NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)

The thing that bothers me most about this as a European is; I have zero say in this, in the US you can strike out against surveillance, you can write to senators, protest against terrible legislation. Actually have a voice, however faint it is. Whereas I don't get a say but the exact same treatment from your country. The Five Eyes have made me paranoid and the only escape seems to be downgrading your phone to a brick and carrying it in a Faraday cage. We may as well just go back to plain old telephones.

Man I will forever be grateful for the eye opening insights Snowden has provided to us. I now check for https and use tor and always block cookies. How is there not a monument in every city dedicated to this hero?

How would America respond if it found out that say the UK is tracking cellphones worldwide, except for British subjects of course, but including all Americans on American soil?

Apart from the political conversation I&#x27;ve always tried to encourage a technical conversation about how our mobile phone infrastructure is <i>really terrible for privacy</i> on many levels.<p>CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there&#x27;s more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)<p>Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions <i>are continuing to be made</i> in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5&#x2F;1 is so weak), and it&#x27;s still happening at ETSI now.<p>I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.<p>We can find lots of reasons why this is hard (&quot;Bellhead&quot; communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it&#x27;s hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there&#x27;s a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it&#x27;s probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.

&gt; The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes [...] The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data<p>27TB doesn&#x27;t sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn&#x27;t specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would &quot;struggle to ingest&quot;?

Okay I hate to be the one to break the news to everybody here, but if you have a GSM phone this is quite trivial to do.<p>The NSA hasn&#x27;t done anything groundbreaking here, except maybe a Google search.

This shows clearly that Putin is a dictator, that China is communist and that the USA spys the entire world to protect its citizens freedom. &#x2F;s

I&#x27;m on mobile and don&#x27;t have any links handy, but it&#x27;s fairly well known that you can ostensibly track every. single. handset. in the world if you can gain access to any one carrier&#x27;s infrastructure. You can bet every spy agency from every country is doing this.

If Americans (of which I am one) and the US government believe that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, then surely they should apply the principles that they have enshrined in their constitution to all equals when dealing with them, regardless of whether or not they are a US Citizen or where on earth they are.

Not long ago you could buy SIM cards from kioskos, corner stores, etc. This is becoming increasingly rare, even in places with otherwise poor infrastructure. The shift was rapid but noticeable.

And why we still have terrorists?

they are tracking our every single movement, and aspire to track our every single thought<p>we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can&#x27;t delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.

So now they can detect the location of the &quot;target&quot; and send a drone to kill them from the convenience of their office, before going on lunch break.<p>This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer.<p>To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.

I am really amazed that more people are not outraged at this. When things like the Pentagon Papers came out or when Watergate hit the news, people reacted and change happened.<p>Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.

I wonder if they manage to track my cell phone more accurately than my cell phone manages to track itself.<p>My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town.<p>Simply lost count of the number of times I&#x27;ve been like, &quot;yeah, I&#x27;m sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I&#x27;m more interested in where I am now&quot;.<p>Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.

..And people ask me why I don&#x27;t have a cellphone in 2016.

Please edit the title to reflect the fact that the article is dated December 2013.

Well, in fairness, that&#x27;s actually more aligned with their actual mission, not to mention legal under American law.<p>This isn&#x27;t great news as a non-American but from their perspective, surely this is just the NSA doing their job?