Europol Says Mobile Roaming Tech Making Its Job Too Hard (theregister.com) 33
Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations -- and it's not end-to-end encryption this time. Not exactly. From a report: Europol published a position paper today highlighting its concerns around SMS home routing -- the technology that allows telcos to continue offering their services when customers visit another country. Most modern mobile phone users are tied to a network with roaming arrangements in other countries. EE customers in the UK will connect to either Telefonica or Xfera when they land in Spain, or T-Mobile in Croatia, for example.
While this usually provides a fairly smooth service for most roamers, Europol is now saying something needs to be done about the PETs that are often enabled in these home routing setups. According to the cops, they pointed out that when roaming, a suspect in a criminal case who's using a SIM from another country will have all of their mobile communications processed through their home network. If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn't issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.
While this usually provides a fairly smooth service for most roamers, Europol is now saying something needs to be done about the PETs that are often enabled in these home routing setups. According to the cops, they pointed out that when roaming, a suspect in a criminal case who's using a SIM from another country will have all of their mobile communications processed through their home network. If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn't issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.
Yeah, imagine that, cops might have to do footwork (Score:4, Insightful)
Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations
Cry me a river.
If you can't investigate the lazy, illegal way, do your work and find a way to investigate within the bounds of the law.
If the police had all the tools at their disposal to find criminals easily, we'd all live in a dystopian hellhole. There's a reason why we curb their ability to get evidence any which way.
Remember the definitions (Score:3, Insightful)
A conservative is a liberal who has just been mugged
A liberal is a conservative who has just been arrested
I have a suspicion you've not been mugged recently. Most crime isn't easy to solve, despite the low IQs of most of the criminal classes. You seem to assume it is.
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A conservative is a liberal who has just been mugged
A liberal is a conservative who has just been arrested
I have a suspicion you've not been mugged recently. Most crime isn't easy to solve, despite the low IQs of most of the criminal classes. You seem to assume it is.
There's an argument that police have become lazy and dependent on technology to replace proper police work. I think it goes both ways that technology has made more crimes solvable but also has become a bit of a crutch.
Another problem is the "me me me" culture that pervades our society. Everyone thinks their little crime is ultra-important and deserves all the police attentions in the country...if not the country. I grew up in a poor area of Australia in the 1980s which was not the most prosperous time fo
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We coddle our children and try to keep them as young for as long as possible. Helicopter parents have even starting going to job interviews with their adult children. https://www.msn.com/en-us/life... [msn.com]
I'm baffled by this because it leads these "adults" to not be able to take care of any problem themselves. They are practically helpless.
Regarding the article, it's kind of amusing to hear police complain about this. Do they also complain that people use burner phones and that we shouldn't allow that either? I
Re: Yeah, imagine that, cops might have to do foot (Score:2)
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Short of banning VPN access, I'm not sure how they would even stop this. If you connect your phone to your home network via vpn and then make all your calls/sms over your data link as opposed to the cellular link, how do you prevent this from happening? You'd have to make it so it's illegal to have VPN software on your phone.
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Don't say that out loud or the Telcos will propose it as the best possible answer.
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That's fair though I'm pretty sure every police organization in the world is all for nuking e2e or otherwise breaking it with backdoors. I imagine we all have a lot less privacy then we think we have. Remember that kid in, I think it was France or Spain, that joked about bombing an air plane prior to getting on using, I think, whatapps and then being shocked his communications weren't private? It's sort of like that.
The spooks likely have API access to nearly every communications platform and we just don't
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See also Cory Doctorow's short story "Unwirer" from twenty years ago.
https://craphound.com/stories/... [craphound.com]
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Sorry, I forgot. It was Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow collaborating.
Think back (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Europol Says Mobile Roaming Tech Making Its Job Too Hard"
Well Boo-freaking-Hoo.
Let's see, 30+ years ago almost nobody had mobile phones. They couldn't be electronically tracked or have their communications spied on easily when not using their own land-line. They had no social media that could be hacked. They likely had no Email either. How DID we survive fighting crime? Think back. Yeah, it took some actual effort and leg work.
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>"Europol Says Mobile Roaming Tech Making Its Job Too Hard"
Well Boo-freaking-Hoo.
Let's see, 30+ years ago almost nobody had mobile phones. They couldn't be electronically tracked or have their communications spied on easily when not using their own land-line. They had no social media that could be hacked. They likely had no Email either. How DID we survive fighting crime? Think back. Yeah, it took some actual effort and leg work.
But, 30 years ago, there was no crime.
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Untrue. :)
Approximately 50 years ago the founder(s) of Apple were hacking the telephony stack to make long distance phone calls.
Forty years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker's husband hacked into the Pentagon over an unsecured line and almost caused WW3. Okay that one was a movie...
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Untrue. :)
Approximately 50 years ago the founder(s) of Apple were hacking the telephony stack to make long distance phone calls.
Forty years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker's husband hacked into the Pentagon over an unsecured line and almost caused WW3. Okay that one was a movie...
Not hacking; Phreaking.
And it was hardly intellgent for AT&T to use in-band, audible-tone Signalling for their Control Signals.
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>"But, 30 years ago, there was no crime."
