Whenever I warn friends about this, I get called a conspiracy theorist :-/
We have a long way to go in educating the general public about technology, its benefits, and its pitfalls.
Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#12Here are some excerpts from the WSJ paywalled article: Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device being used by the U.S. Marshals Service identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, even though it doesn’t, and forces all the phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Even having encryption on one’s phone, su…
And I assume the "USA Freedom Act", which has been drastically watered down already and Democrats are now pretending to want to revive it ( after losing Senate...) so they look good at the next elections, doesn't even cover this sort of surveillance.
There are two ways in which the "USA Freedom Act" could cover flying dirtboxes: regulation and reporting. I've been working on http://recent.io/ rather than following this closely but I'm not aware of any effect the bill would have on dirtboxes (love that term!).
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#13I think cell antennas have unique identifiers. If true, can you detect when you connect to a tower that isn't your usual tower in your usual geographic location (assuming you're being targeted at home, for example).
And if there is indeed a unique id, can the fake cell take the id of a real cell and still work with the cellphone company, or would it need the cooperation of the cellphone company? (for example, the cell company would look at hops?)
I guess it's too much to hope that the cellphone companies would try to protect our privacy.
Maybe someday we'll have police running things similar to license scanners but for cellphone conversations. They'll drive around the city recording conversations to detect keywords for illegal activity (herb, drug, murder of crows, etc)
EDIT: actually, I don't think they need to hijack cellphone connections. They can just listen in - at least they used to be able to. We determined the identities of the bombers of our embassies in Africa in the late-90s through cellphone conversations through RC-135s flying along the Africa coast from Diego Garcia, and an intelligence gathering satellite that drags an antenna behind it.
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#14Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#15The US Marshals are not the only federal law enforcement agency doing something like this. According to documents I obtained through a FOIA in 2012, ICE has purchased an airbourne mounting kit and paid for airbourne training for their Stingray II cell phone tracking gear. See: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/479397-#document/p44 Anyone interested in learning more about IMSI catchers and their use by US law en…
>The US Marshals are not the only
yep. The cell phone tracking has actively been used for tracking and targeting in Ukraine/Russia war on Donbass by both sides.
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#16Here are some excerpts from the WSJ paywalled article: Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device being used by the U.S. Marshals Service identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, even though it doesn’t, and forces all the phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Even having encryption on one’s phone, su…
In addition to the egrigious complaints citizens could make, wouldn't telecoms and cellphone manufacturers have grounds to sue over this? It sounds like these boxes are actively disrupting or reducing cell-phone service reliability by tricking devices to connect to them, despite not being a good tower.
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#17Wait, and this is news why?
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#18We changed the url to one that seems to work, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604931.
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#19Isn't it time Google and Apple build some protections inside Android and iOS against this? Maybe do something like what these guys did, but I'm sure they can come up with even more comprehensive protections: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cryptophone-firewall-identifies...
Given the nature of the sniffing, the best offering would probably be "turn off cell antenna, use wifi."
Given the above, I wonder if the airplanes are also listening to other stuff past cellular.
Re: Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program
#20Isn't it time Google and Apple build some protections inside Android and iOS against this? Maybe do something like what these guys did, but I'm sure they can come up with even more comprehensive protections: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cryptophone-firewall-identifies...
The application OS is basically irrelevant when talking about cell communications. They'd have to design their own boards to even have a chance at isolating the "baseband" processor - to say nothing of controlling its behavior, especially as carriers want to keep its workings secret for "security"
Most phones (anything CDMA, or most everything LTE) use a Qualcomm SOC, with both the baseband and application processor sharing the same memory space. This is a recipe for anything on the application processor being pwned beyond recognition.
The last time I played with Qualcomm/CDMA (around 2007), I used proprietary software (QPST) to do undocumented incantations to clone an ESN from one phone to another. When I called the number, both rang. Picking both up led to hearing the conversation in both. This tells you precisely how good their idea of "encryption" is.
The entire Qualcomm ecosystem is a black box, and is there even a remote chance they don't have a partnership with the NSA? I'm sure San Diego is seen as a key national security interest - if it weren't "secured" by the NSA, then China/Russia intelligence would do so (or an uppity colony looking for a leg up).
I'll happily eat these words when there's an open source GSM or CDMA stack, portable hardware to run it, and the ability to pay for network access anonymously. But fr now, I see Wifi/Mifi as the only plausible way forward.