To think that "everyone" is being tracked borders on paranoid delusional yet you can be.
May 6, 2015
Privacy advocates and civil-liberties groups say the police shouldn’t be able to track cell phones without a search warrant “” but they’re losing that fight in the courts.
Two federal appeals courts have now ruled explicitly that police don’t need a search warrant to track the location of a suspect’s cell phone, and a third court gave law enforcement a partial win on the issue.
It’s a disturbing trend for privacy advocates, who say the law isn’t keeping up with advances in technology. Retroactively tracking people’s cell phones can provide an open window into almost every detail of their lives, potentially giving law enforcement far more personal information than they’ve ever been able to obtain before””without a warrant.
“When the government has a record of everywhere we’ve gone on a continuous basis over a period of time, they know our religious beliefs, our health information, our associations, our political views, our most private activities,” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
Read more > http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/2015/05/06/Police-Can-Track-Your-Cell-Phone-Without-Warrant-Now
The government can't really turn your phone back on. But it can keep the phone from actually turning off.
Even if you power off your cell phone, the U.S. government can turn it back on.
That's what ex-spy Edward Snowden revealed in last week's interview with NBC's Brian Williams. It sounds like sorcery. Can someone truly bring your phone back to life without touching it?
No. But government spies can get your phone to play dead.
It's a crafty hack. You press the button. The device buzzes. You see the usual power-off animation. The screen goes black. But it'll secretly stay on -- microphone listening and camera recording.
How did they get into your phone in the first place? Here's an explanation by former members of the CIA, Navy SEALs and consultants to the U.S. military's cyber warfare team. They've seen it firsthand.
Government spies can set up their own miniature cell network tower. Your phone automatically connects to it. Now, that tower's radio waves send a command to your phone's antennae: the baseband chip. That tells your phone to fake any shutdown and stay on.
A smart hack won't keep your phone running at 100%, though. Spies could keep your phone on standby and just use the microphone -- or send pings announcing your location.
John Pirc, who did cybersecurity research at the CIA, said these methods -- and others, like physically bugging devices -- let the U.S. hijack and reawaken terrorists' phones.
Related: Cybersecurity: How safe are you?Read more > http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technology/security/nsa-turn-on-phone/
More people are beginning to buy smart devices – like smart TVs, smart appliances, smart thermostats, smart baby monitors, and so on. And homes are getting smarter as more people adopt these devices to enjoy smarter lifestyles.
But are these “smart” technologies intelligent enough, or sensitive enough, to understand that you may not want to entrust them with information about everything that happens in your home? There’s probably nobody manufacturing a smart TV that will think to itself “perhaps my owners don’t want me to record this intimate moment, or this fight. Maybe I should just mind my own business until they’re ready to watch the next episode of The Walking Dead.”
This kind of scenario might seem outlandish, but it’s really not. Mikko Hypponen tweeted about this topic last year, warning that smart TVs may be recording and sharing conversations – something confirmed by Samsung. And as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, many of which are not being built to be sensitive to people’s need for privacy within their own homes, become more prevalent, the number of sensors and transmitters that collect and share data will increase.
“I think smart cameras and other home monitoring devices are the potential ‘killer apps’ that will sell the idea of smart homes to many people,” says Mika Stahlberg, F-Secure Director of Strategic Threat Research. “The idea of being able to keep an eye on your dog while you’re at work, or seeing when your kids get home from school, is going to be really appealing for people. Every square inch of a smart home can potentially be monitored using IoT devices that are quickly becoming more accessible and marketed to consumers.”
Essentially, the little cameras that come built-in to laptops, video game consoles, and smart TVs will only become more widespread. But how people can control how these devices function, or how companies use the information collected by these devices, is still unclear. Baby monitors provide an excellent example of how these devices can compromise people’s privacy, as one American family discovered the hard way that these devices can potentially be used to let anyone wiretap your home.
So as people graduate to using smart devices, they’ll need to keep these privacy considerations in mind. One quick fix they can use, as recommended by Karmina Aquino, Service Lead for F-Secure Labs’ Threat Intelligence team, is to change the settings on these devices. In the case of Samsung’s smart TVs, the settings can be adjusted to prevent the TV from recording absolutely everything.
But doing this for absolutely every device is impractical, and maybe even impossible. So F-Secure has developed a more comprehensive solution – F-Secure SENSE. SENSE is a unique combination of hardware and software that can be used to protect all of the devices people use in their home. This includes things like PCs, smartphones and tablets, but also modern smart devices like Internet-connected baby monitors and smart TVs.
SENSE’s software can be installed on devices like laptops and smartphones, allowing these devices to stay protected, even while they leave the home. But many IoT devices are unable to run user-installed apps, and that’s where SENSE’s hardware comes in. SENSE’s hardware is able to connect to any Internet-connected device people use in their home, which allows SENSE to create a private, secure network for those devices. It uses artificial intelligence capabilities in F-Secure’s Security Cloud to proactively “sense” threats hidden within Internet traffic, allowing it to find and neutralize threats to people’s security and online privacy before it has the opportunity to reach devices.
These capabilities allow SENSE to block potentially harmful traffic, such as data exchanged by spyware or unwanted tracking technologies. It can also prevent Internet traffic from being directed to potentially harmful websites without people’s knowledge. SENSE’s software also gives people a complete overview of their home network and the security status of their different devices, so they can always see what’s going on.
Mika says it’s time for people to recognize how important it is to keep private information inside their homes, as losing control over such personal information can quickly grow from a minor inconvenience or source of embarrassment into a security issue.
“A lot of these newer Internet-connected devices aren’t really common enough to make hacking worthwhile for criminals, but this will change as more people buy them,” Mika says. “Manufacturers will eventually phase out non-smart products, and that’s when the security implications will really start to hit home. These devices will let criminals learn a lot about their potential victims, so securing privacy within a smart home is going to be something people need to do to keep their homes and families safe.”
F-Secure SENSE will start shipping in spring 2016, and is priced at 199 EUR/USD, which includes the hardware, software, and a 12-month subscription. It is currently available for preordering for customers in Europe, and the first 5000 customers will receive a 50% discount.
https://privacy.f-secure.com/2015/11/16/are-you-watching-your-smart-tv-or-is-it-watching-you/
A small company in Texas has produced the TraqCloud, a new, significantly cheaper way to track anyone or anything using GPS. TraqCloud, in its promotional materials, is marketed for luggage or kid tracking, but using such a tracker against a suspected cheating love interest, a sneaky business partner, or local law enforcement is now simple and inexpensive.
Read more > http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/spy-tech-goes-cheap-track-your-car-kid-or-enemy-for-10-a-month/
If you are being tracked, you brought your tracker into your life 99% of the time.
Go off the grid.
