Crapaganda.com

The Chinese government has announced plans to track the real-time location of all cell phones in the city of Beijing, purportedly to ease traffic problems that have plagued the city. Human rights activists have expressed concerns that this plan may well be the newest attempt by the Chinese government to surveil its citizenry against any attempted uprising. As Wang Songlian of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network told the Guardian:

For ordinary people, the government is worried about social unrest. Often there’s a spark somewhere and everyone gathers and puts out information. By registering people and tracking them, it enables them to find out about particular protests and punish individuals.

Location privacy is an endangered concept. As technology evolves, many networked devices are becoming increasingly more portable and affordable — and increasingly sharing one’s real-time location data without a users’ explicit knowledge or consent. The threats to location privacy in the era of the smart phone are multifarious, including applications that leak private data and obsolete laws that fail to protect civil liberties. As the situation in China demonstrates, modern smart phones may also act as a mechanism for governments to vacuum up data on citizens who might protest authoritarian regimes. While EFF continues to champion cell phone location privacy inU.S. courts and on the Hill, the fundamental privacy conundrum posed by modern cell phones is that they cannot function properly without simultaneously exposing locational information.

This means that Beijing citizens have few choices when it comes to protecting their location privacy from the government, an especially problematic scenario considering China passed a lawlast year mandating that people register their cell phones in their real names. Currently, the only solution for true location privacy, whether in China or anywhere else, is turning off the mobile phone and removing the battery. Unfortunately, there’s no feasible and easily achievable consumer-facing software or hardware anywhere that can effectively circumvent location tracking while leaving modern smart phones functional.

There are, however, some hacktivists and academics beginning to explore creative solutions to this problem. Among the ideas being circulated is the possibility of a “mobile mesh network” connectivity – having cell phones connect directly to one another, rather than routing signals through cell phone towers. While there may be other security concerns around mesh networking, such communication methods hold promise for maintaining communications in “Internet blackout” scenarios such as those seen recently in Egypt and Libya. We look forward to future developments in this arena.

Source: Electronic Freedom Foundation

The Army wants to issue every soldier an iPhone or Android cellphone — it could be a soldier’s choice.
And to top it off, the Army wants to pay your monthly phone bill.

To most soldiers, it sounds almost too good to be true, but it’s real, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC). He said the Army would issue these smartphones just like any other piece of equipment a soldier receives.

“One of the options potentially is to make it a piece of equipment in a soldier’s clothing bag,” Vane said.

Efforts are underway around the Army to harness smart phones to revolutionize the way the service trains and fights.

Army-issued smartphones are already in the schoolhouse and garrison, or on post, in the hands of some students at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.; Fort Lee, Va.; and at Fort Sill, Okla., under an Army program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. CSDA’s next step, already underway at Fort Bliss, Texas, is testing for the war zone.

In February, the Army plans to begin fielding phones, network equipment and applications to the first Army brigade to be modernized under the brigade combat team modernization program. That test will not be limited to smart phones but will include any electronic devices that may be useful to troops.

“We’re looking at everything from iPads to Kindles to Nook readers to mini-projectors,” said Mike McCarthy, director of the mission command complex of Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss.

The Army plans to roll out wireless Common Access Card readers for the iPhone in January and for Android phones in April. This would give soldiers secure access to their e-mail, contacts and calendars.

At war, smartphones would let soldiers view real-time intelligence and video from unmanned systems overhead, and track friends and enemies on a dynamic map, officials said. But the Army must first work through the complex task of securing the data and the network before it sanctions smart phones on the battlefield.

The goal is for soldiers to get information when they need it, wherever they are.

“What we’re doing is fundamentally changing how soldiers access knowledge, information, training content and operational data,” McCarthy said. “The day you sign on to be a soldier, you will be accessing information and knowledge in garrison and in an operational environment in a seamless manner. We’re using smart phone technologies to lead this.”

Open to multiple phones, the Army has not conducted testing of the concept over classified networks. The service first had to prove it could combine the phones and applications with a mobile infrastructure capable of offering service in an austere environment.

“We had to prove that we could make the electrons flow from one end to the other successfully,” McCarthy said. “We took a little bit of license in not going over classified networks. Once it works, we can start working on the information assurance piece.”

The Army is open to using multiple phones, according to Rickey Smith, the director of ARCIC-Forward.

