The UK's The Guardian reports with reference to the recent attacks in France: "Foreign, non-EU intelligence, based on mobile phone surveillance, indicating the Isis militant had recently been in Greece did not reach Paris until 16 November, three days after the attacks."
So a non-EU country tracked this person's phone while in the EU. Technically impressive, finding this one phone among 1.1billion mobile phones in Europe. Scary, too.
The Guardian has the full story.
Editor's note: Copy of the unedited version of the article.
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EU Phones Tracked by Non-EU Surveillance
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(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday November 22 2015, @06:04PM
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday November 22 2015, @07:05PM
Wasn't there a story maybe a year ago about how the NSA totally owned France's phone system? Why would this be a surprise.
I believe this is covered under the "it would be illegal and improper for us to spy on all our citizens this way. here, you do it for us."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday November 22 2015, @07:27PM
Nobody said it was the NSA, (yet).
The tracking was in Greece, not in France.
They recovered this cell phone and it's sim card. They had everything they needed to scan every tower log in the EU to see where it had been turned on. The chances of any cell provider standing on protocol and insisting on a warrant after a terrorist act are slim to none.
But even if the CIA/NSA was involved there is nothing all that magical or amazing when all they would need is a Sim Catcher [wikipedia.org] (Stingray) sitting somewhere in Greece recording every sim coming within range.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday November 22 2015, @07:11PM
Exactly. Its a cell phone. After the fact tracking is nothing more than scanning the logs of cell towers, and digging through the accounting records.
There is no magic here. Once you find the abandoned phone, back-tracking it is child's play.
Which brings up the point that almost ALL the spycraft (encryption back doors, cell logs, email full-take, etc) is about catching culprits AFTER the fact, and none of it is useful in PREVENTING attacks. Only once the terrorists revealed themselves (DNA, Fingerprints, discarded cell phones) does any intelligence come to light.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by albert on Monday November 23 2015, @01:51AM
After an attack, we track it back. This gets us the terrorist training location. While the next terrorist is busy training, he gets bombed.
The terrorists of course report that the camp is something like a daycare center, and useful idiots eat it up. We still prevented the next attack.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday November 23 2015, @03:36AM
Sounds impressive, except getting Cell records from Syria is pretty much a non-starter. There is no reason to believe the same sim card would be use over that whole period. Maybe one of the French terrorists sere anywhere near a training camp any time recently.
Most of them were on watch lists, but for the most part left totally alone to come and go as they please.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by albert on Monday November 23 2015, @04:42AM
Have you ever wondered why the USA flies satellites with gold mesh antennas that unfold to being larger than a football field? I think it is pretty obvious that this isn't being done for science.
The USA can also use drones, mountaintops on the other side of an international border, and hidden receivers. Maybe we even hack into the cell network; the Greeks certainly seem to think we do so.
Yep, we can track these people in numerous ways, and we can kill them in numerous ways. We obviously won't get them all, but we can get an awful lot of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @07:21PM
Not impressive if the same phone/SIM was used. Even if GPS and other tracking stuff was turned off, the mobile phone operators would know roughly where the phone was just based by which GSM towers the phone was talking to.
If the phone was allowed to talk back to Google/Apple/Microsoft they too would know where the phone was. Even if GPS and GSM was turned off just knowing what WiFi APs a device (phone, PC etc) can see will often locate it down to within 100 metres or better.
You remember Google's street view car going around collecting GPS + WiFi + etc info? That's useful but now they have millions of phones that report the APs and cell towers they see around them and thus keep that DB updated.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-google-and-everyone-else-gets-wi-fi-location-data/ [zdnet.com]
Once you have the number, "hindsight is 20/20". Just get the records from whoever you have leverage on.
p.s. the author of the article says:
As for me, I find the advantages of having knowing exactly where I am and where the hotel, restaurant, theater, or what-have you are in relationship to my location to be worth the vanishingly small chance that someone is tracking me with this data.
