American Phone-Tracking Firm Demo'd Surveillance Powers By Spying On CIA and NSA (arstechnica.com) 50
Anomaly Six, a secretive government contractor, claims to monitor the movements of billions of phones around the world and unmask spies with the press of a button. Reader BeerFartMoron shares a report: In the months leading up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six -- or "A6" -- the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6's powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.
Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there's a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading.
Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there's a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading.
just because you're paranoid ... (Score:5, Informative)
For the other people's devices I'm running pi-hole and on average it blocks about 10,000 requests per day PER PHONE on the network.
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Or just use a dumbphone.
Most of us spend nearly all of our time within walking distance of an internet-connected computer. Why do we need to be constantly connected via our phone too?
Re:just because you're paranoid ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or just use a dumbphone.
Most of us spend nearly all of our time within walking distance of an internet-connected computer. Why do we need to be constantly connected via our phone too?
If you are using a cellular phone, you are using a device and infrastructure that is exactly a tracking system. It's inherent to the cellular system, and if not tracking, it will not work.
Now if you are willing to be located only when you need to use the phone, turn it off, and store it in a tight metal box while turned off.
Seriously - there is only one way to be free of these things. Destroy your SS, find a way to have yourself declared dead, do not engage in any form of RF or wired communications, and maybe move to a compound in Idaho, grow all your food and live by bartering chickens.
Most people think that is being snarky, actually that is the god-honest truth.
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Or you could just not install bad apps.
too bad the bad apps include (Score:1)
.. google products (Android, Google Play, Gmail, Google docs...) .. your phone carrier's apps (AT&T's, Verizon's, T-mobile's...) .. your phone manufacturer's apps (Samsung's, Apple's, ...)
so that almost gets you there if you write your own fork of android; but you're still missing ... the firmware apps that run on a lower level than the Android layer that you can't uninstall without a soldering iron that'll break your phone...
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Or you could just not install bad apps.
...or leave your cellphone at home.
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I recommend ditching Android altogether in favor of Pine64's PinePhone or PinePhone Pro.
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I recommend ditching Android altogether in favor of Pine64's PinePhone or PinePhone Pro.
How are you going to deal with Cell Phone tower triangulation?
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It has a switch under the back cover to turn off the modem.
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It has a switch under the back cover to turn off the modem.
An actual mechanical switch? That would be great.
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An actual mechanical switch? That would be great.
Yes, there are 6 mechanical "dip" switches to toggle radios, mic, camera and headphone port.
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An actual mechanical switch? That would be great.
Yes, there are 6 mechanical "dip" switches to toggle radios, mic, camera and headphone port.
Bloody hell - take my money! 8^)
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Maybe they tap into the ocean floor cables (Score:4, Insightful)
"... or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines."
*cough* bullshit *cough*
Unless they're on the surface, you can't track cellphones in submarines. Radio waves don't penetrate beyond a few inches of water at best.
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You seem to be unaware how GPS works. Also, you seem to be unaware that motion-trackers on phones are way to inaccurate to replace that missing GPS signal. The best you can get is if personnel from a submarine is in a harbor and they are using their phones on shore-leave. I.e. you can "track" submarines this way exactly when they do not mind being "tracked".
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The phone has accellerometers, and while they aren't as precise as GPS, they will certainly be able to track the movement of a phone across the ocean. At the very least, it would be able to tell you how long that particular crewman was onboard. at the very best, you'd be able to read the launch codes that he pressed into the panel above his console.
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You are fantasizing. The accellerometers are wayyyy to imprecise for anything useful. The keyboard-reading works via sound and requires you to listen to the keyboard for quite a while _and_ requires dictionary-based correction to even work somewhat. Accellerometer based keyboard reading is a theoretical possibility, but it is _worse_. Also, do you really think submarines allow personal electronics in control-rooms? What planet do you live on?
This is just bullshit disconnected from reality. Of course all the
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...but do cellphones in submarines eventually get connectivity at some point?
Yeah.
Interesting to think about how useful smartphone inertial and magnetic sensors could be in a sub.
All phones have inertial sensors, a clock and magnetic sensors although magnetic measurements in a sub are complicated.
Imagine if everyone's smartphones recorded this stuff over time and batch uploaded it all when they got service again. Phones of multiple sailors can average out inertial error across measurements. An adversary could play time and direction to get a relative idea of the shape of the area co
30 seconds to maybe 5 minutes (Score:3)
> All phones have inertial sensors, a clock and magnetic sensors although magnetic measurements in a sub are complicated
This is something we actually have to try to do when a GPS goes out on a quadcopter aka drone. Inertial navigation can save your ass for a couple seconds during a gps glitch. A university research project decided to see how well they could track position using the types of sensors used in a drone or phone, without GPS. Using the sensors to try to go straight for 100 meters, they ended
Ps even with a ring laser gyroscope (Score:3)
To give you a flavor it, beyond the simple drift you get from $1.15 IMU chips, consider this.
Even with a $10,000 ring laser gyroscope, if it's bolted to the floor it'll spin 180 degrees in 12 hours. Because it's attached to a spinning planet. But that's only 180 degrees at the equator. At the poles, it's zero (ish, another calculation). You have to know just where they are in order to know how much to offset the gyro for earth rotation. Which means that in order to know your turn rate and therefore guessti
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Even with a $10,000 ring laser gyroscope, if it's bolted to the floor it'll spin 180 degrees in 12 hours. Because it's attached to a spinning planet. But that's only 180 degrees at the equator. At the poles, it's zero (ish, another calculation).
