photo by Jurvetson (flickr)

Tell your average hipster that they can use VZ Navigator on their phone to get directions to the coolest new club through a GPS chip in their phone, and they’ll probably think its pretty neat. Tell the same thing to your average healthily paranoid geek, and they’ll hopefully question how else it might be used. Sure its cool, but if Verizon can do it, so can the government. On top of that, they may also turn on on your mic even when you’re not on a call. In a follow up to my article on FBI cell phone tapping, we’ll be discussing how you can be tracked on your cellphone, and under what circumstances.

UPDATE: See this article on cellular phone company tracking

Flip a switch and your cell is a bug

There is at least one documented instance where a case against the Genovese crime family relied on evidence collected by activating one of the defendants’ cell phone microphones (not during a call, but while it was not in use!) to use it as a “roving bug”, recording all conversations in its vicinity. This was done through the cell provider, and could be used against any civilian if a court order is given. The ability to do this is latent in most any modern cellular phone, and requires no physical contact with the device.  Some sources say all GSM phones are vulnerable, while others say it depends on the manufacturer:

from nets.zdnet.com

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. “They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time,” he said. “You can do that without having physical access to the phone.”

If the civilians can find you…

Arguably worse than turning your phone into a bug, it seems any civilian could potentially track you with the help of paid services like Accutracking, uLocate, World Tracker, and Flexispy (just to name a few).

To use these services, the spying person often needs to install the software on the victim’s phone, however the spying person need only have the phone in their hands long enough to navigate to a web page with the phone, and enter their user code. This causes the spying software to be downloaded to the phone and enabled.  In some instances, the user will be sent a seemingly innocent text message that requests they download some software.

Once installed, the offender has a web page where they can view all manner of information.  If the phone has GPS, you will get their exact latitude and longitude. If not, you get the CELL ID of the tower they are closest to, or their general location through triangulation.  Most of these programs also give you the phone’s in/outbound calls and text messages, all without giving any indication to the victim that this information is being transmitted.

…So can the Feds

It almost goes without saying that government agencies have a much finer grain of control over tracking your location.  Due to September 11th and e911 compliance, by 2006 all cell phone carriers were required to provide the ability to trace cell phone calls to a location within 100 meters or less.  Since many rural areas lack the necessary density of towers to triangulate to that accuracy, cell phone carriers instead integrated GPS technology into cell phones.  Often times this chip isn’t accessible to the user, so don’t think that just because you can’t see it, it isn’t there.  Some networks do have that density, however, and your cell carrier may be able to triangulate your position based on your signal strength to each tower your phone connects to.  In these cases, then the more populated the area you’re in (and hence the more cell towers around you), the greater the accuracy you can be tracked down to.  And for any of you would-be 911 pranksters:

from ezinearticles.com

when the person who has the phone has made an emergency call, this GPS transmission will always be sent. This is designed to ensure that the police can always track a cell phone location, in order to get help to people who need it.

Another way the government can pinpoint your location is through the use of a technology called a Triggerfish.  Triggerfish are pieces of hardware that emulate a cell tower.  Once your rough location is determined based on your connection to a cell cite, a triggerfish can be deployed (perhaps in an unmarked black van?) to home in on your signal.  Triggerfish can also get your phone’s unique IMEI and serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data.

Update 2-11-2010: Apparently it’s completely legal for the feds to track you without a warrant.

What you can do about it

In the case of the Genovese family case, the court denied motions by 10 defendants to suppress the conversations obtained by “roving bugs”.  That being the case, I would personally not count on arguing the legality of being bugged or tracked after the fact.

The first precaution I would suggest is to never let your phone out of your site, and not download files from untrusted sources.  Beyond that, the only sure-fire way to make sure you aren’t bugged or tracked through your cellphone is to take the battery out when you don’t wan’t to be… not very practical for the average joe.

