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[Tim Osman]

Found this article,  "Director of NSA Shifts to a New Path"

Most of it is pretty boring but it contained some interesting tidbits which I have excised for any interested parties:

Encrypted Email:

The NSA has also found a silver lining to the use of encrypted e-mail: Even if a particular message cannot be read, the very use of encryption can flag it for NSA's attention. By tracking the relatively few Internet users in a certain country or region who take such security measures, NSA analysts might be able to sketch a picture of a terrorist network.

In other words, use encrypted email regularly, and you're a suspect!

Cell Phone Tracking:


And cell phones - as handy for terrorist plotters as for everyone else - provide not just an eavesdropping target but also a way to physically track the user.

Uhrig, who has installed cellular intercept systems in several countries, says that as cell phones have proliferated, the "cells" served by a tower or other antenna have correspondingly grown smaller. "A big hotel may have a cell for every other floor. Every big office building is its own cell," he says.

By following a switched-on cell phone as it shifts from cell to cell, "you can watch the person move," Uhrig says. "You can tell the direction he's moving. If he's moving slow, he's walking. If he's moving fast, he's in a car. The tracking is sometimes of much more interest than the contents of a call."

This is especially scary; they don't need "chipped phones" to track you at all!   Thank god for Virgin Mobile.  I'm not even sure that's safe.

Fiber Cable Taps

Several sources who regularly speak with NSA officials say they believe Uhrig is right. Although they do not know the details, they say the agency has almost certainly managed to tap fiber cables on a large-scale basis, making access to the information inside less of a problem than its overwhelming volume.

This ties in to Declan McCullagh's recent CNET article "FBI Wants to Eavesdrop on Fiber Links", which discusses how the FBI wants Verizon to make sure their broadband service can be easily tapped to spy on us.


It's like they can't decide whether they wanna be a police state (Boston, Oshkosh, etc) or a surveillance state!

[unstructuredreality]

I've suspected this for a while.  By the way isn't your nick the CIA's name for Osama?  That aside, anything that circumventst traditional communication methods is subject for increased scrutiny.  The key is to study and be smart about how you use it.  Encryption by itself is lost in a sea, but where you encrypt information and what sites you visit using it may perhaps be something that pops up on the radar.  Even so, NSA, can only do so much and it would face a public outcry the likes we haven't seen if it is uncovered that they used their billions of dollars to snoop on people visiting sites that posed no threat to the country.  I suppose there could always be an example set, but what are the chances.  If you are busted by the NSA, i have the feeling we'd never hear from the person in question again.  The best mode in my opinion is to not encrypt, but to hide in plain sight with communication that can't possibly mean anything other than to the recipient.  That too will probably land me in the big house, but oh well, what is a brother to do?  Ear to ear is the best form of communication available, remember that.  Indeed though, it pisses me off too.

Peace and Good Day
No worries

[Tim Osman]

By the way isn't your nick the CIA's name for Osama?

That's what they tell me...   However, I called the CIA and they refused to comment.

it would face a public outcry the likes we haven't seen if it is uncovered that they used their billions of dollars to snoop on people visiting sites that posed no threat to the country.

I must have seen 100 stories this year where I thought that.  Where I thought:  "I would have thought this would cause an outcry!"  But nope.   I believe that many people are desensitized by now to government outrages.  If Bush & Ashcroft announced that, to prevent terrorism, we must all submit to public anal exams, I bet millions of sheeple would line up.  Seriously.

If you are busted by the NSA, i have the feeling we'd never hear from the person in question again.

No doubt.  I'm sure it is happening now.  


About this article:  I had seen, about a year ago or more, a fiction television program where the cell tracking thing described in this article was done.  I just thought it was creative fiction, I didn't know it was based in reality at all.

As for the encryption making you a target?  Reminds me of how sometimes a refusal to consent to search is thought to be used as a justification for a warrant...

[rick]

What you folks maybe don't know: the beloved NSA has been taping long-distance calls in Germany since 1948. All calls. These suckers are collecting some 24 million kilograms of tape a year in Germany alone. I have no clue for what purpose. This is not much of a well-kept secret over here. G. Orwell was an optimist...

[Junker]

One of the hopes is to provide a sea of background encryption so that any *needed* use of it disappears in the background. Thus, I encrypt all personal mail, not just sensitive items. It's a small delay, but Linux frinstance allows it as a normal part of the email package. I would hope that encryption continues to increase in use...the deviso-- Encrypt Everything!
Maybe in time even standard business mail will be encrypted.

[Roy J. Tellason]

One of the hopes is to provide a sea of background encryption so that any *needed* use of it disappears in the background. Thus, I encrypt all personal mail, not just sensitive items. It's a small delay, but Linux frinstance allows it as a normal part of the email package. I would hope that encryption continues to increase in use...the deviso-- Encrypt Everything!
Maybe in time even standard business mail will be encrypted.

They put it in envelopes that are sealed,  don't they?  Same thing...

Re:  The cell phone tracking,  I haven't had one working since oh,  1995 or thereabouts,  and even back then I was reading about the sizes of the cells being reduced and the resolution of the tracking being finer all the time.  I kept that old bag phone in my vehicle and plugged in,  watching the signal indicator to see where the dead spots were and such,  thinking it might come in handy if I ever needed it to make a 911 call,  but I eventually got tired of that and put it away...

