6 ms·

For sale: Systems that can track where cellphone users go around the globe

70 points by acdanger 12y ago

manicdee 12y ago
Why would it be "bad" for Iran to track people this way, but there is not so much concern for the NSA tracking people this way? The USA has already killed people based on trivial amounts of data such as, "A had dinner with B who is C's relative. Thus even though A is US citizen in a foreign country, we will blow up his car with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone because C is a known terrorist."
- x0x0 12y ago
  Terrorist: defn: person killed by drone strike
  - belorn 12y ago
    It was the official policy during the bush administration (unknown if still current policy). It resulted in very low numbers when calculating civilian deaths. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...)
    - mkaziz 12y ago
      Right now a terrorist is a man between ages 18 and I think 45. If you have brown skin and are at that age and are killed in a drone strike in Pakistan, the US gov't announces you as a terrorist killed. :)
- eurleif 12y ago
  >The USA has already killed people based on trivial amounts of data such as, "A had dinner with B who is C's relative. Thus even though A is US citizen in a foreign country, we will blow up his car with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone because C is a known terrorist." Do you have a link for that?
  - junto 12y ago
    The US also has a rather repugnant taste for targeting funerals, weddings and the rescuers of such attacks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yemeni-victims-of-us-military-drone-strike-get-more-than-1million-in-compensation/2014/08/18/670926f0-26e4-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yemeni... http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror... http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-strikes-are-said-to-target-rescuers.html?_r=0 http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-str...
x0x0 12y ago
It's unbelievable that at&t / verizon / tmobile / uscellular / sprint would freely make this available to overseas companies / just anyone, no? Or am I wrong? I mean, those companies are scum, but damn. Verint, which also has substantial operations in Israel, declined to comment for this story. It says in the marketing brochure that it does not use SkyLock against U.S. or Israeli phones, which could violate national laws. But several similar systems, marketed in recent years by companies based in Switzerland, Ukraine and elsewhere, likely are free of such limitations. At The Post’s request, telecommunications security researcher Tobias Engel used the techniques described by the marketing documents to determine the location of a Post employee who used an AT&T phone and consented to the tracking. Based only on her phone number, Engel found the Post employee’s location, in downtown Washington, to within a city block — a typical level of precision when such systems are used in urban areas. But apparently SS7 -- the network-to-network connection -- freely lets you query anyone's last cell tower. Un-fucking-believable.
- bzz01 12y ago
  I've seen these talks from CCC few years ago, tried that myself (on myself) and SS7 only gave MSC id, which is wayy more coarse than cell tower level -- like, 1M customers per MSC (still a privacy concern of course). But that city block level location thing seems like it is something more sophisticated.
- shard972 12y ago
  If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about.
  - symfrog 12y ago
    I have seen this sentiment posted often when privacy concerns are raised. It implies a deeply flawed notion that as long as you don't have anything to hide then the privacy violations are not of concern. In reality the systematic break down of privacy and systematic increase of power to those who are committing them eventually leads to oppression and near total control. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revisited-the-banalities-and-betrayals-of-life-in-east-germany-a-659708.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revi...
est 12y ago
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2997.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2997.en.... slides from CCC in case someone is interested.
joosters 12y ago
I wonder how this scales? Would it be possible to get bulk data on phone locations? You could imagine an unscrupulous company repeatedly grabbing the location data for every phone on a list to improve their own customer profiling or advertising.
morgante 12y ago
> Which is not to say I’d be happy about the NSA using this method to collect location data. But better them than the Iranians. I have the opposite concern. There's really not much that Iran can do to an American citizen continents away. The NSA, on the other hand, can target, track, and detain me without any recourse.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  It's the fear that's been marketed towards us. I don't understand what interest one would imagine that the Iranian government would have in anyone's location who is not Iranian or a threat to Iranian interests. I think the same about the US, but I am a citizen of the US, and the US has interests that are significantly wider ranging than Iran.
- kiram_bozorgeh 12y ago
  >There's really not much that Iran can do to an American citizen continents away. This is a very naive illusion. Their intelligence agencies have a long history of doing things to their own citizens around the world too.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - morgante 12y ago
    > This is a very naive illusion. It's naive to think Iran is more dangerous than the US government.
googamooga 12y ago
Actually, everybody who posesses a credit card or paypal account could start tracking a location of any mobile phone with country-level resolution. Any bulk-SMS sending company has a service called HRL Lookup, which is normally used for optimization of SMS-sending costs to users in roaming. Though VLR address (which is the result of HLR Lookup) can be used for user tracking purposes - the first few digits of this address is just a country code of the country which the user is visiting now.
algorithm_dk 12y ago
The technical part of this article is partially wrong. I will post the real way it works later along with a real demo you can try on your own number. Stay tuned!
skidoo 12y ago
Would have been nice if this tech applied to Malaysian flights.
colinbartlett 12y ago
When I travel outside my country, I always put my phone in airplane mode, then purchase a local SIM card when I arrive. Would that thwart this particular tracking?
- inh3 12y ago
  Not necessarily due to each phone having its own unique identification number, the IMEI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Equipment_Identity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Eq...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
srean 12y ago
I find personalized 3rd party tracking objectionable, unless the person volunteered or consented. That said, it would be quite nice to have an open API where I could query an area for the count of cell phone users active there. Of course this should have upper and lower bounds on the area, perhaps on its shape too. I emphasize that it is just count that I seek, not querying the location of a specific cellphone. Is anything like this available, free, for a fee, for specific providers ?