But it's not a vanishingly small chance - he is very likely getting tracked by Google or whoever his phone reports to. Perhaps nobody cares to look up his location history _yet_, but they probably could if they ever wanted to.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday November 22 2015, @08:00PM
Spot on. As you said, It is not a vanishingly small chance that someone is tracking him. It is an overwhelmingly large change that multiple parties are tracking him. You then said noone cares to look up his history, but I all but gaurantee you that at least automated systems are looking at his history, and doing things in response to it... even if it's just altering the ads he gets shown, and updating statistics on how much he moves around and where etc which might be used to help categorize his profession, wealth/income, etc...
I'd rewrite your sentiment as 'No one has cared to make his life difficult _yet_'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @08:54PM
Indeed, the main danger is not some intelligence agency tracking you (most people are unlikely to ever get the attention of the three-letter agencies) but businesses tracking you, and making your life worse without you actually knowing it. It starts with simple things like your online shop displaying higher prices because it determined you'll likely be able to pay them. Worse, you may get higher credit interest rate, or even not get a credit, based not on your personal risks, but purely on statistical correlations which your collected data happens to fit. Bought a larger amount of alcoholic drinks for a party and paid with your credit card? Well, maybe some system calculated an increased risk for you to become an alcoholic (although you possibly don't drink anything yourself). Your health insurance rates might reflect this (not that you'll ever learn about it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @09:08PM
Bought a larger amount of alcoholic drinks for a party and paid with your credit card? Well, maybe some system calculated an increased risk for you to become an alcoholic
Or your family members will start getting coupons for discount/free alcohol because alcoholism is partially genetic and they figure it is a good investment to try to get them hooked.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday November 22 2015, @10:08PM
Indeed, the main danger is not some intelligence agency tracking you (most people are unlikely to ever get the attention of the three-letter agencies) but businesses tracking you
I'm tired of hearing/seeing this. Government surveillance threatens democracy itself. [gnu.org] It will be used to find whistleblowers (Thereby disrupting democracy, because The People will not know of the government's wrongdoing.), destroy activists (No change can come about if no one is able to challenge the status quo.), and will even occasionally be used to destroy a completely normal person (probably by mistake). That's in addition to the fact that it violates our fundamental liberties and in many cases breaks the law.
Even normal people will be harmed by the surveillance, because the mere collection of the information violates their rights and therefore necessarily harms them. Furthermore, additional harm will come about in the form of a chilling effect on freedom of speech. We've already seen normal people get harassed by government thugs because they made obvious jokes on the Internet about bombs. What if mass surveillance identifies you based on some private joke you made? What innocuous speech will cause their systems to mark you as a target? You never know, so people will be more frightened to speak.
That's already worse than anything businesses could do directly, though I will not deny that I am no fan of corporate thugs tracking everyone. However, any information that businesses collect will likely be given to the government, as we saw with the NSA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @11:38PM
The non-EU part is the impressive bit - it requires quite a bit of infrastructure to be able to query cell towers (or their logs). Especially if you're not the owner and you're 1000s of miles away as seems to be the case here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Monday November 23 2015, @12:02AM
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday November 22 2015, @06:06PM
that means China, US or ...Canada! (of course): we just slip some good Canadian beer and poutine to the right person and 'Bob's your Uncle', we got the goods, eh!
Canadian Intelligence: brought to you by the people who brought you Bob and Doug and John Candy and Leslie Nielson and... yeah, sorry, Celine Dion and Bryan Adams.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1) by meustrus on Monday November 23 2015, @01:03AM
So a broad foreign intelligence effort identified a known terrorist probably on his way to do terroristy things. Which is probably what it was designed for. So why did it take so long for the intelligence to reach the right place? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing broad intelligence sweeps are for? If it's not intended to protect EU targets, why conduct surveillance in the EU at all? If they aren't going to actually make this kind of intelligence useful then there's no "security" being gained in the "security vs privacy" dichotomy. We're just losing privacy for no security gain, and on top of that eroding the very concept of national sovereignty that protects any actor capable of such overreach.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?