If you watch or read a lot of techno-thrillers you probably know the trick of buying a disposable pay-as-you-go phone (with cash).  This is possibly the only way to make sure you aren’t tracked, and even then you’ll need to change phones quite often to avoid patterns.  All that, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

In reality, while using a celular phone you are at the mercy of the government, the FCC, and the phone company.  The best defense is to stay off everyone’s radar by not doing anything that arouses suspicion.  For as they say, being a “law abiding” citizen isn’t the issue, whom defines “law abiding” is the real issue.

In other news: iPhone 3G! FARK YEAH!

Oh, and for all you haters: Lowest price for a new Tom Tom GPS = $199.
Lowest price for a new iPhone with GPS (and phone, music, video, monkey ball, etc…) = $199. And yes, it will have turn by turn directions in the near future.

Gadget pr0n will follow once I get my invisible shield on it

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Riley--one of the fur kids--on my lap supervising

Now when you visit this site on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll see a layout optimized specifically for those devices! I hope you like it, I sure do.

Also: “Akismet has caught 34,650 spam for you since you first installed it.” Best damned plugin ever conceived. Enough said.

I’ll first tell you what I did so you don’t have to repeat it, or at the least can save it for last, but if you’re impatient just scroll to the end of this post.

The Issues.. Oh god the issues!

The problem started Saturday morning when I was lying in bed and decided to check my email. Our roommate had just moved out and took with him our wireless network (his hardware, but I was managing it), but seeing the little blue “E” icon that meant i have EDGE service, I decided to open the mail app. Instead of a nice tidy inbox, I was greeted with pop-up message saying “Could not activate EDGE: You are not subscribed to EDGE”. Now, I don’t have a $20/month data plan for nothing. I most certainly was subscribed to EDGE, so pardon my acronym but WTF was this?

I restarted my phone and still got the error message, then turned airplane mode off for 20 seconds and back on again (This is supposed to clear some settings like WiFi so I gave it a shot). Still nothing. Now, I had jailbroken my phone the day before with iLiberty+ (I STRONGLY recommend this program for installing 3rd party apps, unlocking, activating, or bootloader patching), and so was afraid I’d broken it somehow, but I had used EDGE fine after that for the better part of a day so I was on the fence on whether that was the problem. Like any good problem solver I had to rule it out regardless, so I decided to restore my iPhone.

The first thing I did was go into iTunes and hit Restore. Once that was done I tried to get on EDGE with the result of the same error message. Through iLiberty my bootloader had been changed, and more importantly my baseband may have been changed as well. Baseband is the firmware that runs your phone, modem, wireless, and bluetooth hardware, so I was definitely suspect of that. I re-ran iLiberty+ with the option of restoring the baseband and bootloader, and still had no success. Finally I re-re-ran iLiberty+ with a WiFi/EDGE fix I had come across, usually only broken through using ZiPhone (DON’T USE ZiPHONE!) but decided to try it anyway. Of course, no change. I still got that damn error message! This was getting frustrating in the extreme.

After this I called AT&T through 611, and after 30 minutes of work knew the lady, while being extremely nice, had no idea what the problem was. She thought it must be because I was picking up WiFi. Not only were there no hotspots in range, I had WiFi explicitly turned off. Rather than explain this to her I just said thank you and hung up.

Figuring I’d done all I could with hardware, I account was screwed up, I went to AT&T and checked my account. It showed that I had an EDGE data plan and should be working. Nothing on the support site, KB, FAQ, etc. was of any use, and live chat was closed for the day, not that I had high hopes for that… I had a lot of things to do this weekend so I decided I’d just call a different support number on Monday and try again.

The Solution!

I know I know BLAH BLAH BLAH Get to the fix! Okay okay! Flash forward to today. Before calling AT&T back I decided to do some goog-vestigating. Of course this was practically the first thing I did, but hadn’t gotten any immediate success, the closest being an AT&T forum where go-phone customers were having a similar issue last December (they fixed this by renewing their monthly contracts a bit early). On this second round of searching I found a couple of potential hits, but the one that finally fixed me was here on Apple Discussions!