“We’re not wedded to a specific piece of hardware. We are open to using Palm Trios, the Android, iPhone or whatever else is out there,” Smith said.

The Army probably won’t develop its own phone or do much to alter the commercial phones it buys.

It would rather make minor tweaks and “ruggedize” existing phones, which as long as the phones’ shapes and electronic guts aren’t modified, will place them at close to retail prices, said Tony Fiuza of the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center.

Vane said the Army is still figuring out the dollars and cents of buying smartphones and apps. One option, though, is giving the purchasing power to the soldier.

Soldiers could receive a monthly stipend — what Vane called a “maintenance fee” — to spend on both minutes and apps, allowing each soldier to personalize his phone with the training and tactical apps he needs.

“If you did it that way, the advantage would be to pay for the phone once and then you pay a maintenance fee to the soldier … and then the soldier can buy whatever iPhone, Android or hardware that he or she likes,” Vane said. “Then the challenge is just figuring out how we pay for the minutes each month.”

Army officials want soldiers to bring the phones to the war zone, where their intelligence sharing and communications capabilities could revolutionize battlefield tactics.

A widespread deployment of the phones to the battlefield could come as soon as next year, Vane said.

What the Army found is that soldiers with smartphones are more likely to collect data and share it.

Vane said he wants to use the phones to collect biometrics on enemy combatants.

“Can we connect this to biometrics? Well, that’s the direction we’re headed,” he said.

The technology is there, but “the challenge will be to work through the policy issues of sharing data and information assurance,” Vane said. “Army officials remain concerned of enemy forces hacking into the phones, but don’t want that fear to paralyze the use of these phones.”

Have a suspicious neighbor you want to snitch on? There’s an app for that.

A new app called the “PatriotApp” doesn’t come filled with powerful quotes from our founding fathers or even a digital copy of the Constitution but instead it comes with a graphical interface that allows patriots — of course – to report any suspicious activity to the appropriate government agency.

See someone trying to get on a plane that looks suspicious? Click on the suspicious activity icon on the app and report the person directly to the FBI. See someone polluting down a local storm drain? You can report them to directly to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The app plays on the popular uprising of the Tea Party. Although they already have a “very cool” and “state of the art” app of their own called the “Tea Party Finder.” The PatriotApp is available for both the iPhone and the iPad.

Regardless, be sure not to confuse the PatriotApp with the PATRIOT Act. The two are very different things.

The Obama administration is considering disabling cell phones in American cars, aiming to cut down on distracted drivers and cell-phone-related road deaths.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the nation’s preeminent anti-distracted-driving crusader, said in an interview on MSNBC yesterday that federal officials are looking at technology to disable cell phones inside cars.

“I think it will be done,” LaHood said. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones. We need to do a lot more if were going to save lives.”

Also on Thursday, the SecTrans launched a new “Faces of Distracted Driving” video campaign that features people who have been killed or lost loved ones because of inattentive drivers. The video features heartwrenching stories of children killed in crashes because of text messaging, and new videos are expected to be added every few weeks, according to the New York Times.

More than 5,500 people were killed last year by distracted drivers, and another 500,000 were injured, according to the Department of Transportation. LaHood has said it is never safe to talk on a cell phone while driving, hands-free or not, because it is a “cognitive distraction.”

Incidentally, a lot of people seem to agree with this sentiment – a new poll released Thursday shows nearly two-thirds of American support a national ban on the use of cell phones while driving, even if the driver is using a hands-free device. But the poll didn’t ask how people feel about government-issued mobile phone scramblers or other disabling devices.

Source: PopSci

Mythbusters compares driving on cell phones to driving drunk.

Source: cbs4.com

A CBS4 I-Team investigation into your safety and security raises troubling questions about your cell phone and how it might be used against you. We’re not talking about how a cell phone and its records could be used in a court of law, although that’s a possibility too, but how it can be used as a tool to spy on your life by people meant to do you harm.

What’s worse, the technology is so advanced that experts say people can spy on you using your cell phone and you will have no idea it’s even happening.

I-Team investigator Stephen Stock spent the last six months researching how this technology works.

Talking, texting and tweeting you see it all the time.

If they appear to be everywhere, the US Census bureau says they truly are. In a nation of 309 Million people officials estimate there are as many as 200 million cell phones.

The majority of Americans use all these cell phones to talk, text or tweet.
But all this high tech communication hides a dark and troubling danger.

