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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
171–180 of 196 posts
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
not sure if you are just being a troll with that statement. The loss of all innocent life is wrong, regardless of who the perpetrator is or the skin colour of the victim. Its one thing for a terrorist to behave like a terrorist and another thing for a publicly financed government to behave like one
So the US should just sit back and take it?
We've banned this account for serial trolling. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. You're not welcome, though, to just continue to make accounts to break HN's rules with.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#173Apart from the political conversation I've always tried to encourage a technical conversation about how our mobile phone infrastructure is really terrible for privacy on many levels.
CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there's more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)
Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions are continuing to be made in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5/1 is so weak), and it's still happening at ETSI now.
I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.
We can find lots of reasons why this is hard ("Bellhead" communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it's hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there's a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it's probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#174> The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes [...] The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data 27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify…
Well if each (lat,lon,cell#,imei) record takes, say, 500 bytes and they take a measurement every minute, 27TB is enough to record every American for 4 months. That's pretty hefty surveillance even if the raw size doesn't impress.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reason to believe that no European countries do this kind of thing? Relative to national budgets, this kind of stuff can't cost that much. Dunno where the EU is on their EU-level army right now, but it'd stand to reason that a EU-security org would do exactly this kind of stuff. The UK certainly has no qualms about it. Even the US's allies will try stunts as bad as false flag bombings[1]. So it's not lik…
Quite the opposite - GCHQ in the UK is just one agency that, from available evidence, is very probably doing the same things against its own people and those of the rest of Europe. The American outage at the NSA is entirely correct. The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark.
> The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark
If I recall correctly, there was much in the media around the time of the Arab Spring about UK and German companies selling the tools of mass surveillance to governments that were less than friendly to their residents. It's easier to point a finger at the US than to acknowledge that the major European governments are usually deeply involved in the same activities and equally responsible for much of the conflict we see in the world today via the legacy of colonialism and actions such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
KGB/FSB are interchangeable. I don't think this pedantry invalidates his point. The reality is that if the US is caught doing something you can bet other countries are doing the same, and if not more, considering how little oversight autocratic states have. This is basic game theory and how countries handle foreign relations. Hell, Putin murders journalists on a whim. That's a far cry from cellphone tracking.
I wonder if Putin looked up to Stalin
well actions speak louder than anything, so I would say yes, with a 21st century approach (better PR)
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite the opposite - GCHQ in the UK is just one agency that, from available evidence, is very probably doing the same things against its own people and those of the rest of Europe. The American outage at the NSA is entirely correct. The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark.
> The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark If I recall correctly, there was much in the media around the time of the Arab Spring about UK and German companies selling the tools of mass surveillance to governments that were less than friendly to their residents. It's easier to point a finger at the US than to acknowledge that the major European governments are usually deepl…
Yep. Of course, the US government has been involved in helping friendly tyrannical regimes monitor their citizens. It's not that anyone's hands are clean, it's that castigating a scapegoat is the comfortable alternative to doing anything about these issues.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#178The thing that bothers me most about this as a European is; I have zero say in this, in the US you can strike out against surveillance, you can write to senators, protest against terrible legislation. Actually have a voice, however faint it is. Whereas I don't get a say but the exact same treatment from your country. The Five Eyes have made me paranoid and the only escape seems to be downgrading your phone to a brick…
Partly true. Europeans have fairly good opportunities to influence domestic and regional issues. Probably better than the in the US. For instance look at how the data retention directive was invalidated [0]. That said, support for US misconduct in Europe is still surprisingly strong. From US companies paying less tax than European counterparts to blatant spying or kidnapping. I'm not sure what the answer here is othe…
> From US companies paying less tax than European counterparts to blatant spying or kidnapping.
It's a little naive to assume that European countries do not have similar banking issues. Between Switzerland, London, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands there is more than enough dodgy banking to compete with the US
Likewise with spying and kidnapping - the major European powers have been playing those "games" (and worse) since long before 1776. Extraordinary rendition did not happen without the knowledge of European governments and the UK in particular has a long association with many of the countries where those picked up were interrogated/tortured in.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hesitant to consider the next presidential election's results as a harbinger of the state of politics during the 2020 or 2024 races. The Baby Boomer generation's influence is waning and I'm optimistic that the next generations who did not grow up in a period of extreme mutual distrust like we saw post-WW2 and during the Cold War will be better suited to lead. It's going to take us, as a global group of people on…
That sounds nice. It won't happen, but it sounds nice. Every generation has felt they could do things better than the previous (old people shouldn't be allowed to vote has been stated lately), until they learn what it was the previous generation had to deal with. The mutual distrust among certain parties do go away after time, look at all the countries that were at war in WW2 that are now allies. But there is always…
> old people shouldn't be allowed to vote has been stated lately
Really? I'd be interested to see a source on that. Not questioning the validity, I so many of these college aged kids calling for restrictions on speech and political organization of people they disagree with. I'm not surprised that this would come up.
Looks like we can expect a mommy-state as much as we can expect a liberalization of out-dated baby boomer policies.
Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
#180Okay I hate to be the one to break the news to everybody here, but if you have a GSM phone this is quite trivial to do. The NSA hasn't done anything groundbreaking here, except maybe a Google search.
It's not about whether the achievement is groundbreaking in a technological sense, but whether this is a reasonable, defensible, sane, or even merely legal, program.