To summarize, people fixed this one of two ways. The way that fixed me makes me want to facepalm so hard that I replace Captain Picard as the de-facto image macro. Its an iPhone setting and goes thus:
Settings --> General --> Reset --> Resent Network Settings

I know! “IDIOT!” Why didn’t I know that was there? Because there was no “TFM” for me to “R”, thats why. I was so relieved when it worked that I cried out in a fit of unbridled joy, to the unease of my co-workers. Not only was my problem fixed, I didn’t have to call AT&T back!!!

Now, for those of you who are not so lucky as to have you iPhone placated with this simple settings reset, most of the people on the above thread solved their problem thusly:

It’s definitely not an Apple problem, it’s a simple checkbox on AT&T’s account configuration screen called EDGE Provisioning. Some account changes, like adding a Foundation Account number to your plan to take advantage of company discounts, over-ride the EDGE provisioning setting.

Unfortunately, some AT&T customer service reps think it’s iPhone related and don’t bother checking your account first before transferring you to Apple. So, do yourselves a favor and ask them to check “EDGE Provisioning” on your account (use their terminology) and they will be able to fix it for you in a second.

Several people on the forum echoed cries of joy as this solved their problem as well. Apparently the number to call is either 800-331-0500 or 877-419-4500 and be sure to ask them to check your “EDGE Provisioning”.

So, with a fully functioning iPhone (again jailbroken and running some kick-ass apps!) I leave you this information in hopes that it helps someone out the same issue.

PS: A very special thanks to Joe Maloney1 at the Apple Discussions forum for providing the crucial fix for me!

I knew this was coming, especially in light of the iPhone and the steadily declining iPod shipments (thinning out their stocks), but to physically see it, in all it’s glory, is another thing all together. It comes with Wi-Fi, web browser, and all the other goodies that the iPhone has (sans cellular). I, for one, don’t mind keeping my phone as a phone and my iPod as an iPod, so the fact that the iPod Touch has all that stuff does better justify getting one rather than an iPhone.

We also now have a new nano (that reminds me of the Zen V), and now plays video and has cover flow?! As if that wasn’t enough, the newly dubbed ‘iPod Classic’ is now all metal and comes in up to 160GB! Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Crazy times we live in my friends, crazy times…

Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
That rumored Verizon-Fairpoint deal has gone through.

blah!

Verizon has announced that it will be spinning off rural assets to FairPoint Communications. These include all assets in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The deal will close sometime in 2007 and is worth $2.7 billion. 1.6 million phone lines, 234,000 DSL subscribers, and 600,000 long-distance customers will be moved to FairPoint in Verizon’s effort to shed its low-margin lines in rural areas.

For all the ribbing I tend to give Verizon, they do a hell of a job. I work with them every day maintaining over 1400 connections for schools and libraries throughout Maine, and the majority of the time, they provide great service and get things fixed quickly. I’ve worked with Fairpoint as well, though not nearly as often, and I can’t say the same for them…

I imagine this is going to wreak hell on my job, and I can only hope consumers don’t have any trouble.

An Israeli consortium of telcos and companies like ECI Telecom, funded in part by the Israeli government, is attempting just that. Ars Technica has the big scoop:

so sayith Ars

If they succeed, Verizon’s $18 billion decision to run fiber all the way into consumers’ homes might be a costly one for them and other companies around the world that have jumped on the fiber optic bandwagon.

…One of Dr. Cioffi’s presentations of DSM contains a slide that argues that copper actually has more available bandwidth than fiber; it just needs to be better used. He points out that a bundle of 50 Cat 3 twisted-pair wires (the kind that might be used in the last segment of the phone network) has 10Gbps of available bandwidth to distribute to the fifty homes at the end of those wires. By contrast, fiber to the home has only 2.5Gbps to distribute to its homes.

