[IP] more on How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
Begin forwarded message:
From: Phil Karn <karn@xxxxxxxx>
Date: December 4, 2006 9:26:42 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
A story is making the rounds right now regarding FBI use of cell
phones as remote bugs (e.g. http://news.com.com/
2100-1029-6140191.html ).
Personally I am much more concerned about the use of mobile phones as
physical tracking devices than as audio bugs.
Every mobile phone, whenever it's turned on, is *already* a physical
tracking device. *EVERY* mobile phone. Even when idle, phones
periodically transmit "registration" messages to the base station so
that the network will know where to deliver an SMS or inbound call
message. (This is why airlines require phones to be completely shut
off in flight; it's not sufficient to simply avoid making calls to
prevent transmissions.)
In the old analog days, low user populations and lack of automatic
wide-area roaming sometimes made it practical to "flood" paging
messages over a network so that mobile registrations were not
necessary. But flood paging has long become impractical in digital
cellular networks.
Cellular networks have a perfectly legitimate need to know where you
are, at least to the nearest cell sector, so they can do their job.
The recent addition of GPS reporting to E911 calls increases the
positioning accuracy still further.
And this is what's so problematical. Location data, like so much
other personal data necessarily collected in the routine operation of
modern communication networks, has both benign -- lifesaving, even --
and harmful uses.
At least the content confidentiality problem has an effective
technical defense (end to end encryption) even if it isn't widely
used. But there seems to be no such technological defense against the
abuse of cellular location data. Your only choice is to turn your
phone off, preferably by removing the battery, when you don't want to
be tracked. If you turn it on, even for a moment, the system will
again know where you are.
Another alternative is to forego a cell phone in favor of a one-way
pager, if they're even still available. But should you answer a page,
even with a pay phone, you could in principle still be tracked unless
you encode your pages.
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