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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
- kseistrup 10y agoPlease edit the title to reflect the fact that the article is dated December 2013.
- ffggvv 10y agoThis shows clearly that Putin is a dictator, that China is communist and that the USA spys the entire world to protect its citizens freedom. /s
- meric 10y agoThe "communist country" has a capitalist economy. The "free country" has total electronic surveillance. The "federation" is run like an empire in a dictator-like fashion. And north korea, the "democratic republic", is the most oppressive regime in the world. What a world we live in.
- tonyjstark 10y agoSeems like labels are not always telling the truth. It's a bit like in the supermarket, if something is called 'Premium' it's often nothing like that.
- chocolatebunny 10y agodoublespeak has always been a thing.
- nyolfen 10y agoTotal electronic surveillance seems to be the international norm at this point. Disgusting, disheartening, and disillusioning, but true. I've come across the phrase 'surveillance capitalism' to describe the present world order and it seems pretty spot on to me.
- jdimov10 10y agoOk, Putin is a dictator (duh). How is that ANY worse in ANY way than what America has? Seriously, people, get over your ridiculous democracy addiction, it's killing more people annually than all other drugs combined. Westerners are so brainwashed, you think your shit smells better than everyone else's. It doesn't. It's worse in many respects. And even if it IS better in some respects, nobody wants your shit pushed down their throat. If people like something they see, they're clever enough (AND enabled enough) to bring about the desired change in their own countries. Nobody needs you to save the world! Go solve your own problems.
- dijit 10y agoYou're being downvoted because you're going on an opinionated rant. There is however a term coined to engage discussion about the totalitarian actuality of extremely large democracies.[0] The issue is, when you invoke the name people laugh you off as a conspiracy theorist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
- dang 10y agoYour comments here have been breaking the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do that. Please (re-)read the rules and post civilly and substantively from now on, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Also, please don't use multiple accounts to comment regularly.
- duncan_bayne 10y agoWell, in fairness, that's actually more aligned with their actual mission, not to mention legal under American law. This isn't great news as a non-American but from their perspective, surely this is just the NSA doing their job?
- NietTim 10y agoRight, so fuck the US even more.
- datamoshr 10y agoThe 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 and carrying it in a Faraday cage. We may as well just go back to plain old telephones.
- d33 10y agoWhat's the difference really between a "faint voice" and no voice at all? What's the point of wasting breath if you get no influence?
- iamben 10y agoLots of faint voices, put together, can actually make quite a noise.
- dandelion_lover 10y ago...or make you think you have done something useful.
- benevol 10y agoThe "Brexit" stats have clearly shown that UK would have remained in the EU if the "millenials" had really made use of their right to vote. The "old" generation (voting to leave the EU) clearly understands the value of their vote(s).
- kaffee 10y agoVoter turnout was at record levels. It's not obvious that greater turnout of "millennials" specifically was likely to happen. Typically it's difficult to ensure that one kind of voter turns out without also increasing the rate of turnout for other kinds of voters as well.
- bicubic 10y agoI'm on mobile and don't have any links handy, but it's fairly well known that you can ostensibly track every. single. handset. in the world if you can gain access to any one carrier's infrastructure. You can bet every spy agency from every country is doing this.
- Zigurd 10y agoTo get a feeling for the size of the problem, the carrier logs all handset accesses on all transceivers. To do location tracking you have to get the carrier to give you access to those logs and you have to have the storage and processing to get finer-grained location based on overlapping transceiver accesses and precise times. It's a bit more than the carrier themselves would do for network quality monitoring, but not even 10X more. With this data your daily routine and divergence from that routine can be learned and detected. With this plus payment information, you've got enough to tell who is doing something interesting in real time.
- progx 10y agoAnd why we still have terrorists?
- dunkelheit 10y agoobviously because not enough resources were poured into these programs. /s
- Zigurd 10y agoBecause terrorists establish normal-seeming patterns of movement that do not diverge from that pattern until it is too late. Whereas if you take some time off from work to attend a protest, the FBI knows to come knocking on your door to ask pointed questions about your friends. That's what's pernicious about these programs. They're not good enough to focus on terrorists, but there is plenty of fodder for harassment of protesters.
- nacs 10y agoAlso I'm thinking they don't use smartphones that leak all kinds of other data and instead cycle thorugh simple, cheap/pre-paid, disposable phones which would make establishing long-term patterns more difficult.
- mouzogu 10y agoSo now they can detect the location of the "target" and send a drone to kill them from the convenience of their office, before going on lunch break. This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer. To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.
- toomanythings2 10y agoThe people they kill are those who have killed others. Quit pretending they are innocents just minding their own business.
- peterkelly 10y agoOr sometimes wedding parties, such as one where the US government murdered 47 innocent people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deh_Bala_wedding_party_airstrike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deh_Bala_wedding_party_airstri...
- toomanythings2 10y agoYou mean like the 3000 in the World Trade Center?
- gazaren 10y agoSo two wrongs will somehow make things right?
- toomanythings2 10y agoYou forget who did it first.
- mouzogu 10y agonot 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
- jacquesm 10y agoHow would America respond if it found out that say the UK is tracking cellphones worldwide, except for British subjects of course, but including all Americans on American soil?
- athenot 10y agoThat would be called a cyber attack, and the group responsible would be portrayed as an "evil" group. 2 weights, 2 measures...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- themartorana 10y agoThey probably are, so the NSA can request such data from them if they need it. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gchq-spying-edward-snowden https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gch... https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secre... And so on.
