Questions We Get - Cell Phone Location Data

"I want to know is whether your location can be tracked if your location based services are turned off?" - from an attorney who reported on the selling of cell phone location data to bounty hunters. more

Good question. The answer is yes.

The information the phone companies are selling is gathered from the phone's administration communications with the cell sites, "Hi. I'm here. I can accept a call." The signal is picked up from multiple cell sites and is evaluated to determine which site is receiving the strongest signal.

Location is determined by triangulation. While not precise, it can get you into the neighborhood.

If they were using the phone's GPS-based location services the location accuracy would be within a few yards. ~Kevin

Counterespionage Checklist: How to Be Safe on the Internet

An open source checklist of resources designed to improve your online privacy and security. Check things off to keep track as you go. more  Scott Adams

CIA Spy Tool Kit (Preparation H suggested)

The CIA Rectal Tool Kit

The Weed of Crime Bears Bitter Fruits - The Worldwide Huawei Wows

Federal prosecutors are pursuing a criminal investigation of China’s Huawei Technologies Co. for allegedly stealing trade secrets from U.S. business partners, including technology used by T-Mobile US Inc. to test smartphones, according to people familiar with the matter.  

The investigation grew in part out of civil lawsuits against Huawei, including one in which a Seattle jury found Huawei liable for misappropriating robotic technology from T-Mobile’s Bellevue, Wash., lab...

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers introduced legislation that would ban the export of U.S. components to Chinese telecommunications companies that are in violation of U.S. export-control or sanctions laws. Backers said the bill was aimed at Huawei and ZTE Corp...

Last month, Canadian authorities arrested Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou at the request of U.S. authorities...

In another development, Polish authorities last week arrested Huawei executive Wang Weijing and charged him with conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese government. more

Court: Authorities Can't Force Technology Unlocks with Biometric Features

A judge in California ruled Thursday that U.S. authorities cannot force people to unlock technology via fingerprint or facial recognition, even with a search warrant.

Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, made the ruling as investigators tried to access someone's property in Oakland.... (however)

The judge in her ruling stated the request was "overbroad" because it was "neither limited to a particular person nor a particular device." The request could be resubmitted if authorities specify particular people whose devices they'd like to unlock. more

Early Documented Case of Video Voyeurism

The first telescoped PoV close-up in film: As Seen Through a Telescope by George Albert Smith uses an iris'ed close-up to give the impression of filming through a telescope, thus giving the viewer the point of view of the main character. There is also a voyeuristic element as the lead (and each of us) witnesses a bit of naughty action...

Police Surveillance "in an unobtrusive manner, with a sleek, yet friendly look."

Florida law prohibits police departments from using drones to surveil citizens. So Miami Beach cops instead got a small blimp...

(City Manager Jimmy Morales) Morales' letter admits cops bought the "tethered" surveillance balloon to get around the state's ban on police drone surveillance. (The ban, passed in 2015, was dubbed the Freedom From Unwanted Surveillance Act.)...

Morales opines that the small dirigible "provided an ideal vantage point in an unobtrusive manner, with a sleek, yet friendly look." more

New Year’s Resolutions for Your Intellectual Property

by Bryan K. Wheelock - Harness, Dickey & Pierce, PLC 
Its the start of a new year, and here are ten things that you should consider doing to enhance your intellectual property in 2019... more

Number 3 is... "Take secrecy seriously. Trade secret protection depends upon whether steps, reasonable under the circumstances, have been taken to protect the secrecy of the subject matter."

The other numbers offer sage advice as well. ~Kevin

Your Tax Dollars at Work - An NSA Freebee!

The US National Security Agency will release a free reverse engineering tool at the upcoming RSA security conference that will be held at the start of March, in San Francisco.

The software's name is GHIDRA and in technical terms, is a disassembler, a piece of software that breaks down executable files into assembly code that can then be analyzed by humans.

The NSA developed GHIDRA at the start of the 2000s, and for the past few years, it's been sharing it with other US government agencies that have cyber teams who need to look at the inner workings of malware strains or suspicious software...

