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> Detection tools and systems to track down international phone calls made inside North Korea are becoming increasingly accurate and more widespread, so calls m
by BuildTheRobots 11y ago
> Detection tools and systems to track down international phone calls made inside North Korea are becoming increasingly accurate and more widespread, so calls must be kept under two minutes.
Could someone elaborate on this... keeping calls <2min to stop them being traced seems painfully Hollywood
- Vexs 11y agoNo idea if this is right, but I imagine that's how long it takes to get the word out to start tracking this number, after which the actual tracking happens quickly.
- grecy 11y agoSpeaking from a telco perspective, all of our switches make a CDR (call data record) for ALL calls in and out. Origin number, destination number, number of seconds, date stamp, etc. etc. There are millions of CDRs per day. It would be trivial to filter them for calls to/from certain ranges of numbers. EDIT: To be clear, it makes no difference if your call is one second or one hour, I can easily find the CDR for it and prove you made/received a call from/to X
- goodcanadian 11y agoYou are correct, of course, except that I highly doubt North Korea has access to Chinese telephone records. As another commenter pointed out, the North Koreans are probably relying on radio triangulation. With the right resources, I'm sure they could detect that a call is occurring almost immediately, and perhaps even pinpoint where it is coming from, but they still have to go out and catch them. I don't know what resources the North Koreans actually have, but I suspect they are fairly limited.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- leoc 11y agoThere are reports that the DPRK government splashed out on mobile-phone radio detectors http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=12545&cataId=nk01500 http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=12545&cataId=nk0... http://renewal.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=12972 http://renewal.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&n... as part of a major crackdown on the border in the past year or so.
- grecy 11y ago> You are correct, of course, except that I highly doubt North Korea has access to Chinese telephone records They don't need access to Chinese records, they have their own records. If you use a phone in North Korea, the switch in North Korea (likely) has a CDR for that call.
- goodcanadian 11y agoThey are connecting to Chinese networks from the border areas; it is there in the article.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoRadio triangulation can take time.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoThese are operating off of Chinese cell towers near the border, so the Nork authorities have no access to cellular system records. They have to use plain old RF direction finding techniques to pinpoint the location of a signal, and then catch a person with an illegal cell phone in their possession.
- BuildTheRobots 11y agoThanks -makes perfect sense. I didn't realise they were using an out-of-country cell network to initiate communication.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoSure, it was in the last paragraph on page 1 of the article.