Systems That Can Secretly Track Where Cellphone Users Go Around the Globe 76
cold fjord writes with this story about the proliferation of companies willing to sell tracking information and systems. Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people's travels over days, weeks or longer ... It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official ... said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide. "Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world," said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International.
Oh please, we've had this for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept that we don't track you illegally worldwide is a wonderful fairy tale, but we do track you.
Now stop using it in the bathroom. That's just gross.
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Now stop using it in the bathroom. That's just gross.
Particularly that third stall from the end.
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actually, when you buy in bulk TBs are cheap, and mem prices drop, especially when you have 100 GB/s pipes
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actually, when you buy in bulk TBs are cheap, and mem prices drop, especially when you have 100 GB/s pipes
Disks may be relatively cheap especially in OEM quantities, however when the requirement is for multi petabytes then you cannot think in terms of a collection of single disks even in a RAID array you have to consider a Storage Area Network and the infrastructure to manage, backup and even do a recovery. When you start adding up the costs this does not come cheap.
Yes governments, especially those in first world countries can build up the necessary infrastructure to capture information and it comes out of t
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You're assuming I don't work for the government.
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If they don't start getting that through their heads (which they really should have by now), they're in for a very serious surprise.
Better ways to track users (Score:5, Funny)
This is good technology, but not as good technology as that thing where people call the bad guy and have to stay on the phone with him for 20 seconds in order to trace the call. If I can offer one recommendation: they should work on making that like 19 seconds. Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.
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Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.
I'm pretty sure that the U.S. Government doesn't need a stopwatch to know when 20 seconds are up. I'm also pretty sure that toying with Edward Snowden isn't as much fun as it may seem. But then again, the U.S. Government is rather psychotic nowadays.
Re:Better ways to track users (Score:5, Funny)
Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.
Which is why, back in 2007, the NSA infiltrated stopwatch manufacturers and altered their timing mechanisms so they run slow - when a stopwatch says 19 seconds, in truth it's been a bit over 20 seconds. So now when the bad guy thinks he's outsmarted the beautiful police detective, she's had time to set up that GUI in Visual Basic and knows exactly where he is.
Don't believe me? Just look at the number of world records that have fallen during the last few Olympic Games.
I should be more careful (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Storm in a teacup (Score:5, Informative)
Not true.
The basis of triangulation is you get pings on multiple cell tower logs, it decides which cell tower serves you, but you show up in all of the traces.
With three or more point sources it's fairly easy to pinpoint your location, and when you turn on Bluetooth and wireless we get additional data that allows us to locate even your elevation.
And there's more, but I'm not supposed to talk about what we can do to your actual phone.
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And there's more, but I'm not supposed to talk about what we can do to your actual phone.
Who is this "we" that you keep mentioning?
I can neither confirm nor deny why I use we in referring to actions taken in prior decades.
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But if you make the battery blow up, you can't track the phone anymore.
Re:Storm in a teacup (Score:5, Informative)
If you remember a little device from 2007 called iPhone - it introduced a "novel" idea: Let's find out where we are based on the nearby cell towers - we get a list of nearby cell towers and distance from them (can be computed: power & ping delay) and we ask a central data base where the tower location is and we triangulate based on that.
The Cell ID location databases are still active and public (and used for AGPS [wikipedia.org] in the newer iPhones and other devices). And even if you cannot access it, by just driving around with a GPS-enabled device and some logging software you can build your own map.
And the cell locations are NOT changing frequently. It costs A LOT to have a tower in place: the only things that are changing once a tower is in place is the antennas (orientation and type/spread) and back-end network hardware (upgrades from 2G cards to 3G to 4G ...)
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Minor correction. This technique was not introduced by the iPhone. Google Maps was doing this on Nokia/SonyEricsson J2ME candybar phones for years beforehand. When Apple licensed Google Maps they got access to the same technology. As far as I know Google invented this, although it's one of those ideas that's obvious enough to anyone who explores the problem that
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Shoot...the telecom manufacturer I worked for demonstrated this back in the early 90s. Didn't need any logic in phone -- just service provider logic correlating relative powers reported by multiple cell sites.
Re:Storm in a teacup (Score:4, Informative)
rare to have the data that maps Cell ID's to locations for every cell tower in a country
I'd expect that data to be readily available at some point in the cellular system. Otherwise, how would they route an incoming call to a cell phone to the proper tower? As you move, your phone continuously 'checks in' with the nearest towers. Depending on the definition of 'where cell phone users go around the globe', that will probably satisfy most nosey governments.
If they need better resolution, they could craft a special SMS message tha would not cause your phone to display any activity, but would provide an acknowledgement with triangulation data to the message originator.
As far as knowing where the cell towers are; in the USA that's a matter of public record [fcc.gov].
Re:Storm in a teacup (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that's part of the GSM protocol.
You can "ping" a device in th GSM network and that device will return a reply containing the current Cell ID and distance from the tower. And with some devices you can "ask" them to seek a different cell - and it will return that as the reply. The owner of the phone only sees the cell signal bar fluctuating.
Also over the course of a phone conversation, both devices will tell the other one the Cell ID at the beginning of the call and at every hand-over between cells.
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rare? it's not rare as it's easy to build such maps.
google has such a map. nokia/ms has. and apple has as well.
but the tracking doesn't really work for "anyone". rather it works for people who are using an operator from your country(or if you can snoop on the data).
that doesn't mean that anyone could buy just some sw and track anyone, it just means usa can track all verizon users and finland could track all finnish people moving all over the globe(provided they keep their finnish sim in their phone and the
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Well ...
