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If we had a crowd-sourced database of cell towers (picture & coordinates) wouldn't it then be straightforward to know (and report) when your phone wasn't connecting to a legitimate tower? I for one want to make sure the criminals aren't intercepting my signal with home-made stingrays; the police have other lawful ways to get what they need.
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It's kind of sensitive information with regards to communications infrastructure. Not too dissimilar from various details of sensitive sites not being disclosed to reduce the risk of a coordinated attack. Not saying it's effective, but I can understand the reasoning.
Tower data is public record. Here’s a search aggregator: http://www.antennasearch.com The issue is that the baseband should be handshaking cryptographically with your provider’s towers to prevent MITM attempts, and no downgrade should be possible. Between eSIM and 5G, honestly surprised it’s not a standard yet.
https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/support/antenna-structure-regis...
If we had a crowd-sourced database of cell towers (picture & coordinates) wouldn't it then be straightforward to know (and report) when your phone wasn't connecting to a legitimate tower? I for one want to make sure the criminals aren't intercepting my signal with home-made stingrays; the police have other lawful ways to get what they need.
Considering all the stuff that's open public information, it's a bit surprising that cell tower locations aren't .
Why not focus policies around using the surveillance tools? The tools should be as powerful as possible. To keep people safe, shouldn't infrastructure be powerful enough to tap anything instantly with proper authorization, even backward in time? Why not? Then we're focused on making rules better. Isn't that the best thing to do in a system of laws and standards? Imagine if you could change any aspect of the system to…
> The tools should be as powerful as possible. I think a lot of people would disagree with this premise. The argument against it is basically that abuse of powerful surveillance technologies is inevitable precisely because the technology is so powerful. In reality, law enforcement is only incentivized to catch criminals, not necessarily to protect people's privacy or personal freedoms, so LE will abuse these capabili…
What would be some examples of an abuse?
What would be some examples of a powerful surveillance technology?
For instance, what "surveillance technology" isn't already an internal diagnostic tool for day-to-day system administration for a telecom/service provider?
Only difference is who picks the target and them having oversight (likely having to provide a predicate/rationale). Why is this so bad?
If there's a lack of oversight, what rules and systems would you suggest to prevent abuse, as you define it?
Contribute to the ACLU here: https://action.aclu.org/give/now
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That's super interesting. Those are international departure airports. I wonder if what they're doing is sniffing for phone numbers of interest showing up in the international terminal indicating a 'person of interest' is trying to leave or arrive. I assume people trying to leave or enter the country without permission might have false ID and a false name on their ticket but they probably don't think about changing th…
Or the reverse. Since airports are one of the very few places where you can positively identify a certain person was there at a certain time, you can combine a passenger list with a device list to get some soft matches to previously unlinked devices. Combine that linked metadata with other dragnet metadata, and you're going to learn a lot.
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Seems like the police casually breaking the law is the core of the issue. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The ACLU. edit: to be clear, I think the government itself could really do with reeling it back a bit as well - but this very news is a reminder that some people are watching out for the watched.
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Considering all the stuff that's open public information, it's a bit surprising that cell tower locations aren't .
Exact cell site locations would be considered competitive strategic information by most carriers, who spend a lot of time, money and energy selecting the right cell sites to cover the right markets at the right cost. Also, they change all the time, eg when leases expire, when customer traffic patterns changes, when there are upgrades, etc.
Stingrays have been known to be used by law enforcement for a decade now. It's about bloody time more information than just "they are used" is opened to the public.