSA and others can recover it.
-The Bill Gates/NSA home spy project called Kinect 2. Due to the complete failure of the Xbox One in the marketplace, Microsoft has reversed every Gates/NSA requirement for the original Xbox One launch. No great loss to the NSA, since the Kinect2 was just a tiny part of the NSA grooming project to get sheeple accepting of NSA cameras, microphones and associated computer processing in their own homes. Almost every brand of smart TV has cameras and microphones that CANNOT be disabled, and continuously stream data from these to NSA servers in the so-called 'cloud', if people are dumb enough to connect these TVs to the internet.
Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android (Score:5, Interesting)
Spidey [mit.edu] is a stingray detector app developed by the ACLU and MIT. This page [spideyapp.com] is a page to get notified when it goes live. The source code is on GitHub [github.com]. It works by comparing the towers you can see at any given moment against what you've seen before and data from the OpenCellID Project [opencellid.org].
Who watches the watchers? I do.
Re:Stingrays (Score:2, Interesting)
> i think the Justice Dept. is trying to keep this tech out of the hands of the general public
I expect it is really about the fact that if people know how it works, it becomes easy to avoid.
It should be super simple to write an app that will detect them and warn you about it. They all work by putting up a "microcell" and convincing your phone to connect to their microcell and then on the back-end they route your calls back through the regular cell network. The thing is, they have to use a tower-id that does not conflict with the real towers in the area else they would cause random failures on any phone trying to talk to the real tower (something like when two computers have the same IP address on the same subnet). So, an app that just records the tower-ids your phone sees along with the GPS coordinates would quickly notice if a new "tower" popped up in your neighborhood.
I'm surprised there isn't such an app already (maybe there is, I haven't checked since I first heard about stingray like 2 years ago).
How can we? (Score:2, Interesting)
When Ralph Nader was running in 2000, he was barred from the debates. [washingtonpost.com]
The Democrats and Republicans have a oligarchy here in the States when it comes to political candidates.
We also have a populace that has been programmed by propaganda to fear the "other side" soooo bad, that they'll vote for the "lesser evil".
There are plenty of BS reasons and rationals that people use - "throwing your vote away" is the most idiotic one of all.
So, people, the parent is right. And we DO have the government that reflects the people. And the people are lazy, easily manipulated cows.
But the thing is, just try to go against the flow of mindless walking cows.
I will continue to throw my vote away and listen to people who bitch about how things never change with disgust.
Obama is Bush term 3 &4? WTF did you expect?! That's his campaign rhetoric was the truth?
And if you think Romney would have been better, you are just as delusional and just as much of a sheep as everyone else.
Pathetic sheepeople - ALL of you!
Re:Hollywood co-operates with NSA (Score:4, Interesting)
Hollywood uses phone tracking when it's convenient to the plot, and discards it when it's not. The biggest procedural crime drama on TV (NCIS) had phones being instantly trackable as recently as this season, with people specifically removing their batteries for exactly that reason. That same show ignores that ability when it makes the storyline more interesting without it.
No secret conspiracy to show it one way or the other.
Take off your tinfoil hat and go out side, dolt.
Re:Oh my ... (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you needed any more proof that Obama has had the power to close Gitmo all along, he just traded five detainees for Bergdahl. (the "illegal" portion of his actions was that he didn't inform Congress far enough in advance as required by law)
I think you'll find that a huge number of people will continue to vote for the terrible Republicans, just as a huge number of people will vote for Democrats even when they act little better than the Republicans. And even if Obama hadn't just openly stated that he can release detainees without anyone else's consent, he has always had a massive amount of influence on policy through the bully pulpit. He's not getting crappy results because we have lots of useless and obstructionist Republicans and some useless Democrats, he's getting crappy results because he really doesn't care about the moral positions he previously advocated. To suggest that things are largely the Republicans' fault simply isn't rational, after the willful continuation of virtually all the existing War on Terror policies, and the weakest possible healthcare reform that could still be argued to be a "victory."
I don't want to believe that Obama and the Democrats are useless, since it makes improvement solely through the electoral system (as opposed to through large scale strikes or serious economic problems) seem far off and unlikely, but it's certainly not helping to make excuses for politicians' bad behavior.
Re:Oh my ... (Score:4, Interesting)
They are both idiots.
Wrong! They are con men, who hit the jackpot. The voters are the only idiots here, and they are just as corrupt as those people they reelect. The corruption of the politician is a reflection.
Re:Stingrays (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh my ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If President Obama had wanted to close Gitmo, he would have shamed the Democrats in Congress into doing it.
He doesn't care that Gitmo is open. If anything, he loves it being open, because it gives him another cudgel to bash the Republicans with. And people like you eat it up.
Also, if the Republicans had this great lockstep mentality you mention, the term RINO wouldn't exist.
Re:Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is, can this be done on the OS level, or does it have to happen on the driver level? If it can be done at the OS level, easy peasy, just modify the code to establish tower connections to include this check. If it has to happen on a driver level, it gets trickier. Most phones use proprietary binary drivers for their cell radios, so they couldn't be readily modified. However, it may be possible to load an intermediate driver, which in turn loads the proprietary driver. If it could be determined which driver calls involved connecting to a new tower, you could just pass through everything else, and only pass through calls to the tower connect function if they passed your database lookup. Trickier, but doable. Because really, you want to avoid connecting to these things at all. Nice though it is to see you're being attacked, it's better to stop the attack before it starts.
Re:Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a major C/C++ developer with the skills you mention.
I've already started work on such a tool and will be instead changing my efforts to enhance the provided GitHub page.
I'm also aiming to replace the binary blob with a debugging shim that *then* uses the blob. Essentially keeping a log of what's going on there.
Don't worry brother. Others are also outraged and using their development skills to fight for freedom.
Re:Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android (Score:2, Interesting)
This would almost certainly need work at the driver level. I'd be rather astonished if the decision to switch towers is made outside the driver. Most likely this doesn't even reach the processor(s) running the main kernel and remains on the isolated processor which handles talking to the cell network. This might be something to hope for in the future, but it will take pushing the various companies to add this feature. You might be able to get this feature out of CryptoPhone [cryptophone.de] in a reasonable timeframe.