70 points by acdanger 12y ago

Why would it be "bad" for Iran to track people this way, but there is not so much concern for the NSA tracking people this way? The USA has already killed people based on trivial amounts of data such as, "A had dinner with B who is C's relative. Thus even though A is US citizen in a foreign country, we will blow up his car with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone because C is a known terrorist."

x0x0 12y ago
Terrorist: defn: person killed by drone strike
- belorn 12y ago
  It was the official policy during the bush administration (unknown if still current policy). It resulted in very low numbers when calculating civilian deaths. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...)
  - mkaziz 12y ago
    Right now a terrorist is a man between ages 18 and I think 45. If you have brown skin and are at that age and are killed in a drone strike in Pakistan, the US gov't announces you as a terrorist killed. :)
eurleif 12y ago
>The USA has already killed people based on trivial amounts of data such as, "A had dinner with B who is C's relative. Thus even though A is US citizen in a foreign country, we will blow up his car with a Hellfire missile fired from a drone because C is a known terrorist." Do you have a link for that?
- junto 12y ago
  The US also has a rather repugnant taste for targeting funerals, weddings and the rescuers of such attacks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yemeni-victims-of-us-military-drone-strike-get-more-than-1million-in-compensation/2014/08/18/670926f0-26e4-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yemeni... http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror... http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-strikes-are-said-to-target-rescuers.html?_r=0 http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-str...

x0x0 12y ago

It's unbelievable that at&t / verizon / tmobile / uscellular / sprint would freely make this available to overseas companies / just anyone, no? Or am I wrong? I mean, those companies are scum, but damn. Verint, which also has substantial operations in Israel, declined to comment for this story. It says in the marketing brochure that it does not use SkyLock against U.S. or Israeli phones, which could violate national laws. But several similar systems, marketed in recent years by companies based in Switzerland, Ukraine and elsewhere, likely are free of such limitations. At The Post’s request, telecommunications security researcher Tobias Engel used the techniques described by the marketing documents to determine the location of a Post employee who used an AT&T phone and consented to the tracking. Based only on her phone number, Engel found the Post employee’s location, in downtown Washington, to within a city block — a typical level of precision when such systems are used in urban areas. But apparently SS7 -- the network-to-network connection -- freely lets you query anyone's last cell tower. Un-fucking-believable.

bzz01 12y ago
I've seen these talks from CCC few years ago, tried that myself (on myself) and SS7 only gave MSC id, which is wayy more coarse than cell tower level -- like, 1M customers per MSC (still a privacy concern of course). But that city block level location thing seems like it is something more sophisticated.
shard972 12y ago
If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about.
- symfrog 12y ago
  I have seen this sentiment posted often when privacy concerns are raised. It implies a deeply flawed notion that as long as you don't have anything to hide then the privacy violations are not of concern. In reality the systematic break down of privacy and systematic increase of power to those who are committing them eventually leads to oppression and near total control. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revisited-the-banalities-and-betrayals-of-life-in-east-germany-a-659708.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revi...

est 12y ago

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2997.en.html https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2997.en.... slides from CCC in case someone is interested.

joosters 12y ago

I wonder how this scales? Would it be possible to get bulk data on phone locations? You could imagine an unscrupulous company repeatedly grabbing the location data for every phone on a list to improve their own customer profiling or advertising.

morgante 12y ago

> Which is not to say I’d be happy about the NSA using this method to collect location data. But better them than the Iranians. I have the opposite concern. There's really not much that Iran can do to an American citizen continents away. The NSA, on the other hand, can target, track, and detain me without any recourse.

pessimizer 12y ago
It's the fear that's been marketed towards us. I don't understand what interest one would imagine that the Iranian government would have in anyone's location who is not Iranian or a threat to Iranian interests. I think the same about the US, but I am a citizen of the US, and the US has interests that are significantly wider ranging than Iran.
kiram_bozorgeh 12y ago
>There's really not much that Iran can do to an American citizen continents away. This is a very naive illusion. Their intelligence agencies have a long history of doing things to their own citizens around the world too.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- morgante 12y ago
  > This is a very naive illusion. It's naive to think Iran is more dangerous than the US government.

googamooga 12y ago

Actually, everybody who posesses a credit card or paypal account could start tracking a location of any mobile phone with country-level resolution. Any bulk-SMS sending company has a service called HRL Lookup, which is normally used for optimization of SMS-sending costs to users in roaming. Though VLR address (which is the result of HLR Lookup) can be used for user tracking purposes - the first few digits of this address is just a country code of the country which the user is visiting now.

algorithm_dk 12y ago

The technical part of this article is partially wrong. I will post the real way it works later along with a real demo you can try on your own number. Stay tuned!

skidoo 12y ago

Would have been nice if this tech applied to Malaysian flights.

colinbartlett 12y ago

When I travel outside my country, I always put my phone in airplane mode, then purchase a local SIM card when I arrive. Would that thwart this particular tracking?

inh3 12y ago
Not necessarily due to each phone having its own unique identification number, the IMEI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Equipment_Identity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Eq...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

srean 12y ago

I find personalized 3rd party tracking objectionable, unless the person volunteered or consented. That said, it would be quite nice to have an open API where I could query an area for the count of cell phone users active there. Of course this should have upper and lower bounds on the area, perhaps on its shape too. I emphasize that it is just count that I seek, not querying the location of a specific cellphone. Is anything like this available, free, for a fee, for specific providers ?