The group’s main hope is a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM). Telephone line cables are run in large bundles, and each wire in the bundle has electricity running through it. That makes a magnetic field, and when the magnetic fields of adjacent wires interact, you get a type of interference in the wires called “crosstalk”. Higher speed transfers create more crosstalk. DSM would greatly reduce crosstalk, allowing for much higher transfer rates.

Now, even if this group suceeds in meeting or exceeding fiber optic speeds, this could still be integrated very sucessfully into networks like Verizon’s, where the last mile, or the cable from VZ’s equipment to your wall jack, is still copper. Current 7Mbps top speeds could be boosted to 10Gbps (10,000Mbps).

Get the full low-down at Ars Technica

This just opens the door for prosecutors to abuse the law in the future, which is especially disturbing since the FBI swore never to use the 1994 ommunications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to track cellular phones, but has been doing it anyway.

So says ZDnet.com:

When lobbying for that law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh assured the U.S. Senate that location surveillance would never take place unless there was evidence of wrongdoing.

“It does not include any information which might disclose the general location of a mobile facility or service, beyond that associated with the area code or exchange of the facility or service,” Freeh testified. “There is no intent whatsoever, with reference to this term, to acquire anything that could properly be called ‘tracking’ information.”

The problem is that the Justice Department’s current official position–a flip-flop from its previous official position–says police should be able to secretly monitor your whereabouts as long as they claim that tracking could possibly be “relevant” to some investigation. Not only is that insufficiently privacy-protective, it doesn’t track what the law actually says.

Our Government continues to step on our Civil Rights whenever it suits them, and this has got to stop.

via Making Light

He said soldiers who hear of but don’t see an incident should deal with it through superiors of the offending Iraqis.

That’s when Rumsfeld stepped to the microphone and said, “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it. It’s to report it.”

Pace then repeated to Rumsfeld that intervening when witnessing abuse is the order the troops must follow, not just reporting it.

Do you know what we just saw? We just saw the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell the Secretary of Defense to sit down and shut up. In public. In front of reporters.

I doubt Rumsfeld will resign. He doesn’t have that much tact. And yes, General Pace may lose his job, but the damage has been done…

Illegal Cellular Tapping:

Analog cell phones were easy to tap. There was no signal encoding, so all one needed was a modified CB scanner (800MHz range) to pick up cell phone conversations.

Nowadays, nearly all cell phones are digital. The signal is still receivable (all RF signals are), however, since they are multiplexed and modulated, use FSK, PSK, Frequency Hopping, TDMA, CDMA, etc, you would only hear “noise”. This can be recorded and decoded, however you would not only have to fork out large sums of money for the complex equipment to do so, you would also have to locate said highly-illegal equipment. Unless you are a very important person (any your mommy telling you so does not qualify as very important, it is unlikely that anyone would go through the trouble of trying to tap your cell. Unless, that is, the government has their eye on you…

Governmental Tapping:

If a government official listens in on your phone conversation without a court order, they can’t use that information, however it is much more likely that a law enforcement official will get a legal tap.

Ephraim Schwartz from InfoWorld.com has this to say:

Wireless World

Recently the FBI requested permission from the FCC to use dialed digit extraction technology. Here’s how it works: If you are on your cell phone and accessing your bank using touch tones to punch in an account number, the FBI wants to be able to intercept that information under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

The wireless industry took that FBI request to court; the courts ruled with the industry and against the FBI. At this point, any information passed via the phone that is not the phone number and location is not available to law enforcement agencies without a court order.

Permission to tap differs from state to state, but the general requirement is that the highest-level criminal court judge in each county is selected to hear applications made by police officials using sworn affidavits supported by live testimony. The affidavit states that a crime is being or has been committed and that evidence of person or persons involved in committing that crime can best be obtained by using a wiretap.

Permission is typically given for limited amounts of time, usually on a 30-day basis with the time extended under certain circumstances. Interestingly enough, by law, the person being tapped must be notified, usually within 90 days after the tap, that a tap was placed on the phone.