LOL! Yeah, the "good 'ol days"
Re:Think back (Score:5, Interesting)
The flip side of that is criminals had fewer options for organizing and communicating. They could use phones and those created call/billing records with law enforcement absolutely did attempt to obtain. They could also be tapped, and they were, at least with a warrant in the states and I suspect less judicial oversight in Europe.
E2E - does interfere with lawful intercept. (or at least the practical usefulness of it)
Similarly you did have a a trade in people, drugs, weapons, etc - however the producers had to have distributors and mules, the distributors had to have networks of dealers ... Now if you want to get a shipment of Fentanyl from your guy in China you can call or e-mail him directly, he or she can have their guy in the e-commerce warehouse watch for a box addressed to you come done the line and slip it into your order stupid USB gadgets. Considering you can get tens of doses out of something that won't look different than a packet of silica-gel on an x-ray if customs even looks - its probably happening.
Coordinating something like that 30-40 years ago would have been a challenge. Now its child's play thanks to the internet. A lot less people, a lot less opportunity for leaks, and even watchful law enforcement to spot patterns. I am advocating anything here as far as E2E in the general case, just saying that its become a bit of manta around here that LEOs should just do 'police work' they way they always have; and wanting some foothold into digital communications is 'lazy' but the digital world does create new methods of crime that would be immune or largely so to traditional surveillance methods.
BitCoin - blah blah its all on the block chain for everyone to see. Well no. Nothing stops me from creating a new wallet, transferring the coins into it, and electronically sending you the wallet and cipher info... Yep the coins can still be followed; If you know I have wallet A, you can see I sent money to B, and if my recipient goes from B -> to his known C, you can guess what happened; but we can create gaps in apparent custody and mix that with additional laundering efforts on both sides and it does become harder to connect the dots. Yet nobody has to have gophers running around town with duffels of cash; there is no curio shops with junk priced at 1000x what its worth yet with a steady stream of young men swapping merch regularly...
Re:Think back (Score:5, Insightful)
And public coin operated phones were common and sufficiently anonymous. Criminals often used those.
No billing records, and difficult to tap unless you know in advance which public phone a criminal is going to use.
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yes and no, e.g Hells Angels (that controls quite a large portion of the drug markets and protection rackets in many European countries have since the cell phone was invented a complete ban on the use of them for business related matters, instead they simply send messages in person by having prospects riding between factions. While every other criminal gang have people caught in e.g Encrochat, HA is completely absent, meanwhile they have zero problems organizing their criminal activities.
So while it is true
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How DID we survive fighting crime? Think back.
I'm getting sick of this false comparisons on Slashdot. 30 years ago you're right, police didn't have the tools they do now. But then neither did the criminals. 30 years ago police tapped landlines directly. 30 years ago police intercepted messengers. 30 years ago financial fraud was not committed by 15 year olds with a mobile phone.
Pretending that police should stick to how they did police work 30 years ago while not requiring criminals to organise crime like they did 30 years ago is just dumb. Especially
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Re: Think back (Score:2)
I was thinking something similar.. "you don't fight the current war with last war's tech." If criminals are moving to cyberspace, then crime fighting needs to go the same. The trick is not to overstep and get innocent bystanders caught up in the process.
Lazy modern law enforcement. (Score:1)
The real problem is a Euro problem (Score:4, Interesting)
NO YOU CAN'T ELIMINATE ENCRYPTION. You can get your governments to agree to Euro-operate together. Do that and it won't matter where people are from, were they are roaming,all of which should be seamless to the 99.999% of us that don't commit crimes. It will also allow all your police forces with their methods to work with each other in Euro-harmony.
If the police can't issue a warrant it's because their island nations still pretend they are separate countries subject to separate jurisdictions.
That's a Euro problem. All the problems with inter-Euro countries are Euro problems. The solution is to solve THOSE problems, not remove roaming or encryption or forcing everyone straight.
This has nothing to do with roaming, a common thing throghout the world. It's a lack of cooperation between countries pretending to be in a Euro-union but still maintaining their rights to say nyet.
It has everything to do with minor fiefdoms pretending they are independent countries and yet claimin to be part of the Euro-trash part of the word. They say they want to respect the CJEU and yet stick to their tiny irrelevant country laws from 100 years ago.
Euro-figure it out. Either you want to be one big EU (Schengen Zone, EU, EU Common Market, CJEU, etc.) or you want to pretend LIcthtenstein, Monaco, etc. are just as "valuable to the Euro-world" as real produicer countries. Right now you're just shaking your fist at the clouds. (non-Euro clouds?) You're a joke. China has overtaken you under 10 years economically. The UK said "lose my number". France is on deck.
Brexit didn't happen in a vacuum. In the United States it took a bloody civil form to get a union of the states.
Get your Euro-fiefdom out your ass and either work together... or don't.
E
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People in Europe use SMS? (Score:3)
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Big difference for each country.
The actual issue is slow EIO responses (Score:2)
From TFA:
So, instead of campaigning to get those responses speeded up they want to do away with the entirety of PET.
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SMS is NOT Encrypted (Score:2)
That said, some Apps encrypt the content before putting data in an SMS message but that is outside the purview of any Telecom and they do not have the ability to decrypt it.
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It's not encrypted, but if it is routed through your home country, your guest country's LEO does not legally have access to even the recipient list let alone the content.