US cops point at cell towers and say: Give us every phone number that's touched that mast US telecoms giant Verizon says police are increasingly asking it to cough up massive dumps of cellphone data rather than individual records. This according to the latest Verizon US transparency report for the first half of the 2017 calendar year. The dossier tracks government requests for phone records both of individual …
Why do they think they NEED to store that information long-term? It's transitory by nature!
As always, the best thing an organization which cares about the privacy of their customers can do is **not store the data in the first place**. If they haven't got it they can't be compelled to hand it over.
If I told you, I'd have to kill you...
Just kidding.
Actually there is value.
It allow the police to build a map and identify travel within an area. (tower to tower over time.)
It also allows you to build a picture over time. Is the number someone just passing thru or if they are a local.
It also gives you a pattern of when someone was in the area.
There are other patterns but you get the idea.
That explains (at least in part) why the *cops* want the data. It doesn't explain why the carrier would store some of the data being asked for. The answer to that question is probably that the regulators (at the behest of the various alphabet agencies) are requiring them to do so.
Just think of the money to be made from advertising. Compare the registered address of the phone owner with where they are. Up scaling? Down scaling? Real estate agents; removal firms; insurance brokers; car dealers and so on. They'll all pay good money for that data.
Just visiting? Regularly? Car dealers; insurance agents; coffee shops; supermarkets and so on.
All you have to know is that no matter where you are or what you are doing, someone, somewhere is trying to figure out a way to make money off you. It's quite amazing how many succeed...
Big Brother, complete with sponsors messages...
Also if you've ever worked at a tech company, you'll know that data is "gold".. They hoard it, slice it, dice it and monetise it!
From that data alone, they can generate a map of where you hang out, what shops you visit etc etc, then try to find a way of making money from it (via advertising, selling it etc).. even if they anonymise the data, it still has value to somebody.
I get people storing large amounts of data in the email server . Some even see the wastebin in outlook as a great place to store information. It seems to be a measure of how important they are.
"I'm very important so I have top keep all my emails for six years. Its because of data protection . No , wait its cos of health and safety , its one of those catch all excuses anyway"
"ah so that's why you need all these 'Party next friday' word documents with the 10mb jpgs in?"
Actually it does.
Cell phone companies have multiple towers in an area. They need to route traffic between towers as well as determine where they need a new tower if the area is heavily congested.
For example, where I live, during the evening rush hour out of the city, I have calls dropped, even though our building has a telco's mast.
Its gotten better, however there are still some days where calls get dropped.
The cell companies will want to be able to determine load on the system and track usage.
Is the load due to a special event? Or is the load due to every day commuters. You really can't depend on an aggregation because you don't know who's a regular and who's just visiting the area.
There's more, but you should get the idea.
For example, where I live, during the evening rush hour out of the city, I have calls dropped, even though our building has a telco's mast.
Your phone is not connecting to the mast on your building. Being under a mast, or within a half kilometer of one, is one of the worst areas you can be for cellular coverage. A base station antenna is something like a lighthouse -- you have to be some distance from the the tower to see the light directly.
Typically the beam width on a base station antenna is 15 degrees or less with a downtilt aiming the center of the lobe down below the horizon. At 60 meters high you need to be over 400 meters away before it can "see" your phone. Any less and you are picking up a reflection or side lobe which will be unreliable for communications. Shorter towers of course lower those numbers, but being below the antenna is still the worst place to be.
@ old previously-owned proggy-
AND, for bonus points, i defy you to *try* to access any of 'your' data Big Telco has on YOUR account...
had a situation where i had to 'prove' i called a certain state office about an employment matter, and they -effectively- claimed i did not do so... went to 'my' (sic) Big Telco who I PAY MONEY TO FOR SERVICE, if they would kindly provide my phone call records for about a 3 month period...
first, took going up the hierarchy and yelling and stamping my foot to get ANY response, and that response was 'no'... um, say wha ? those are 'my' records, of 'my' calls, WHY can't i have a copy of said records ? ??
well, not sure, but they were damn well NOT going to give me the records until i both wrote them a snail mail letter threatening legal action, as well as contacted a state rep... not sure what changed their mind, but they did relent and provide said records...
