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from the this-explains-why-we-never-have-bars dept.
The US government will be forced to explain why its cell network kill-switch plans should be kept secret today.
Under Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303, the US government – in particular the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – is allowed to shutdown cellphone service anywhere in the country, and even across an entire city if it feels there is a crisis situation.
However, the actual content of the policy remains secret, raising fears that it is open to abuse. For example, it's not clear who is authorized to make such a decision nor under what circumstances.
There are also groups concerned that killing of cellphone service during an emergency could make things worse.
In a frequently quoted example, San Francisco's rail system BART flipped a cell network kill-switch in several subway stations in 2011 amid a protest over a BART cop who shot and killed a drunk homeless man ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/12/bart_polioce_cut_mobile_phone_service/ ). Charles Hill allegedly threw a knife at an officer before the police opened fire.
The fact that the network shutdown was ordered against a public demonstration raised immediate concerns over how the policy is written and implemented.
In February 2013, sparked by the BART event and a refusal by the DHS to release the policy under a Freedom of Information Act request, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sued the DHS ( https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/04/27/epic-case-dhs-phone-kill-switch.pdf ) [PDF] in order to get it to disclose the details.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MrGuy on Thursday April 30 2015, @02:46PM
They don't really have to explain why the rules are secret. They've already done so. The reason they are secret is "Disclosing these rules is a threat to public safety." A court accepted that explanation previously as sufficient.
What's happening now is that EPIC has requested a re-hearing on that decision, arguing that the "public safety" justification previously accepted isn't based on a sound reading the law. A judge agreed to hear argument on that topic. EPIC submitted their position. Today, DHS' response is due.
I don't believe we should expect DHS to come up with new reasons why the rules are secret. What they'll file is what they consider the legal basis for exempting certain information from public disclosure for reason of public safety, and why they consider such an exemption appropriate in this case.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dunbal on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:36PM
Yeah. The reason why the secret is secret is also a secret. Of course there's a good reason for this too, but it's secret. Don't worry. Trust Us (tm).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:20PM
I'm at a bit of a loss. Why won't the standard government draw card work now?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:34PM
where the bad guys call a cellphone attached to a bomb to detonate it.
No one tell the bad guys that the EM spectrum continues to exist outside of typical cell service frequencies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:53PM
Sure, in theory. But as a de facto risk, we've seen tons of IEDs detonated by cell signal abroad as part of the Iraq and Afghanistan insurgencies.
Because building a radio is actually hard and time consuming. Not to mention that signal processessing is actually an advanced skill, and distinguishing an arbitrary signal from background noise is so complicated many people get PhDs focused on that. And the FCC would be able to tell where you were when you set it off, if you're working on an unoccupied spectrum.
Compare that to reconnecting the wires from the vibration motor of a cell phone to a detonator, which is something you can do with almost no training and in the space of an hour.
Yeah, it makes sense to kill cell towers in the fantasy land where they somehow know a bomb is rigged to be detonated ahead of time.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:34PM
What's the range of cheap two-way radios? Here is your receiver with source untraceable. To avoid mistriggers, just add off-the-shelf pattern recognition, like "god hate fags" in morse code
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:40PM
"of the shelf pattern recognition" isn't exactly as easy and anonymous to come by as prepaid cellphones.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:04PM
Yup. It's so difficult you'd probably have to spend a whole *twenty dollars* for FRS/GMRS walkie-talkies from K-Mart! Most of them have a calling or paging features, and many of them have vibration motors or flashing lights or something that responds specifically to that call signal. Granted, it's always possible that someone else will have a similar radio and send the signal prematurely, but that seems pretty unlikely.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:53PM
Agree with everything else you said, but I find this one hard to believe. You're saying there are existing directional, log-keeping, antennae with sufficient density to locate someone sending a single pulse transmission in a typically-unused frequency band that they'd have no reason to expect traffic on?
I'm not saying that absolutely no one would pick up such a transmission, but getting a reasonable localization beyond "somewhere in the New York City area" seems hard.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:03PM
Well, that's fair.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:03PM
Trilateration will find most radio transmitter with high precision. The question is to what extent that kind of listening is still done. Because you need to sample a wide bandwidth in the general area or miss it. Something that costs power (watts) and money.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 01 2015, @05:39AM
That is not feasible in the United States.
Telemarketers.
Just takes one of those to ruin your whole day!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Friday May 01 2015, @04:35PM
So, WalMart selling lists of recently-activated prepaid cell phones to telemarketers isn't a scummy, money-grubbing move; instead, it's a critical part of our anti-terrorism effort!
All right, then, carry on.
*Note: I have no evidence WalMart is doing so, they're just a convenient punching bag
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday May 02 2015, @12:17AM
I have been told telemarketers are using - on the ground tier - "war games" type dialers that machine-gun style dial up every number in an exchange just to see if a human head will take the call. That's those calls that ring and when you pick up and say "hello", you get a dead line. It now has your number and the fact it got a human head on that number in that time window.
Once finding a human head that answers the telemarketing call, it will then route you to the next available telemarketer, however the human head soon senses it has been duped and it hangs up. No biggie, though. The number and time it was answered is now logged. It will now be shared and that number can expect a barrage of repeat calls from co-operatives of telemarketers sharing databases.