“I don’t think the general public is aware how insidious this can be,” said private investigator and cell phone spyware expert Tim Wilcox.

Wilcox owns and runs one of the premier private investigative companies in the country, International Investigators, Inc. International Investigators does a lot of things. But one the company’s specialties and expertise is uncovering and exposing hidden spy tools like bugs in cell phones and other appliances.

Click here to go to the International Investigators’ website.

“It takes about 90 seconds to download the spyware and you’re in business,” said Wilcox of some versions of this software that can be loaded onto someone’s cell phone.

The spyware is a lurking danger that turns your cell phone into a secret listening device, an instrument used to spy against you. Worse yet, you’ll likely never know it is on your phone.

“There could be anywhere from three to five or six million cell phones that are infected with spyware (at any one time),” said Wilcox.

This spyware, otherwise called malware, can be found through a simple search on the Internet. The software can be loaded onto your phone in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Once it is on your phone and operating it can turn your cell phone against you.

“I put $70 malware onto a phone (for demonstration) through blue tooth and then onto this computer,” said Daniel Smith, an expert in uncovering and defeating this type of spyware.

Smith, a recent graduate of Purdue University’s College of Technology, is an expert at finding and getting rid of malware on all kinds of computers and cell phones. Smith works for International Investigators, Inc. And he travels the country investigating complaints of people who believe their cell phones are being used to spy on them.

“That’s the file name that’s controlling my phone,” Smith said as he showed the I-Team a small piece of computer code, four short lines, hidden among millions of lines of computer programming language that run his cell phone and all its applicatons.

Smith demonstrated for the CBS4 I-Team how easy it can be to install and listen in and how hard it is to detect that the malware is even present.

“This is what we’re looking for?” asked I-Team investigator Stephen Stock pointing to the computer screen. “Four lines of code?”

“Four lines of code,” said Smith. “That is the file in the computer, the spyware.”

These four lines of instructions hide a program that allows the person who installed it on your phone to take every bit of information from your cell phone, your pictures, your personal addresses, your data, your life.

“Now you have a list of everything that’s on my phone,” said Smith as he showed how the spyware quickly downloaded everything from his cell phone for the I-Team to view on another, disconnected computer.

To find out exactly how this all works, the CBS4 I-Team bought and installed several versions of spyware on anchor Jawan Strader’s blackberry. We did all of this with his knowledge and participation.

During the installation and running of some versions of the software the I-Team ran into several glitches. Sometimes the software allowed us to “spy” and sometimes it didn’t.

The I-Team discovered this type of spyware doesn’t always work on all cell phones. The older and less sophisticated the phone, apparently the harder it is to use them to “spy.”

But once the I-Team got the software working, the capability was scary. The I-Team could read all of Jawan’s e-mails. The I-Team read all of his text messages.

I-Team investigator Stephen Stock also got alerts on his cell phone every time Jawan got a call, an e-mail or a text. That way Stock could monitor Jawan’s incoming communication at all times.

And even though Jawan met meeting behind closed doors with news director Cesar Aldama and assistant news director Nick Bourne, even with the blackberry turned off, investigator Stock could still dial in and listen to the conversation while standing several miles away.

And the closed-door meetings’ participants would never have known that Stock was listening had the I-Team not told them. Remember the cell phone was off. Despite that, Stock was able to use the spyware to dial in and listen using the Blackberry’s speaker feature. Experts say that same thing can be done using a cell phone’s camera feature.

The spyware also allows someone to listen in on cell phone calls in real time, as they are happening.

The I-Team also used the spyware to track our expert, Daniel Smith’s, movements in real time. All while he was in Indiana, as the I-Team sat in Miami.

All of this is illegal in the United States without a court warrant. However, this spyware software is sold on the Internet by offshore companies.

Our experts say as many as 5 to 6% of all cell phones in the US may have once had or now have this spyware on them.

“This is a stack of the complaints we get from people worried about their phones being infected with spyware,” said Tim Wilcox as he showed the I-Team a thick folder filled with e-mails and letters from people complaining that someone apparently is spying on them.

“And you get three or four of these a week?” asked I-Team investigator Stock.

“We get three to four every day,” replied Wilcox.

To learn more about the risks associated with spyware on your cell phone the I-Team also traveled to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, to talk to one of the world’s experts on cyber-security, Richard Mislan.