(which 'proved' my case, and made the state acknowledge the validity of my claim...)
what i *thought* should have been a simple request and easily fulfilled response, became a protracted and maddening process of punching at smoke...
grrrr, me hates me some Big Telcos...
"It allow the police to build a map and identify"
Remember this is not the UK, it's the US where they shoot first and ask later. It is highly doubtful that kind of intelligent can build anything or even identify anything.
Just to put some intelligent into this case, why didn't the police just give information to the telecoms giant and let them search it for them? It doesn't take that much brain-cells to notice it is a lot quicker and cheaper (just pay the telecoms) than to get hold of a few billion log records that still need to be manually searched. It is like they are not really trying to solve a case like racing against the clock.
Sorry mate, I have to down vote you.
How much do you want to bet that this is also happening in the EU and the UK?
Hypothetically, if you wanted to find a bad actor who frequently changed phones, how would you do it?
One idea would be to monitor the cell phone traffic in the area as well as monitor when the bad actor was in the area. While you don't know the specific cell number, you can, over time eliminate phones in the area based on their usage pattern. Thus limiting the cell phones that could be used by the bad actor.
Then you can get a warrant to use StingRay and find said phone.
You can't give the information to the telcos and have them search because you risk the investigation being blown or the bad guy being tipped off.
Also consider that it could be a terrorist cell at work. So you could be racing the clock.
Part of the reason for storing the records is financial. Depending on one's plan there might still be roaming charges or other usage charges based on location. So the telcos have to keep detailed records of all phones pinging off their towers for accurate billing and must keep them for a period of time in case of billing disputes. This is mostly legacy but there might be a few older or dirt cheap plans that have roaming charges.
I do question why the local Stasi and their feral counterparts need all the numbers that pinged a tower. It seems as if the doughnut eaters are being lazy and not asking the correct questions. If they have some idea of the phone id/number or the general travel direction they can ask a narrower question that should reduce the amount of data they need to dig through. Even if they do not know the specific phone, if they know the general direction someone fled (e.g. north), check for the records of those phones that moved north at about the right time from tower to tower. It will be far fewer than a general dump.
Another case I can see is this.... You know your pep's phone number. Looking through logs of *all* phones attaching/detaching from a tower, can you see any other numbers which attach/detach at the same time as the perp's? That could help you identify other phones used by said perp, and you may want to dig more deeply into those as well.
You have a possible suspect. You don't have a perpetrator until you can establish a lot more information. Unless they're using data from multiple towers, you haven't established that the person is actually at the locations of the shooting, just at the nearest tower.
What you don't have is a case, but rather a coincidence.
I do question why the local Stasi and their feral counterparts need all the numbers that pinged a tower
Seems obvious - take said list and run a search for known numbers of perps or potentials they want to pull in - if they pop up on the ping list, they have their excuse to pull them in and see if they can get the 'ole' slipper to fit'.
They "need" to store it because police and spooks pay good money for the data. Selling out their customers to the government is another revenue stream:
"AT&T stores customer data as far back as 2008, and charges from $100,000 to over $1 million a year for law enforcement agencies to access this data. This program, called Project Hemisphere, gives law enforcement access to your phone records without a warrant, at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a23567/att-phone-records-police/
Anyone remember the heady days of, ooh, 2005 or so, when Americans used to sneer at Brits for being so heavily surveilled by cameras?
"Just you wait", I told them. "We're pioneers. Your authorities will learn from ours, and when they build their own systems, they'll make ours look petty and amateurish by comparison."
Welcome to the future.
Damn, yes. I must be a very dodgy criminal every time I switch the thing off for the theatre or a concert.
You might be one day! Was the showing pre-approved?! WHO WERE YOU WITH?!
Was it Les Mis? Then you're someone with revolutionary tendancies, as would be if it were Evita. And if it were Chicago then clearly you're hanging around with nefarious types.
If you can go without the phone on, why take it at all? Leave your phone behind, with it turned on. Let it be 'proof' that you never left that area. Why didn't you answer your calls, assuming you recieved any? You were simply engaged in other activities (showering, on the toilet, showering, sleeping, etc.).
If you need a phone during the commission of a crime, burner phones are cheap.
Britain's largest police force has been using covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network to intercept communications and unique IDs from phones or even transmit a signal to shut off phones remotely, according to the Guardian.