I have been told this technique is called a " Dial-a-head" ( or " Dial ahead ") . Using a machine ( that works very cheaply ) to dial ahead and blaze a trail of humans that will personally take a call is a very cost effective way of making dialing lists for subsequent telemarketing activity. They now have the universe of numbers filtered by which numbers at which time has been answered by an actual human head. By cross-correlating that number with other databases, they can get names and personal information which is used in the telemarketing effort to use a rapid-fire barrage of small-talk then trick the unsuspecting human that picked up the call into agreeing to some commitment, or at least extracting yet more information for their database.
I now whitelist my phone for this reason. If its someone not on the whitelist, they get the answering machine. The dial-aheads recognize answering machines because the machines always emit a lengthy spiel of reply, whereas a human always answers in "hello?"...pause ... "hello?" ... hangup. Once you get on those calling lists, it is hard to get off, as it costs them nothing to place calls.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:16PM
Its a pretty stupid excuse for this system. Plenty of other options to go with. The boston marathon bomb was said to have been triggered using the parts from remote control toy cars (see wikipedia article). Even the bomb was made from a pressure cooker and fireworks. The Westgate shopping mall in Kenya was attacked by armed thugs. The US is filled with plenty of guns and obtaining them is pretty easy. A similar attack could EASILY occur on US soil and all their high tech BS surveillance and kill switches won't stop it.
Tin foil hat time: This is more about suppressing protests and activism than stopping a bomb.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday April 30 2015, @10:47PM
It's not about winning the war, it's about suppressing unfriendly populations -- like how we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and domestically during the war on drugs, and now moreso domestically with the war on terror.
A war on terror...we're supposed to win by being afraid of everything? Classic doublethink. And now doublethink is taught as Common Core in America's public schools, which allows kids to improperly evaluate basic fucking arithmetic problems and still get the problem right with the proper explanation. And vise-versa, a student could have a numerically correct answer and still fail the problem because it was not calculated in the manner expected.
This can and does break the will of the student or citizen, with Learned Helplessness [wikipedia.org] being the end game.
(Score: 2) by WillR on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:19PM
What they don't want to disclose is that the rule is "we turn off the cell network if the local cops ask us to, even if it's to keep witnesses from tweeting video of them shooting a man in the back."
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:40PM
... but the reason they have this power is a secret, too.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:18PM
A pretty good indicator for which states are oppressive authoritarian funholes is that--if they aren't already--they like to shut of Internet access at the first sign of public protests.
We've come a long way, America.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:39PM
Go to any third-world country and cell phone towers are turned off whenever the authorities feel like it. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for whole cities. Internet is also turned off, especially wireless internet.
A solution: Do not depend on a cell-phone business/internet-access business operated by someone else. If you didn't build the entire thing, and aren't running it yourself, expect to be let down anytime. Just because something is working right now does not mean it will work when you really need it. Have a backup plan.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Friday May 01 2015, @02:06AM
Which third world country are you talking about?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:33PM
Shutting down cell towers for "public safety" sounds a lot like what the People's Republic of China did to try to quell protests in Hong Kong recently. Of course, the crafty protestors used FireChat instead. But it's still something a totalitarian state does, not what an alleged democracy does.
Is America still a democracy? (first guy to quip "republic" gets slapped with a fish...)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:10PM
It's lunchtime. So..Republic?
Where can a guy get some lemon around here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:42PM
If you know that it is a Republic, then why did you call it a Democracy?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @08:00PM
Because a republic is a type of democracy you fucking moron. "Republic" is to "democracy" as "cadillac " is to "car".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:51PM
Slap me with a fish for noting that a democracy can also allow you to be sure to not choose the wrong lizard.
Or, in other words, "democracy" does not imply direct causality for absolute civil rights.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:08PM
America is whatever you want as long as you can pay K-street enough :P
(and voters can just watch themselves being fucked over regardless of their standard type of voting)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:50PM
I think you're right, so I'll pose another question: If this government does not work for the vast majority of the people in the country, why not scrap it and build something better?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Friday May 01 2015, @12:01AM
Guess who hold the controls? the media, school curriculum, power of organized violence, business opportunities, thug law etc.
Why would they ever remove themselves? ;) and how do you wake up individualized people to a common goal in an environment that makes stress, poverty, drone choirs etc a common fact of life.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:18PM
The golden rule of secrets. They are secret because otherwise another party may take action against the party with the secret. And the only factor usually preventing this is the secrecy. So whenever something is secret it's detrimental to someone elses wishes and you have to assume the worst.
In this case it's likely that public at large would realize that this power option is directed at them which of course no self preserving organization will allow to be public. They have nothing to win from this. The negatives from keeping it secret is less than the negatives of publication. Basic game theory.
Oh.. you can communicate outside common spectrum without a PhD.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @01:17PM
crazed radicals, i'm sure. of course it makes things worse. the fact that they could convince anyone of the opposite just speaks to how brainwashed the population is. This is clearly treason. you're going to sacrifice my family member's safety in a crisis to make your job of controlling the masses easier? This is the same thing as the FBI and the president trying to get backdoors baked into phones to "protect america". America is the people with the phones you stupid treasonous $%^%#$! What, damaging the reputation of the whole nation's tech sector wasn't enough for you, now you want to just turn shit off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @07:34PM
Crap like this is why I've picked up the amateur radio hobby again in the past few years, after letting it go for most of the '00s. Unless they plan on dropping an EMP or somehow jamming all VHF/UHF signals (either scenario meaning they also jam their own communications), I'll be able to reach other people in a crisis. They can't stop the signal!