- threatofrain 10y agoI feel that it's reasonable to expect that Russian, Chinese, and EU members are tracking American activities worldwide. It would be a failure of their various institutions to not track and influence nations and institutions with world-relevant power or influence. This includes both monitoring and more aggressive attacks. I also feel that as an individual person, I have no defense against this, partly because it's generally easier to attack a system than to defend it, partly because of the asymmetry of costs in defense vs attack leading to the lack of business or personal justification for effective defense spending, and partly because electronic monitoring and attacks are difficult to investigate by their international nature. So if American institutions discovered some attack, they would release the information with proper political timing to influence national narrative, thereby inflating their agency importance, or it may further some group goals, the news media may proliferate and bark about it, and no national administration, including the American one, would be surprised at all. It would not update anyone's view of the world in any way.
- furyg3 10y agoIf Americans (of which I am one) and the US government believe that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, then surely they should apply the principles that they have enshrined in their constitution to all equals when dealing with them, regardless of whether or not they are a US Citizen or where on earth they are.
- Practicality 10y agoI think a good number of us do and a good number do not. There is a world divide right now and you may have laid your finger on what the difference is. Ironically, those who believe all men are created equal are loathe to divide from the rest, so it's an awkward divide.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cryoshon 10y agothey are tracking our every single movement, and aspire to track our every single thought we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can't delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.
- ctack 10y agoIt's only going to get worse. At the moment it's "only" creepy but is already leading to self censorship. I'm not sure what the solution is, but any country with human rights as a true goal should be pushing encryption like there is no tomorrow.
- toomanythings2 10y agoHow many government employees does it take to track and analyze my every movement?
- JChase2 10y agoA couple of engineers, depending on the situation.
- toomanythings2 10y agoSo it takes two engineers to analyze my and hundreds of millions movements each and every day?
- jefe_ 10y agoNot long ago you could buy SIM cards from kioskos, corner stores, etc. This is becoming increasingly rare, even in places with otherwise poor infrastructure. The shift was rapid but noticeable.
- tonylemesmer 10y agoAs soon as you start using them, that's when you become an interesting subject.
- TACIXAT 10y agoI've picked them up from Walmart. You can register them via Tor.
- bnastic 10y ago> 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 if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?
- advisedwang 10y agoWell 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.
- bnastic 10y agoI don't dispute that, but instead the tone of the article that makes it sound as if it's such a huge quantity of data that NSA is struggling (or was struggling) to capture it all.
- brokenmachine 10y agoI agree that 27Tb doesn't sound too big for the NSA, but perhaps they are doing very deep and involved "processing" on the data, making the output size orders of magnitude larger than the input size. Better give them more budget, then they will be able to handle all the data!
- exabrial 10y agoOkay 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.
- throwanem 10y agoA measured reaction? Good God! We can't have that.
- exabrial 10y agoSorry to disapoint. Please resume panic
- peterwoo 10y agoIt'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.
- marksc 10y ago> if you have a GSM phone this is quite trivial to do. If you have a face, it's quite trivial to be punched in it. That doesn't make it okay for someone to punch it, much less legal.
- cdevs 10y agoMan I will forever be grateful for the eye opening insights Snowden has provided to us. I now check for https and use tor and always block cookies. How is there not a monument in every city dedicated to this hero?
- toomanythings2 10y agoSo you think using any of that protects you from the Chinese, KGB, etc.? Did you forget to block localStorage, too?
- peterkelly 10y agoThe KGB ceased to exist in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union, a full three years before HTTPS was invented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
- toomanythings2 10y agoHas nothing to do with my point. Quit pretending the Russians don't have a spy agency.
- grandalf 10y agoWe are supposed to fear the Chinese? Russians? The citizens of those nations should perhaps fear those governments, but the typical American has nothing whatsoever to fear from them.
- zymhan 10y agoMaybe if you're trying to make a point about spy agencies, you should learn what they're called first.
- toomanythings2 10y agoYou should be able to follow along without further help while staying on track with the subject.
- mSparks 10y agoI wonder if they manage to track my cell phone more accurately than my cell phone manages to track itself. My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town. Simply lost count of the number of times I've been like, "yeah, I'm sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I'm more interested in where I am now". Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.
- throwanem 10y agoActually, most of the smartest people I've ever known have worked for NSA, in both analytical and other capacities. Some of the fittest, too, for "does century rides on the weekends for fun" values of "fit".
- l3m0ndr0p 10y agoThe true purpose of the tracking, is to track American Citizens. Who cares if they are tracking people outside of the USA? I don't care if the the UK, China or Russia is tracking me. I don't live in any of those countries. But I live in the USA and every agency is better at watching their own citizens instead of ones living outside of the USA. The USA is not the land of the free, home of the brave. It's the home of the enslaved and it's been like this for over 20+ years now. It's a pyramid of power and at the top are the rich (Corps, people, families and politicians). Next are the enforcers, they carry weapons and can make you disappear (3 letter agencies, State & local Police, Military). then there's the rest of us: Middle Class & the poor, which are both merging into the peasantry, the enslaved, the human resource. Yes -> resource. Why is our (USA) "news" Media and government trying so very hard to remove weapons from the peasantry? They are afraid that the peasantry will revolt some day soon. The Enforcer Class kills with impunity and without consequence. It appears that the powers that be, would like to keep it that way.
- tmaly 10y agoI am really amazed that more people are not outraged at this. When things like the Pentagon Papers came out or when Watergate hit the news, people reacted and change happened. Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- schoen 10y agoApart 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.
- anonbanker 10y ago..And people ask me why I don't have a cellphone in 2016.