As long as you can push a SIM-App to that Phone's SIM card, that program can periodically send updates with the current location (Network ID, Cell ID, power) to another network-connected device without the owner ever knowing. It's invisible even to the phone OS, as everything happens inside the SIM and radio module)
And all newer SIM cards (all that have a SIM Application menu, 2001 or newer) can do this, and your network operator (or anyone having the proper network access) can push something OTA to
This is a surprise to anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that partially why receive-only paging services still exist, because those that don't want their location tracked still want to be able to receive notices?
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The surprising part (to some people) is not that the provider knows where you are but that anyone who knows SS7 can submit query like "where is 1-123-456-7890?" to the cell network and the provider will tell them.
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Re:This is a surprise to anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
The "surprise" is that this data is available to seemingly unrelated parties who aren't even state actors. The only data sufficiently protected by the phone system is payment data, because that's what the operators, and by extension the designers of the system, care about.
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I do like the idea though, it would save b
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Mostly yes. It depowers the cell and wireless circuits, which is why it gives you longer battery life.
Assuming there isn't something running on the device level that wakes up the wireless or cell circuits for an ID ping every so often.
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android if you power down the wifi it still looks for wifi networks around you unless you explicitly disable that as well
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I think you are not understanding what powering down means.
powering down means it's powered down, not that the screen is off and it's in powersave - and in that powersave mode you can choose if you want to look for wifi networks.
of course when it's really off, you can't receive any calls either - because it is off and not in contact with the network.
airplane mode/powering it off cuts it off from talking to the network - unless someone messed quite extensively with your phone to the point of adding extra har
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If anonymity with a cell phone was important you'd be spending that subscription fee on a new burner every week.
Don't they do this with SIM cards? You buy a SIM card with x number of minutes with cash and then burn it in a week and pop in another one.
Or leave the phone at home but have it call you in your new sim and relay the call.
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If that does not work, just map an area where tow phones walk towards each other and turn/power off and turn on again walking away from each other.
Any phone is a risk.
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Riiiiiight. As we all know, liberals are the prime supporters of religious nutjobs.
Yeah. Makes lots of sense.
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If you substitute "progressive" for Liberals you might be on to something.
It's Official: Leftist-Islamist Alliance against the West [americanthinker.com]
RADICAL ISLAM'S ALLIANCE WITH THE SOCIALIST LEFT [discoverthenetworks.org]
The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures [danielpipes.org]
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Funny. Not three quarters of a century ago, it was the big marxist-judaist conspiracy that was going to bring the world to its knees with war and strife. Today it's the marxist-islamist conspiracy.
My money is still going to be on the nationalists again when it comes to the reason for war. Then again, once the bombs fall it doesn't really matter anymore who is right.
Only who is left.
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Actually, how do you get ss7 network access?
Wow. Now if only.... (Score:2)
Of course (Score:3)
There are no such thing as privacy as long as you have a cell phone, use a credit card, drive a car with a license plate, anything related to a internet connection, your face visible in public places for cameras to track.
Hardly a surprise anymore.
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The way I use my smart phone like means the opposite. The phone can take messages, hence using it in burst seems the most convenient way to use it. Left in one room of the house and only picking it up to check for messages and making a burst of calls, as I wander around and then putting it back down. Sometimes taking it with me and sometimes not but definitely not always taking it with me. So consider that phone in your pocket a stranger and don't expose anything to it you wouldn't expose to a stranger.
That has been possible from the start of GSM (Score:4, Informative)
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Watch Back (Score:3)
Any tin-pot dictator or any person with enough money.
Governments love that surveillance technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. What they fail to understand is the same technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper for *everyone*. Mobile phone videos of police, customer service call recordings, etc are already starting to make a difference. There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.
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There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.
After 9/11, State/local governments began to understand that police communications were a hodge podge of frequencies.
Since then, there's been a slow, but concerted, push to move all State/local police to a more coherent system.
Unfortunately, many police forces are upgrading to encrypted systems at the same time.
We will never really be able to surveil "them" to the same extent as they can surveil us, if for no other reason than they'll make it illegal.
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Global Wi-Fi, cell-id location databases, ambient signals, visitors use gets a gov/mil some nice indoor positioning.
This is new? (Score:2)
OMFG!!!!!! (Score:3)
I'm shocked.
Who knew that a system that lets you receive a phone call anywhere in the world can be used to tell where in the world you actually are??????
Track Yourself on Android Here (Score:4, Informative)
Why is this a surprise to anyone here? (Score:2)
Using geolocation for fun and profit (Score:2)
That eeevil corporations and government can track my phone is of course, no surprise. However, how easy would it be to fool such systems, and make them think they're tracking me, when in fact they are tracking someone else, I wonder?
But technology is good? (Score:1)
No duh. (Score:1)
The communication device in your pocket is a TWO-WAY radio.
If you want to be able to talk to the world, expect the world know where you are so the world can listen.
Of course the cell phone provider knows where you are; they have to literally beam a signal to you.
So, no duh they know where you are, they have to.
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Yes, my telco is supposed to know. But they should be the *only* ones to know. And it seems this is not the case. Far from it.
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Location services (Score:2)
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I don't think you get it. This has nothing to do with your phone. It's the phone network that keeps track of where you are. Your phone does not need GPS. It just needs to be on. Now it seems that other people, besides your network operator, are able to query the network for your location by just knowing your phone number. And those people are not necessarily your friends.
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Nice idea, but you also have to deal with license plate recognition, EZ-Pass, tire RFID, shoe RFID, facial recognition, and the like.