The system, made by Datong in the United Kingdom, was purchased by the London Metropolitan police, which paid $230,000 to Datong for "ICT hardware" in 2008 and 2009.
Datong is quite a good uk export success company.
I met Dr. David Tong on many occasions and have bought several of his excellent designs (not sure how much he's currently working there), but not their 'stingray' as they are fairly easy to make yourself!
Strangely, a village cop-shop near me recently used a (warranted) GSM tower data-slurp to solve a death. A jogger was killed whilst out jogging at night in a black outfit in the rain. No witnesses. The police requested the data of all GSM terminals that went through the village that night, then went to visit the owners. They eventually found a little old lady with a slightly crumpled ancient Fiat, she remembered a bump but thought it was a pot-hole. That's one valid use for warranted surveillance. I'm not so keen on the unwarranted snooping, but hey, Gladio hardly ever occurred , no?
The point is that these requests cannot be related to individual events but only as part of surveillance and profiling of everyone in the area.
I'm neither American nor a lawyer but I think it is an attempt to work around the restriction on mass surveillance of US citizens. Of course, the NSA probably already has a direct feed because why should they waste time getting warrants?
Is that at least they appear to still need a warrant, even if it is granted almost automatically. If they stopped asking for warrants that's when we should be worried, because at that point we would be forced to assume they're getting a full real time dump of everything.
I wish judges would exercise more discretion, and make them prove a much higher bar to justify a full dump over information for a few numbers.
That's a good question, but I'm afraid I don't know the answer. Federal judges are life appointments, but if the city or state police build a case can they seek wiretaps from state appointed judges who may be elected depending on the state...anyone know?
I think electing judges is a terrible idea, you don't want them to base their decisions on polling, only the law. Appoint them for life, and provide a way to for a supermajority of voters and/or legislators to kick them out if they do something outrageous.
In Norway, Telenor Mobile has just announced that they intend to sell this kind of stored data for analytics purposes. They are saying the data is anonymised, but even their example of using the data for traffic planning by seeing start and end points of journeys makes me sceptical given how much other data is openly available in the public domain in Norway. For example it's possible and easy to do a reverse lookup on a phone number, an address or even a car registration number and car journeys are increasingly tracked using the road toll network and an extension of this that can read your toll RFID tag at other random non-toll related points. Putting this all together with one of the best 4G networks in the world and a culture where they've been paying for everything electronically for decades and you're already living in 1984 or Minority Report!
You can find the owner , and by extension - address , of a car from its reg in Norway?
That seems like a dangerous data breach / invasion of privacy.
It basically means that all the time you are in public in your car you are wearing a huge sign saying your name and address!
Given that situation I'm surprised you bothered hiding your already anonymous reg handle with AC :p
> You can find the owner , and by extension - address , of a car from its reg in Norway?
Not only that you can find out how much they earn and their tax returns as well (All tax and earnings have been public knowledge in Norway since the 1800s)
https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2016/apr/11/when-it-comes-to-tax-transparency-norway-leads-the-field
I'd like to see the law enforcement agencies compile information to let us see how many arrests and convictions came from cases where they were awarded a warrant for cell phone monitoring.
Also the numbers where the cell phone history assists in proving an individual's innocence of a crime.
Hopefully the US government will never put up the same type of camera systems used in England. Most states here will not even allow cameras to be used to catch speeding drivers. So gathering the location history of a cell phone to prove someone's innocence or possible involvement of a crime isn't something which should be too hard to get.
Pah! The first OCR scanner I ever used was a manually operated one and it's default was for reading 9-pin dot matrix printouts line by by line, by physically pulling the scan head along a captive ruler. It dumped ASCII out of it's serial port and had limited typeface selection. It worked better after we ripped it apart and fitted the scanning head to a flatbed plotter. This all ran on a CP/M host computer :-)
we have all been there with a boss that doesn't know what they are doing. Must be plenty of bozo's still blocking a seat that ask someone to print off a vast document and get them to look through it and highlight a few lines here and there.
Obviously the staff that say sod off will be viewed dimly whereas the eager to please will find themselves as a trusted lieutenant for many years till both are eventually canned purely by accident in an offshoring incident.
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