As for the mechanics of legal taps on cell phones by law enforcement agencies, they are just as easy as land lines to tap. Cell phones communicate with a tower in a hexagonally shaped “cell” of coverage (hence the name cellular). The tower picks up your phone signal, equipment in a building at the base of the tower converts that signal and sends it to the CO through copper, just like land-line calls. This means the provider can tap your calls just by routing them via software to an specified location. Usually, the call will be forwarded to the [FBI/CIA/DEA/ATF/etc]‘s office and the agents assigned to the tap will handle the recording and monitoring.

When it comes to managing my life and all the random thoughts and tasks I have that fill it, I have many ways I have tried and new ones I am currently trying.

For example, in the past I have…

• written reminders on the back of my hand (for most of my life)
• written notes on slips of paper and put them in different pockets
• put post-it notes around my work area and in my wallet

All of these have their faults. I never look at the back of my hand (I rarely wear a watch, which would facilitate this), I never remember to check my pockets to look for slips of paper (maybe I should write “check pockets” on the back of my hand!), and I either don’t bring post-it notes with me, or never check my wallet for them.

While GTD is a bit too involved for my taste (most of my tasks are very quick ones), I am trying alternate methods to help me remember things to do.

My current experiments include:

• A TiddlyWiki To Do list
• My good ole’ PDA for school related To Do and Assignment stuff
• The Hipster PDA (which is currently working out wonderfully)

And my latest fancy, Remember The Milk.

Remember The Milk is a free, online to-do list managing aplication. It allows multiple lists, is user friendly (set a date as “next Tuesday” or “in two weeks” or “friday 5pm”), has note storage, and will msg you on AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, or mobile phone when your tasks are due!

Accessability:

I like the fact that RTM is accessable. It can reach you many ways (listed above), and you can either add tasks on the website or just email a new one to your list.

As far as viewing your lists, you can print them (to add to a weekly planner, or just as a reminder), access them with iCal or any app that supports the iCal format, or you can subscribe to Atom feeds of your lists.

A Brief Overview:

RTM has an attractive UI that is easy to use. Once logged in, an overview section is shown. There you can see tasks due Today, Tomorrow, and ones that are Overdue. To manage your tasks, click the “Continue to Tasks” button.

Here, your lists are shown on the left hand side of the screen. Default lists (Inbox, Personal, Study, Work, Sent) are made, but you can add, rename, or delete lists at you see fit.
To add a task just click “Add Task” and type in a description/name of the task. To set things like the due date, whether to repeat, time estimate, or add notes, just click the appropriate icon in the box on the right-hand side of the screen.

When you’ve finished a task, click on that task and hit the “Complete” button. If you need just one more day, hit the “Postpone” button to procrastinate one more day before being reminded to finish it.

I’m no expert, as I’ve just started using it, but it looks like a really cool way to track todo lists. I’ll use it for a while and update on it in a few weeks.

We were really worried about how it would turn out since she’s old for a rat (2.3 years) and had gotten quite thin. It had to come off so we decided to take a chance and she did very well. They removed most of her mamalry on the right side and dermabonded her up (medical super glue). They put her in a little body cast while she rested up and it was painted like a little football jersey. I don’t have a picture of it but our vet does on her phone. I’ll try to get it and update this post later.

The next night she chewed off some of the dermabond and it had opened up. Rats are obsessed about being clean and will take band-aids and nailpolish very carefully off your fingers because they think you are dirty, so naturally, she saw the dermabond as the same. Luckily it was only a little bit and we brought her to the emergency vet where they put in a few staples so it would hold better. They didn’t charge us anything because our vet is a sister orginization to the emergency vet. This is the full length of the incision they did:

and heres one of her just being cute:

She’s still a little sluggish, mostly from soreness I think, but we’re hopeing she’ll make a full recovery.

PS: What do you guys and gals think of my new forest-green theme? The theme-switching buttons in the upper-right of this page should be working.