Note the cycle starts by needing to know your position (and orientation). It ends with a very estimated position, which will be off due to many different error margins. It then feeds that back into another cycle that multiplies the error each time.
You don't have to rely on inertial navigation alone.
Subs typically only move a few knots especially if they want to keep their positions secret. You have a trail of magnetic bearings and time on each bearing. The inertial sensor really only needs to detect jerk to provide some estimation of speed or it can estimate speed during a course change by leveraging magnetic reference. Speed likely restricted to a band of possibilities depending on depth that could itself possibly also give away clues about locat
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It would be interesting to see what smart people could do. Not much, I suspect, but it would be interesting to see. Maybe one could distinguish generally what part of the world you're in. âI think it would be more accurate to detect the location of a US submarine using the following method.
Let's use as an example an Ohio class sub. Let's try to figuring out where they could be. The US has 18 of them. Russia is in Ukraine. North Korea is test launching missiles. China is being China. Guess where w
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Indeed. Also submarines usually have a steel hull which is not the best thing to get radio waves through either...
But these guys are clearly idiots. Spying on the CIA and NSA and then publicly being proud of that?
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"... or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines."
*cough* bullshit *cough*
Unless they're on the surface, you can't track cellphones in submarines. Radio waves don't penetrate beyond a few inches of water at best.
Nah, they just track the sound waves under water everytime they do a Gertrude check...
with bad link, smells fishy (Score:2)
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Why does link behind "unmask spies with the press of a button" lead to a primer on elliptical cryptography instead of something related to the article summary?
Not sure - changed after posting? Here's the article that the summary refers to: https://theintercept.com/2022/... [theintercept.com]
Just because you are paranoid. (Score:1)
So another name for them: (Score:2)
I'm not that interesting (Score:1)
Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers
Yeah, and they're going to be just as disappointed as I'm assuming DJI was when they discovered that I primarily fly my drone around the empty field behind my neighborhood with a great view of the rear side of the nearby Walmart. Somebody in China probably got to say "Hey, I recognize that empty cardboard box!"
I'm guessing if you're not a person of significant political interest, this rent-a-spook company really isn't worth losing sleep over.
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You're guessing wrong if you think they don't also sell the data to criminals and criminal organizations.
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You're guessing wrong if you think they don't also sell the data to criminals and criminal organizations.
Criminals who most likely go through it looking for profitable marks. So, if you own a lot of cryptocurrency and leave it sitting on an exchange, yeah - you might end up the victim of a SIM swap scam or something like that. If you're a celebrity or politician (is there a difference these days?) criminals might see some value in getting into your cloud backups or social media accounts.
But for the average person who sticks to old fashioned money kept in traditional FDIC insured accounts, and isn't a public
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You're naive to the point of suspicion. You claim to be an uninteresting nobody with a clean credit record. You're exactly the type of person they target. You've just been lucky.
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(Lucky or oblivious - sometimes when they steal your identity they keep the bills paid so you don't notice.)
Maybe just me (Score:2)
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But I thought it was common knowledge that apps track people. Its why I disable twatter and faceplant as just two examples. I think most people know, they just don't care. I'd hope soldiers care a little more. But I thought I read something about US soldiers in Iraq not knowing it was a no-no to use faceplant. So maybe soldiers don't care either.
It should be common knowledge. It should also be common knowledge to the Slashdot Paranoids that if as they think, the three letter people are after them, the cellular phone system will eventually lead them to the poor paranoid fella. Then the poor guy will be whisked off to be rendered.
They need to stop using phones altogether. Probably won't cure their paranoia though, because then the Orbital cameras will be trying to get them, maybe psyops will read their mind and know where they are.
We go through
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They need to stop using phones altogether. Probably won't cure their paranoia though, because then the Orbital cameras will be trying to get them, maybe psyops will read their mind and know where they are.
The government will still be able to track them with the 5G chips that were in the vaccines. Duh.
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They need to stop using phones altogether. Probably won't cure their paranoia though, because then the Orbital cameras will be trying to get them, maybe psyops will read their mind and know where they are.
The government will still be able to track them with the 5G chips that were in the vaccines. Duh.
And then pick them up with big magnets, because the vaccine makes people magnetic
You're not a good spy if you let yourself track... (Score:2)
"...the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter..."
At a minimum I would have thought they would use a dumb or "clean" phone with firewall, dnsfilter, etc. Not a phone crippled with malware, and tweeting their latest exploits. Unless it is on purpose..
Also, it is quite strange that these companies reveal how they do it...
More info on A6... (Score:2)
... is available on their "About Us" page on LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/compa... [linkedin.com]
You are not a bear in a forest of bears (Score:2)
Link to article (Score:1)
Seems to be wrong in the post. Here: https://theintercept.com/2022/... [theintercept.com]
Also in EU? (Score:2)
In a sane world. (Score:2)
In a sane world this would be a sign that the practices that make this possible need regulating. But normal people are no longer considered by our leadership.