In total, the NSA has open-sourced 32 projects as part of its Technology Transfer Program (TTP) so far, and has most recently even opened an official GitHub account. more

Ding-Dong - Security Cam Man Calling - Weird

CA - Security camera captures prowler getting his licks in.

Click to enlarge.

In ‘weirdest’ case, police say man spent hours near door of home in Salinas... they said spent hours licking the button on an intercom speaker at a home in Salinas, CA...according to Miguel Cabrera, a spokesman for the Salinas Police Department.

Police said the long night of odd behavior began about 2 a.m., when he approached the house and stared straight into the camera of the home’s doorbell surveillance system.

Arroyo hung out in the doorway for more than two hours...the man lay down in front of the door for 20 minutes before springing back up...Afterward, he stood with his back to the camera, appearing to urinate into a planter by the home’s front door, authorities said.

Arroyo also disconnected an extension cord that powered the home’s Christmas lights and walked off with it. Hence the potential petty theft charge, Cabrera said.  “It’s probably the weirdest [case] I’ve heard in many years.” more

Security Awareness Report for Executives

What can executives do to create or enhance environments to enable awareness programs to succeed?

The first of its kind, the SANS Security Awareness Executive Report draws data from the 2018 Security Awareness Report to reveal a detailed analysis of what drives a thriving awareness program. more

Who Are You...Online - Become an OSINT Awesome and Find Out

We are going to show you how to research yourself and discover what information is publicly known about you...

You will not find all the information on a single website. Instead you start with one website, learn some details, then use those details to search on and learn from other sites. Then you combine and compare results to create a profile or dossier of your subject. 

A good place to start is with search engines such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Each of these have indexed different information about you...

Start by typing your name in quotes, but after that expand your search...

Examples include:
“FirstName LastName” > What information can I find online about this person
“Firstname Lastname@” > Find possible email addresses associated with this person
“Firstname lastname” filetype:doc > Any word documents that contain this person’s name
more
sing-a-long

Judge Nails Husband for Spyware and Eavesdropping on Wife's Calls ...with her attorney ...twice!

A federal judge has levied sanctions on a tobacco heiress’ estranged husband for destroying evidence related to spyware that he secretly installed on his wife’s phone and used to listen in on her calls, including conversations she had with her attorney. 

It was the second time that a judge has hit Crocker Coulson, who is locked in a bitter divorce with Anne Resnik in state court, with spoliation sanctions for destroying evidence of bugging Resnik’s phone. more

Last year...
A man locked in bitter divorce proceedings with a tobacco heiress was caught bugging his wife’s phone and listening in to her conversations with her attorney, an infraction that a Brooklyn judge said should cost him any claim on the family’s wealth. more

The Panopticon Express Doesn't Stop Here

The warnings sound like the plot of a Hollywood spy thriller...

The Chinese hide malware in a Metro rail car’s security camera system that allows surveillance of Pentagon or White House officials as they ride the Blue Line — sending images back to Beijing.

Or sensors on the train secretly record the officials’ conversations. Or a flaw in the software that controls the train — inserted during the manufacturing process — allows it to be hacked by foreign agents or terrorists to cause a crash.  

Congress, the Pentagon and industry experts have taken the warnings seriously, and now Metro will do the same. more

Panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed ... in the late 18th century. The scheme of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

The Shady Middlemen Who Sell Your Location... in real time.

If you want to follow someone in realtime, you don't need to shell out to shady data-brokers like Securus (which use a marketing company that exploits a privacy law loophole to obtain phone location data).

There are a whole constellation of location data resellers who will do business with anyone, regardless of the notional privacy protections they promise the carriers they'll put in place.

Notably, these resellers do business with bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, who can, for a few dollars, locate any phone on the major carriers' networks.

The carriers were mired in scandal over the Securus affair last year, and pledged to clean up their act (T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted "I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen"). They have not. more