Page 8 of 9
Members of Cornell’s Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe’s first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codes secret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices—including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles—that need PRNs to listen to satellites.
Security by obscurity: it doesn’t work, and it’s a royal pain to recover when it fails.
Just hide this gadget in someone’s car or briefcase—or maybe sew it into his coat—and then track his every move.
You have to recover the device to play it back, but presumably the next generation will be queryable remotely.
The movie plots keep coming and coming. Here’s my nomination for dumb movie plot of this week:
Skies ‘now terrorist’s dream’
Australia’s proposed new aviation tracking system would make it easier for terrorists to locate aircraft, aviation campaigner Dick Smith said today.
Mr Smith said a plan by Airservices Australia to replace radar tracking of planes with the Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS B) system would allow terrorists to track every aircraft in the sky.
“Government policy using conventional radar makes it almost impossible for a terrorist or a criminal to locate the position and identity of an aircraft,” Mr Smith said.
“With ADS B it’s the opposite because all you need to track every aircraft is a small, non-directional aerial, worth $5.”
Under the present system, a terrorist can locate the position of an aircraft by looking up. And if a terrorist is smart enough to perform this intelligence-gathering exercise near an airport, he can locate the position of aircraft that are low to the ground, and easier to shoot at with missiles. Why are we worrying about telling terrorists where all the high-altitude hard-to-hit planes are?
Now I can invent a movie plot that has the terrorists needing to shoot down a particular plane because this or that famous personage is on it, but that’s a bit much.
Sometimes I wonder about “security experts.” Here’s one who thinks Google Earth is a terrorism risk because it allows people to learn the GPS coordinates of soccer stadiums. (English blog entry on the topic here.)
Basically, Klaus Dieter Matschke is worried because Google Earth provides the location of buildings within 20 meters, whereas before coordinates had an error range of one kilometer. He’s worried that this information will provide terrorists with the exact target coordinates for missile attacks.
I have no idea how anyone could print this drivel. Anyone can attend a football game with a GPS receiver in his pocket and get the coordinates down to one meter. Or buy a map.
Google Earth is not the problem; the problem is the availability of short-range missiles on the black market.
“…a few hundred meters away….”
Forget RFID. Well, don’t, but National Scientific Corporation has a prototype of a WiFi tagging system that, like RFID, lets you track things in real-time and space. The advantage that the WiFi Tracker system has over passive RFID tracking is that you can keep tabs on objects with WiFi Tracker tags (which can hold up to 256K of data) from as far as a few hundred meters away (the range of passive RFID taggers is just a few meters). While you can do something similar with active RFID tags, with WiFi Tracker companies can use their pre-existing WiFi network to track things rather than having to build a whole new RFID system.
In other news, Apple is adding WiFi to the iPod.
And, of course, you can be tracked from your cellphone:
But the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice have seized on the ability to
locate a cellular customer and are using it to track Americans’ whereabouts
surreptitiously—even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.A pair of court decisions in the last few weeks shows that judges are split
on whether this is legal. One federal magistrate judge in Wisconsin on Jan.
17 ruled it was unlawful, but another nine days later in Louisiana decided
that it was perfectly OK.This is an unfortunate outcome, not least because it shows that some judges
are reluctant to hold federal agents and prosecutors to the letter of the
law.It’s also unfortunate because it demonstrates that the FBI swore never to
use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones—but then, secretly,
went ahead and did it, anyway.
This Dutch prison is the future of surveillance.
At a high-tech prison opening this week inmates wear electronic wristbands that track their every movement and guards monitor cells using emotion-recognition software.
Remember, new surveillance technologies are first used on populations with limited rights: inmates, children, the mentally ill, military personnel.
Universal automobile surveillance is coming:
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
As The Independent opines, this is only the beginning:
The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and stored by machines.
Although the problems of facial recognition by computer are far more formidable than for car number plates, experts believe it is only a matter of time before machines can reliably pull a face out of a crowd of moving people.
If the police and security services can show that a national surveillance operation based on recording car movements can protect the public against criminals and terrorists, there will be a strong political will to do the same with street cameras designed to monitor the flow of human traffic.
I’ve already written about the security risks of what I call “wholesale surveillance.” Once this information is collected, it will be misused, lost, and stolen. It will be filled with errors. The problems and insecurities that come from living in a surveillance society more than outweigh any crimefighting (and terrorist-fighting) advantages.
The article is in Hebrew, but the security story is funny in any language.
It’s about a prisoner who was forced to wear an electronic shackle to monitor that he did not violate his home arrest. The shackle is pretty simple: if the suspect leaves the defined detention area, the electronic shackle signals through the telephone line to the local police.
How do you defeat a system such as this? Just stop paying your phone bill and wait for the phone company to shut off service.
Federal law enforcement attempts to use cell phones as tracking devices were rebuked twice this month by lower court judges, who say the government cannot get real time tracking information on citizens without showing probable cause.
Missouri will track people’s movements through their cell phones.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.