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Why are these planes even required? Cant the US government simply get this information directly from the phone carriers? Given all of the power the NSA seems

by xexers 12y ago

Why are these planes even required? Cant the US government simply get this information directly from the phone carriers? Given all of the power the NSA seems to have, surely they have this capability already.

upofadown 12y ago
I suspect that the planes are a lot more fun...
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- xexers 12y ago
  > going to the telecom company with a sweeping warrant Would it be a sweeping warrant? If they are only targeting 1 person/phone, then it sounds like a very specific warrant. Plus, the phone companies wouldn't give them all the data ("the whole haystack"), the phone companies would only give them the specific data to that person.
Terr_ 12y ago
I imagine intercepting it yourself means you need less cooperation from private entity, less paperwork (or paper-trail), and the ability to react to stuff being said/sent in real-time.
URSpider94 12y ago
I'm not sure that carriers keep the IMSI tower association records (vs. call or data transmission logging information). This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain, since a given phone is always associated with at least one tower and may be re-negotiating its association thousands of times per day.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I believe they do. I'm hardly an expert, but on the Serial podcast, which details a murder investigation, cellphone tracking gathered from the carrier is introduced as evidence, and the events are described as "pings" (not calls, and probably not data since this was in the early 90s). I don't think they actually triangulate the position, they just know the tower the cellphone "pinged" and the approximate distance based on signal power. This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain Not really. An IMSI takes about 7 bytes, plus a few for location, let's say 12 bytes. Multiplied by, say, 2000 pings a day per user, by 300M users, that's just 7TBs/day, for all carriers. Facebook alone deals with 600TBs/day.

by xexers 12y ago

upofadown 12y ago

I suspect that the planes are a lot more fun...

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xexers 12y ago
> going to the telecom company with a sweeping warrant Would it be a sweeping warrant? If they are only targeting 1 person/phone, then it sounds like a very specific warrant. Plus, the phone companies wouldn't give them all the data ("the whole haystack"), the phone companies would only give them the specific data to that person.

Terr_ 12y ago

I imagine intercepting it yourself means you need less cooperation from private entity, less paperwork (or paper-trail), and the ability to react to stuff being said/sent in real-time.

URSpider94 12y ago

I'm not sure that carriers keep the IMSI tower association records (vs. call or data transmission logging information). This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain, since a given phone is always associated with at least one tower and may be re-negotiating its association thousands of times per day.

icebraining 12y ago
I believe they do. I'm hardly an expert, but on the Serial podcast, which details a murder investigation, cellphone tracking gathered from the carrier is introduced as evidence, and the events are described as "pings" (not calls, and probably not data since this was in the early 90s). I don't think they actually triangulate the position, they just know the tower the cellphone "pinged" and the approximate distance based on signal power. This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain Not really. An IMSI takes about 7 bytes, plus a few for location, let's say 12 bytes. Multiplied by, say, 2000 pings a day per user, by 300M users, that's just 7TBs/day, for all carriers. Facebook alone deals with 600TBs/day.