Schneier on Security

not really anon • May 15, 2006 10:12 PM

“So, how do we all feel now that the NSA is sharing its database with the FBI? ABC News is reporting that the ongoing CIA leak investigation is using reporters’ phone records to work out who is leaking to them.”

I’m very curious about all this too, now we’ve heard what we’ve heard today, after reading some articles Bruce put up last year

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/cell_phone_surv.html

and

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/automatic_surve.html

and the comments on them are interesting given recent revelations.

BTW, I came via google after after trying to remember how to figure out how to disable the cell phone gps ping locator doohickey thing now that there’s these new revelations that that data is ferried through companies like Choice Point (correct me if I’m wrong) and stored in an NSA database somewhere…I think I saw on 24 one time you had to remove the battery and sim card, but that’s just a pop culture workaround.

Anyway here’s a reprint of Students comments from the first thread mentioned above:

“Why has it not been done before?

We are upset and complaining over the problems with RFID, while we have a complete monitoring solution, only needing some extra software to get running. The hardware is out there, everybody has an active tracking beacon, and in most cases there is also a database linking each person to their mobile phone. And try to live and work in the modern society without a mobile phone.

Just thinking about the amount of information that could be mined from the location data is staggering. Here (in Sweden) we have had cases where the police have used the automatic tracking of mobile phones to prove that some people were involved in a robbery and other people involved in a murder. The step to requiring that the phone companies store and make this information available “to combat violent crime and terrorism??? isn’t a large one. And then, when it’s available it could of course be used to stop other crimes. Speeding? Theft? Medical Insurance Fraud? Or any crime where the movements of a suspect is interesting. Unlike wiretaps this data doesn’t require a large amount of human resources to handle, as a matter of fact visualisation systems for this kind of data are well developed.

Combine this with the new laws that require the telecommunication companies to store information about who you communicate with through SMS, Internet and Telephone that are being rolled out in the EU.

Tinfoil hat? Perhaps. Still I am not sure if I would trust the goodwill of a mobile phone company, or the good will of the state with that kind of information. It seems like only the technologically savvy will have any sort of privacy if we go down this path. Time for new privacy laws?

Posted by: Student at October 27, 2005 08:57 AM”

Food for thought…my question, does removing the battery really work for taking a phone off the grid (how does the clock keep working) or does the sim card gotta be removed if you want to go under the radar of the Big Eye?

&FWIW, linked in my sig is just a vid on google I had nothing to do with except for being impressed by it (skip ahead to about exactly 2 minutes), enjoy.