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Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

nbcwashington.com

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Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#91

Post by fencepost »

stareatgoats wrote: post #30
ballenf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation discussed in the article was with regard to Stingray-type devices placed at foreign embassies which are considered foreign soil. The FCC doesn't regulate embassies any more than it regulates Beijing or Moscow. The Stingrays found on K Street (far from Embassy Row) and some bridges were more likely US government operations. So the question comes back to are there non-embassy, non-US government Stingrays…

The claim in the article seems dubious. Why would an embassy operate a stingray? More likely it's US government agencies spying on the embassies.

To track who (or at least what devices) are in the immediate vicinity of the embassy and when. Patterns in that could easily be useful for catching physical surveillance at the least, as well as catching placed/planted devices that check in that way.

Edit: To expand on that, some examples:

If a new device shows up and is always present, particularly if it always has about the same signal strength or doesn't appear to move, that indicates a connected IoT device of some sort, and if you're concerned about espionage you may want to take steps to identify it.

If a particular device shows up for 8-12 hour shifts at varying times, but there are no businesses, etc. that would have that kind of attendance pattern, who's carrying that device? An investigator on-site who's also brought a personal device along?

Heck, if you're in an OnStar-equipped vehicle even if you don't have service, your vehicle may show up as always on, or at least may ping regularly.

I'm sure appropriate data mining techniques could pull a surprising amount of information out of the kind of info gathered from these devices.

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#92

Post by pjc50 »

tajen wrote: post #46
CamperBob2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control of 'manufacturing' was never going to happen. They would literally have to prohibit the sale of high-speed DACs and ADCs to civilians. If you think the War on Drugs was an expensive boondoggle, try keeping LTC2216s out of my hands. :-P However, it is the responsibility of the FCC to not throw up their hands and say "Duh, we don't know how to find 'em." They have one job -- regulating the use of the RF spectru…

Or have private-key encoding. That’s the case for HDMI: No-one can manufacture devices that aren’t approved. Of course the funny part is, it’s designed so pirates can only send HDMI output to approved screens (=not recording devices), but for backwards comparibility, they has to allow HDMI-to-SVGA adapter with decoding, so the breach is wide open. But you get the intent: HDMI was supposed to bea fully-encrypted stand…

Until the key was extracted in 2010: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1122247

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#93

Post by exikyut »

coolspot wrote: post #81
exikyut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, then you need a super-mega-amplifier tacked on to boost the signal over the cable (AFAIK, the frequencies used really like short antenna runs). So that then means a super-thick faraday cage around the actual device, and probably somewhat noteworthy power consumption (a battery certainly wouldn't be enough).

Probably meant transmitter (antennae + encoder/decoder) separated from actual BTS hardware & operatives. So after counter-side finds your camouflaged BTS, it is only disposable and relatively cheap part and doesn’t lead to whole operation uncover. That probe part then would connect to starbucks wi-fi and interact with BTS software somewhere far from physical location, so you can’t quickly trace channel between probe…

Doh. I see, of course.

Yeah, I'd gotten it in my head the BTS (TXCO) and the probe equipment needed to be super close together...

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#94

Post by pjc50 »

natch wrote: post #88
dannyw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a $50 burner phone to detect snooping.

True. Would you need to pay for a cellular plan, or would it work without?

Even if you do that's what pay as you go SIMs are for.

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#95

Post by [deleted] »

mdesq wrote: post #64
steve_musk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially considering the POTUS uses a standard android phone.

I believe he switched to an iPhone. [1] I was at an analytics event this year where they were analyzing his tweets based on the originating platform. 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/donald-...

[deleted]

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#96

Post by paulmd »

cosmicexplorer wrote: post #89
indiv0 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the link on mobile right now, but there was an article I read a while back (on HN, actually, I think) where someone did statistical analysis on the speech patterns of Trumps tweets and correlated those with times he was known to have been using his phone (or something like that) and deduced that there were two primary parties responsible for his Twitter account: Trump himself and a PR person/team. Any po…

I was thinking of the same article, and found it, I think [1]? There was a higher-rated link also posted around the same time with the same post content [2]. I also found a follow up post [3] while looking for [1]. [1] http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ [2] https://www.r-bloggers.com/text-analysis-of-trumps-tweets-co... [3] http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-followup/

lmao at the obvious security risk involved here, surely leaking the location of the President to an external service will not end poorly

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#98

Post by ILikeConemowk »

throwaway9803 wrote: post #84
toomuchtodo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should report their approximate location to the FCC.

Honestly, I don't want to be on the radar of any entity that is deploying this type of gear in the DC metro area. I am under no illusion that I can protect myself if targeted by a state based actor. Better to be lost in the crowd. Best case scenario is it's a legitimate LEO operation. Worse, it's a federal national security operation. Worse still, it's a criminal, or foreign national security operation. Only in the f…

I’m interested in attempting something similar in Europe. Do you have some links/pointers?

Thanks!

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#99

Post by tialaramex »

ddtaylor wrote: post #90

Fix the busted protocol, why is anyone expecting this not to be a problem? Use legitimate warrants to monitor communications on premise at the telco.

Encryption protocols are hard. Two stories, one public and one from my current job:

HTTPS is secured using SSL/ TLS. SSLv1 is so bad it didn't survive the laugh test when it was explained to actual cryptographers, I can't find any records of what it did. SSLv2 is also pretty bad. SSLv3 is at last good enough that actual cryptographers spent time finding holes in it and today it's considered so broken as to be useless.

TLSv1.0 went to the IETF. More eyeballs will fix it right? Note if they're all engineers. Finally in TLSv1.2 the cryptographers were called in, but only after it was finished. "Hey, is this finished thing secure? Yes or No answers only"

Only in TLS 1.3 which is finished but yet to be official, did they _start_ with cryptographers and do the engineering problems later after the cryptographers had baked in the security.

At work, after a system being in use for several years, I was told we couldn't put more key-value pairs into the session information, it was "full". So I went to see how this could possibly be true. All the session information is turned into a JSON blob, which is turned into a few hundred bytes, and then those bytes are encrypted with RSA with the results stored in a Cookie. RSA is only designed to encrypt small quantities of data, which isn't a problem because it's supposed to be used to move a symmetric key. But far, far more importantly - even if this particular _method_ of doing so is crazy why are we encrypting all this data and hiding it in a Cookie at all? That's crazy.

Re: Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over DC, MD, VA

#100

Post by ptero »

This is likely the tip of the iceberg: devices with active transmission that are easy to find with some effort. I bet there are a lot of passive listeners (cheap SDR is probably all you need) sprinkled around as well that would be very hard to find.
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