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I think the poison here is government, not the tool. It makes sense for a government to look for location data to persecute its declared enemies.
by conanbatt 7y ago
I think the poison here is government, not the tool. It makes sense for a government to look for location data to persecute its declared enemies.
- mindslight 7y agoGovernment is just doing what government inherently does - attempting to exert control over anything legible to it. The underlying problem is the longstanding insecurity of cell protocols that creates these irresistible databases of everyone's location in the first place.
- icebraining 7y agoHow would you design a cell protocol that prevented signal triangulation? Seems essentially impossible.
- mindslight 7y agoHiding the location of a radio itself is likely infeasible (with sector antennas, each tower actually knows a signal strength and a rough vector). However, what is avoidable are fixed IDs like IMSI and IMEI that allow persistent tracking of the "same device" or "same user" across every tower. The routing functions of IMEI could easily be replaced with a nonce that changed for every registration. The billing functions of IMSI could be replaced with blinded tokens. And the persistent identity of phone numbers could be provided by independent parties like with email, ideally over a (non-wireless) mix network.
- Supermancho 7y agoDeclared *processes. Calling targets enemies is editorializing at best.
- black_puppydog 7y agoWelcome to step number two... :/