Entries Tagged "police"

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More on Greek Wiretapping

Earlier this month I blogged about a wiretapping scandal in Greece.

Unknowns tapped the mobile phones of about 100 Greek politicians and offices, including the U.S. embassy in Athens and the Greek prime minister.

Details are sketchy, but it seems that a piece of malicious code was discovered by Ericsson technicians in Vodafone’s mobile phone software. The code tapped into the conference call system. It “conference called” phone calls to 14 prepaid mobile phones where the calls were recorded.

More details are emerging. It turns out that the “malicious code” was actually code designed into the system. It’s eavesdropping code put into the system for the police.

The attackers managed to bypass the authorization mechanisms of the eavesdropping system, and activate the “lawful interception” module in the mobile network. They then redirected about 100 numbers to 14 shadow numbers they controlled. (Here are translations of some of the press conferences with technical details. And here are details of the system used.)

There is an important security lesson here. I have long argued that when you build surveillance mechanisms into communication systems, you invite the bad guys to use those mechanisms for their own purposes. That’s exactly what happened here.

UPDATED TO ADD (3/2): From a reader: “I have an update. There is some news from the ‘Hellenic Authority for the Information and Communication Security and Privacy’ with a few facts and I got a rumor that there is a root backdoor in the telnetd of Ericssons AXE backdoor. (No, I can’t confirm the rumor.)”

Posted on March 1, 2006 at 8:04 AM • View Comments

DNA Surveillance in the UK

Wholesale surveillance from the UK:

About 4,000 men working and living in South Croydon are being asked to voluntarily give their DNA as part of the hunt for a teenage model’s killer.

Well, sort of voluntarily:

“It is an entirely voluntary process. None of those DNA samples or finger prints will be used to check out any other unsolved crimes.

“Obviously if someone does refuse then each case will be reviewed on its own merits.

Did the detective chief inspector just threaten those 4,000 men? Sure seems that way to me.

Posted on February 28, 2006 at 7:31 AM • View Comments

Police Cameras in Your Home

This is so nutty that I wasn’t even going to blog it. But too many of you are e-mailing the article to me.

Houston’s police chief on Wednesday proposed placing surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes to fight crime during a shortage of police officers.

“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.

One of the problems we have in the privacy community is that we don’t have a crisp answer to that question. Any suggestions?

Posted on February 23, 2006 at 1:12 PM • View Comments

Photographing Airports

Patrick Smith, a former pilot, writes about his experiences—involving the police—taking pictures in airports:

He makes sure to remind me, just as his colleague in New Hampshire
had done, that next time I’d benefit from advance permission, and that “we live in a different world now.” Not to put undue weight on the cheap prose of patriotic convenience, but few things are more repellant than that oft- repeated catchphrase. There’s something so pathetically submissive about it—a sound bite of such defeat and capitulation. It’s also untrue; indeed we find ourselves in an altered way of life, though not for the reasons our protectors would have us think. We weren’t forced into this by terrorists, we’ve chosen it. When it comes to flying, we tend to hold the events of Sept. 11 as the be-all and end-all of air crimes, conveniently purging our memories of several decades’ worth of bombings and hijackings. The threats and challenges faced by airports aren’t terribly different from what they’ve always been. What’s different, or “too bad,” to quote the New Hampshire deputy, is our paranoid, overzealous reaction to those threats, and our amped-up obeisance to authority.

Posted on February 22, 2006 at 2:09 PM • View Comments

The Militarization of Police Work

This was originally published in The Washington Post:

During the past 15 years, The Post and other media outlets have reported on the unsettling “militarization” of police departments across the country. Armed with free surplus military gear from the Pentagon, SWAT teams have multiplied at a furious pace. Tactics once reserved for rare, volatile situations such as hostage takings, bank robberies and terrorist incidents increasingly are being used for routine police work.

Eastern Kentucky University’s Peter Kraska—a widely cited expert on police militarization—estimates that SWAT teams are called out about 40,000 times a year in the United States; in the 1980s, that figure was 3,000 times a year. Most “call-outs” were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders.

Posted on February 9, 2006 at 12:25 PM • View Comments

The Topology of Covert Conflict

Interesting research paper by Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson. Implications for warfare, terrorism, and peer-to-peer file sharing:

Abstract:

Often an attacker tries to disconnect a network by destroying nodes or edges, while the defender counters using various resilience mechanisms. Examples include a music industry body attempting to close down a peer-to-peer file-sharing network; medics attempting to halt the spread of an infectious disease by selective vaccination; and a police agency trying to decapitate a terrorist organisation. Albert, Jeong and Barabási famously analysed the static case, and showed that vertex-order attacks are effective against scale-free networks. We extend this work to the dynamic case by developing a framework based on evolutionary game theory to explore the interaction of attack and defence strategies. We show, first, that naive defences don’t work against vertex-order attack; second, that defences based on simple redundancy don’t work much better, but that defences based on cliques work well; third, that attacks based on centrality work better against clique defences than vertex-order attacks do; and fourth, that defences based on complex strategies such as delegation plus clique resist centrality attacks better than simple clique defences. Our models thus build a bridge between network analysis and evolutionary game theory, and provide a framework for analysing defence and attack in networks where topology matters. They suggest definitions of efficiency of attack and defence, and may even explain the evolution of insurgent organisations from networks of cells to a more virtual leadership that facilitates operations rather than directing them. Finally, we draw some conclusions and present possible directions for future research.

Posted on February 6, 2006 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Anyone Can Get Anyone’s Phone Records

Interested in who your spouse is talking to? Your boss? A celebrity? A politician?

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone—for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts….

How well do the services work? The Chicago Sun-Times paid $110 to Locatecell.com to purchase a one-month record of calls for this reporter’s company cell phone. It was as simple as e-mailing the telephone number to the service along with a credit card number. The request was made Friday after the service was closed for the New Year’s holiday.

On Tuesday, when it reopened, Locatecell.com e-mailed a list of 78 telephone numbers this reporter called on his cell phone between Nov. 19 and Dec. 17. The list included calls to law enforcement sources, story subjects and other Sun-Times reporters and editors.

EDITED TO ADD (1/9): More information on BoingBoing.

EDITED TO ADD (1/9): Also see this on EPIC West.

EDITED TO ADD (1/14): Daniel Solove has some good commentary.

Posted on January 9, 2006 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.