“It (the cell phone) becomes a monitor of you and the use of your phone,” said Mislan, Assistant Professor at Purdue’s College of Technology.

For more on Purdue’s College of Technology’s click here.

Assistant Professor Mislan also serves on the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Task Force, is Editor of Small Scale Digital Device Forensics Journal and is director of Mobile Forensics World.

Mislan and his students at Purdue’s College of Technology research just about anything you can think of when it comes to cell phones.

Mislan says this spyware technology ability to spy is limited only by your phone’s capabilities.

“The phones are getting more advanced,” said Mislan. “And so when that happens obviously there to be had on those phone. And so say we added a video at this point or a video camera option on this phone. Well maybe now there’s an exploit that allows me to say ‘open up that video camera and let me record everything happening right now.’”

Mislan’s office is filled with old, used phones used in his research. Some of the old phones date back to the beginning of cell phones. Others are the most advanced, high tech mobile tools on the market.

Mislan said he worries that the public and even government regulators don’t realize the safety and security risks this spyware poses to the public.

“Eventually something is going to happen for us to really step back (and assess and do something about this),” said Mislan.

While he doesn’t like to talk about his clients and said there are things he is prohibited from saying, research papers published by Mislan show he and his team have done work for the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and military intelligence.

As for the risk to the public posed by this technology, Mislan speaks freely and unequivocally.

“The more high profile phones you go, the smarter they are, the more data that can be exploited,” said Mislan.

In fact, the federal government is using this technology to check out American citizens without a warrant.

The I-Team learned of a half dozen cases across the country in states as varied as New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania, where federal magistrates were asked to throw out cases because federal agents had tracked people in real time through their cell phone. In these cases this cell phone monitoring took place without a hearing, without a warrant without even legal probable cause.

One of the cases has now gone to a Federal Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania.

“It’s an incredibly intrusive thing for the government to be able to track you,” said Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stanley heads the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Libertiesheadquarters in Washington, D.C. The ACLU has joined some of the court cases listed above in fighting some of the federal prosecutors’ actions.

“It’s not that hard if you’re a bad guy then they can get a warrant on you. If you’re not a bad guy then why do they want to track you?” said Stanley.

Stanley, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have joined efforts in at least two federal cases trying to stop this use of spying on citizens through cell phones without a court order.

“The government is trying to claim they should be able to get location information about your phone both where you’ve been in the past and also in some cases tracking you in real time without going through the Fourth Amendment,” said Stanley. “And without showing a probable cause that you’re involved in wrongdoing and getting a warrant.”

Click here for a link to the Electronic Frontier’s Foundation and a listing of the cases in question.

So far, in all but one case the federal magistrates, judges, even an appeals court, have ruled against the federal investigators and for requiring proof of probable cause.

“If I told somebody back in 1975, ‘You know what, in 30 years every American practically is going to be carrying a tracking device with them that tells the government everywhere they go live and in real time,’” said Stanley. “That person would have said I guess that means the Soviet Union is going to win the Cold War.”

Your cellphone can already tell you where to find the nearest Starbucks or the most convenient subway station. But it might soon be smart enough to alert you to a toxic threat during your morning commute or coffee break, thanks to a new plan from the Department of Homeland Security.

The last time we heard about cellphones and terrorism, it was an appeal from the NYPD to shut off cell communication during an attack. Now, Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate want to use cellphones to detect the very threats that might be coordinated using wireless chit-chat. Their new program, called Cell-All, would embed inexpensive, chemical-sniffing microchips into cellular telephones. If a dangerous level of air-based toxin is detected, the phone would issue a warning ring (or vibration) to alert the owner and send a message to a centralized military monitoring station.

And, since the vast majority of Americans carry cellphones wherever they go, the program would use aggregated reports of toxin detection within a small area. If hundreds of cellphones in one location start flooding the alert system, the military knows they’ve got a serious threat to contend with. Detection, transmission and analysis would take around 60 seconds, according to a press release from the Directorate.

Given that terrorist attacks are usually launched in highly populated areas — subways, malls, office buildings — the idea of crowdsourcing the detection of  toxic terror threats makes a lot of sense, and using a built-in cellphone app would give the military the ability to detect threats in every corner of the country.

Except that, for now, the program’s manager is describing the initiative as “opt-in.”