Don't think I'd want one these days.

I thought maybe a prepaid one would be a good thing to have for an emergency,  but then I found out that if you don't use those minutes they *go away*,  and said the heck with that.

In an actual dire emergency where I still thought that making that call would be a good idea I'm thinking these days that perhaps I could find someone nearby with a phone if I needed to.  <shrug>

[enemyofthestate]

About this article:  I had seen, about a year ago or more, a fiction television program where the cell tracking thing described in this article was done.  I just thought it was creative fiction, I didn't know it was based in reality at all.

Tracking a phone in an area where cell sites overlap is not too hard.  If your phone can be seen by three towers, it can be located to within a few tens of yards.  In some cases to within a few feet.

[Tim Osman]

I'm sure that anyone reading this already knows about the tracking chips they are installing in phones now, to comply with the Enhanced 911 mandates and other laws.   For anyone interested, there is a really interesting article about the legal/privacy aspects of this at Legal Affairs.

A lot of people (myself included) thought they could get around this by simply using older cell phones or prepaid cell phones.  As the NSA article proves, this just isn't so.    

[jpheonix]

What might be good is a mod shop for cell phones someone who knows the technology could pull one apart and take out any tracking mechanism or install a jamming device againist locating but it would have to be done without blocking the ability to make and recieve calls.

Also most amatuer radio operators can set up home antennas or repeaters right? so why not create our own network? transmissions could be encrypted at their source and decrypted only by the intended reciever so there's no worrying about the easy interception of tranmissions. With the use of repeaters the locations of the people conversing would be difficult to trace.

[Elias Alias]

Hell, why not just go up the hill and arrest the Federal government? Take all their goodies away from them and divvy it up among the several States, where good neighbors can keep better tabs on their local government's usage of the stuff. Or whatever; but it's downright embarrassing for me to think that I would need to be ever vigilant to watch over governmental abuses of not only its charter-document but the details of my life, and settle myself for simply trying to keep one step ahead of whatever next Fedgov throws at me, when all I really needed to do was to dis-empower Fedgov, right?

Excellent thread and posts.

Elias

[Hunter]

What might be good is a mod shop for cell phones someone who knows the technology could pull one apart and take out any tracking mechanism or install a jamming device againist locating but it would have to be done without blocking the ability to make and recieve calls.

Also most amatuer radio operators can set up home antennas or repeaters right? so why not create our own network? transmissions could be encrypted at their source and decrypted only by the intended reciever so there's no worrying about the easy interception of tranmissions. With the use of repeaters the locations of the people conversing would be difficult to trace.

The first idea is simply technically infeasible. The tracking of users through cells is part of the system; the switching computers HAVE to know what cell your phone is in at all times in order to efficiently route calls to you. The GPS enabled phones you could in theory knock out the location system, but it won't do you a lot of good. First, most of the GPS chips are integrated tightly enough into the phone that it would be real hard to disable just the chip. And second, even if you did the network can still pin you down to within a fairly tight radius by triangulation from the towers - and as I said, that is a built-in function of the system which allows it to operate with the much less powerful phones of today.

As for amateur radio, they already HAVE their own network. Several, in fact. Where do you think a lot of the technology comes from that the cell companies have incorporated? Amateurs have all sorts of interesting stuff going on; and you can dedicate a lifetime to learning about it all. The catch is that the ham bands are pretty strongly self-policed. And one of the things absolutely verboten under the current rules is encrypted communications.

Start doing that regularly on any of the ham bands, and you won't have to worry about the FCC tracking you down. The local hams will do it for them. And they practice regularly at tracking transmitters - it's a sport called "fox hunting". You *could* obfuscate the trail somewhat with repeaters, but that won't help as much as you think. The DX crew finding the "illegal" transmissions would just run the repeater down, have a look at the equipment, and then start tracking the incoming transmission. They don't even have to be able to decrypt it to do that.

The bottom line is - if you really want secure communications, DON'T put them out on radio waves.

[Carl Bussjaeger]

Regarding cell phone tracking: Using older phones won't work. Because cell phone companies don't particularly want to replace all their older equipment to go GPS compatible, many are opting for a time difference of arrival location system. Basically, they hook a common clock source (which does happen to be GPS-derived) onto all their cell sites. A site queries your phone, your phone responds, and multiple cells watch to see how long it takes for your signal to arrive. This gives each the distance between you and each individual tower. They plot the range circles and look for circles to intersect: Your location. It works with _any_ cell phone that's turned on. And it's far more accurate than earlier systems of tracking you by cell movement.

 

[Scarmiglione']

Cell-phone free, and every day I get happier about it.

[Claire]

I thought maybe a prepaid one would be a good thing to have for an emergency,  but then I found out that if you don't use those minutes they *go away*,  and said the heck with that.

TracFone minutes don't go away as long as you keep the phone service activated. You can get a TracFone at Wal-Mart.

Even if the phone is trackable as described in this thread, you can still maintain privacy as long as the gummint doesn't know whose phone that is. Of course, the more calls you make, the more likely they are to find out it's your phone. Then once they know that, you might as well have signed a contract.

Some folks here swap pre-paid cellphones periodically with their friends.

[Thunder]

If you keep the darn thing turned off except for when you need to make calls, that should help.

No signal to track if its not putting out a signal.  Granted, no one can call you then.....