71–80 of 215 posts
Hey. Someone who briefly worked on the Stingray team here. I left the company that develops the stingray (who’s name is mentioned in the article but I shall not say it) because I didn’t feel comfortable with the ethics of how it could potentially be easily abused without legal permission and/or repercussion. I fear these technologies will become more commonly used against Americans by low level law enforcement withou…
Pro-tip: If you want fairly good OPSEC when going to a protest, get a burner Android phone, put it on airplane mode with WIFI only. Then purchase a couple of Comcast / Xfiniti logins off the web, and use those to connect to "xfiniti-wifi" hotspots. Most cities have them, the speeds are fairly decent too. We're truly living in the panopticon
TL;DR it's a radio in your pocket that constantly announces its identity. I'm quite interested in the fact that people don't realize this. Is it a generational split between people who can remember when we did not all have radios in our pockets and those who can't, or ??? The fact that an always-on radio you carry everywhere can be used to track you seems like the #1 most obvious thing about the technology.
I feel like you're ignoring a key point here, which is that these stingray devices can MitM your phone by forcing it to send essentially unencrypted messages. That's both more technically complicated and more serious than passive tracking.
Earlier Harris equip did that by forcing 2g mode but 2g is being turned off: https://1ot.mobi/resources/blog/a-complete-overview-of-2g-3g...
I'm less familiar with the capabilities of current IMEI catchers tho.
Pro-tip: If you want fairly good OPSEC when going to a protest, get a burner Android phone, put it on airplane mode with WIFI only. Then purchase a couple of Comcast / Xfiniti logins off the web, and use those to connect to "xfiniti-wifi" hotspots. Most cities have them, the speeds are fairly decent too. We're truly living in the panopticon
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, why not? How can we improve general technological literacy? I don't want people to memorize the protocols, but I do want them to have the foundation of knowledge that would allow them to conclude that if the phone company can connect calls to your mobile handset, then they can also figure out roughly where it is. I'd also like for people to have the basic knowledge required to understand that GPS does not track…
> How can we improve general technological literacy? Fund schools. Provide mandatory technical and privacy education. > I'd also like for people to have the basic knowledge required to Fund schools.
Hire tech capable teachers that care. Funding only works if it's toward this specific end.
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Through the pandemic, Xfinity is offering anyone free guest access, so for at least the next few months, you don't need to even buy logins. https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-extends...
Note, this only works on the xfinity "public wifi stations" rather than the xfinity ssid's from home routers. If you want to access the home router networks, you still need to pay for an account.
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Every professional, expert, specialist, or technician feels this way about the stuff they know. "Why don't people know [basic thing about their work]? What a bunch of uneducated morons." The answer is because if they knew all the basic stuff about all those fields to be what those experts judge to be informed consumers, and took the time to apply that knowledge, they wouldn't have any time left to 1) actually buy pro…
I guess we will disagree on what is or should be obviously illegal. What your phone does is the functional equivalent of you walking down the street shouting your phone number. It does not strike me as obviously wrong for people to hear it.
I suppose similar reasoning is how we arrive at our judgements on most questions of legality, personally, when deciding how to behave and what to worry about others doing day-to-day. Like, I definitely can't show you the statute that says driving the wrong way on the highway is illegal, rather than just a very bad idea, and I'm not sure I've even ever been told specifically that that is illegal let alone done the research to makes sure it's illegal—but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure it is. So, I would guess some people surprised that their cell phones spy on them in certain ways are more surprised that they are being used that way and not that they could be used that way.
[EDIT] to stretch the analogy further, if I were surprised to learn that some delivery company had found a way to reduce delivery times by driving the wrong way on the highway, the fact that vehicles are technically capable of driving the wrong way on the highway wouldn't be the part that I found surprising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every professional, expert, specialist, or technician feels this way about the stuff they know. "Why don't people know [basic thing about their work]? What a bunch of uneducated morons." The answer is because if they knew all the basic stuff about all those fields to be what those experts judge to be informed consumers, and took the time to apply that knowledge, they wouldn't have any time left to 1) actually buy pro…
I guess we will disagree on what is or should be obviously illegal. What your phone does is the functional equivalent of you walking down the street shouting your phone number. It does not strike me as obviously wrong for people to hear it.
Wi-Fi Calling while in Airplane mode would not be subject to Stingray interception, and would protect IMEI data from airborne bulk capture. Authorities can still set up open SSIDs to capture limited information about phones, but the "fly an airplane over" capture model doesn't work well with Wi-Fi.
You may be underestimating people's lack of care about what open access point people connect to. The traffic itself may be encrypted, but DNS queries, phone hardware addresses, and background traffic might not be.
For a more comprehensive solution, you would need to at minimum not carry any electronic devices (signal detection), wear a mask and IR-blocking glasses (face detection), and wear shoe inserts (gait detection) — and even then, they can still seize you and overcome those obstacles at will.