“Privacy is as important as technology,” Stephen Dennis said. “After all, for Cell-All to succeed, people must be comfortable enough to turn it on in the first place.”

That’s good news for privacy zealots and conspiracy theorists, but bad news for the program’s potential effectiveness, given that crowdsourced intelligence depends on knowing that there’s a crowd to be sourced in the first place.

The Directorate is already in research-and-development talks with Apple, IG, Qualcomm and Samsung, and anticipate having 40 different cellphone prototypes within a year.

Source: Wired.com

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all.

Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials.  But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests.  Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked.

Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ ”

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

How many of the owners of the country’s 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most “don’t have a clue,” says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey.

Read more at: The Snitch in Your Pocket (Newsweek)

Equipment that jams cell phones will get its first federally sanctioned test inside a prison in Maryland this week, as state officials try to show Congress how the technology can prevent inmates from using the contraband devices to commit crimes, a governor’s spokesman said Tuesday.

The state wants to show the equipment can be used without interfering with emergency response and legitimate signals outside the prison perimeter, said Shaun Adamec, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s spokesman.

The Federal Communication Commission can only allow federal agencies — not state or local authorities — permission to jam cell phone signals. But a bill that passed the Senate and awaits action by the House would allow states to petition the FCC to block the use of cell phones from prisons.

Testing is set to begin Wednesday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Adamec said. The governor has strongly backed allowing states to use the jamming technology to battle the growing problem of cell phone use in prisons.

A bipartisan measure sponsored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., was approved by the Senate in September. A companion bill is in the House.

“I think all of this can help Senator Mikulski in her efforts to pass a bill, and hopefully if the FCC sees it coming they might just do it by regulation,” O’Malley said.

The tests are being conducted to provide more information about the technology as the legislation is being considered.

Prisons around the nation have been trying to stem rising problems from prison inmates using cell phones to coordinate criminal activity from behind bars. Officials in New Jersey even intercepted a conference call among gang members from different prisons who were plotting retaliation against another gang member.

Read more at: Feds allow prison phone jamming test (Ap)

New Zealand Jams cell phones in prison – Jamming the phone in the cell (New Zealand Department of Corrections)

“One who does not wish to disclose his movements to the government need not use a cellular telephone,” -ROSLYNN R. MAUSKOPF (United States Attorney)

It may come as a surprise to most of the owners of the country’s 277 million cell phones but their cell phone company retains records of where their device has been at all times–either because the phones have tiny GPS devices embedded inside or because each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint the phones’ location to within areas as small as a few hundred feet.

Such location “logs” never show up on your monthly cell phone bill. But federal court records filed over the past year indicate that federal prosecutors and the FBI have increasingly been obtaining such records in the course of criminal investigations–without any notice to the cell phone customer or any showing of “probable cause” that tracking the physical location of the phone will turn up evidence of an actual crime.

“Most people don’t understand they are carrying a tracking device in their pockets,” says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group that has been trying to monitor the Justice Department’s practice.

Much about the practice–including how many “tracking” records have been collected by the government–remains shrouded in secrecy.

Read more at:  Can the FBI Secretly Track Your Cell Phone? (Newsweek)

Cell Phones Can And Are Being Used As Bugs

Plans are unfolding in the state of Maine and in the City of San Francisco to mandate cancer warnings on cellular phones.  It is alleged that the use of the omnipresent communication devices causes cancerous growths in the brain.

Maine to Consider Cell Phone Warning (Associated Press)
San Francisco considering cellphone warnings ( LA Times)

Cell phone radiation doesn’t cause cancer.

Cancer causing agents break chemical bonds, creating mutant strands of DNA.  Microwave photons are not capable of breaking  chemical bonds.

In 1989, Paul Brodeur, a staff writer for the New Yorker, claimed in a series of sensational articles that electromagnetic fields from power lines cause childhood leukemia.  Brodeur, however, did not understand this and when virtually every scientist agreed that it was impossible, Brodeur took their unanimity as proof of a massive cover-up.  Other anti-science fear mongers followed Brodeur’s lead, shifting their attack to cell phone radiation.  Cell phones have since spread to almost the entire population, but with no corresponding increase in brain cancer.  Case closed.

Study: No cellphone cancer link found (UPI.com)

American Cancer Society on the lack of cell phone/cancer connections.

National Cancer Institute on the lack of cell phone/cancer connection.

Mobile phone emissions reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s (The Tech Herald)