ok, ok, ok, I TOLD YOU SO!

[lowlifecat]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5184

FBI Activates Cell Phones Remotely for Wiretapping
Purav Sanghani - December 2, 2006 3:57 PM


They can see us, read our emails, watch our IM conversations, and now even hear us whether we want them to or not

It seems as though George Orwell hit it the bullseye again when he wrote about Big Brother and the government's way of keeping track of the general public. It has been recently revealed that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has a way of tapping a cell phone and using the microphone to listen in on nearby conversations.

The method used for listening in on conversations held by alleged members of Cosa Nostra is called a "roving bug" and was ruled to be a legal method of wiretapping by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. The bug was alledgedly used on two Nextel phones. It looks like all cellular phones are vulnerable to this sort of wiretapping according to CNet's findings:

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

Kaplan further added that the functionality of the roving bug was in place even when the phone was powered off -- or at least when the phone looked to be powered off. One possible method that the FBI used to tap into the two Nextel phones is by getting the network to install a rogue firmware update which gave the agency access to such features.

Such capability has long been rumored to exist in Motorola phones after it was discovered how the 9/11 terrorists used cellular phones to coordinate most of their activities.

Still there are some skeptics who believe that this method does not exist and that the FBI had to have physically planted a bug into the cellular phone to monitor conversations. But with the recent boom of PDA phones and devices that support custom software it was only a matter of time before hackers, or the government found a way to exploit similar features.

[ND66]

You did, that's right!

.

[Fluff]

It's all funny.

[az]

I'll believe it when somebody shows a proof-of-concept attack.

[lowlifecat]

I'll believe it when somebody shows a proof-of-concept attack.

Such capability has long been rumored to exist in Motorola phones after it was discovered how the 9/11 terrorists used cellular phones to coordinate most of their activities.

[az]

It has been rumored. Where is the proof? What was discovered was that terrorists used mobile phones.

[Gurm]

Until someone shows me a working proof-of-concept hack, I call BS.

[gt40]

I'm with Gurm

[Fluff]

Why would it be a hack? Since i'll never understand or see the contents of the source code and I highly doubt that it's technically impossible.

I will assume it has been done. It seems like a reasonably useful tool. Why would they choose not to have that feature?

[gt40]

I don't think it is technically impossible, but the phone firmware would definetly need to be hacked -this is not something within the normal capabilities of the phone.

[dZeus]

I don't think it is technically impossible, but the phone firmware would definetly need to be hacked -this is not something within the normal capabilities of the phone.

unless you can force certain manufacturers to include backdoors in the firmware in phones sold in the US?

[az]

Everyone would wonder why their unshielded speakers are buzzing loudly whenever the pone comes close ("wow, my old phone only did this when it was on!").

[Nowhere]

Hmmm...not necesserilly, if the signal would be low enough. Yes, I know, the base station won't be able to receive the signal...but does it really have to?

BTW, I have ooold Nokia phone. So primitive that any such hack (if possible at all), wouldn't be possible on this phone. Buy them while you can!

[Gurm]

Your speakers buzz whenever the thing does its frantic "must synch! must synch!" thing.

The power requirements to run the microphone full-time would kill the battery life. I don't believe that this is actually enabled on any phone. I don't doubt that it's "theoretically possible", but I really REALLY doubt that it's turned on by default on every phone sold in the USA - and it would NEED to be, I mean they don't know where the terrorists shop now do they?

It's FUD.

Let's not get started on the fact that the microphone is unlikely to pick anything up with the phone closed on ... say ... my model. Most phones sold here are still non-speakerphone, so unless it's a non-flipper or a speakerphone the microphone is likely covered when it's closed. Not to mention that the phone lives in people's pockets, and if it were powering up it would get warm and the battery would die in a very short time...

This REEKS of "echelon" or "carnivore". Y'know, the super-massive computer that doesn't exist that sorts THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THE INTERNET ALL DAY EVERY DAY? The NSA claims to have that shit, too - but it doesn't exist.

[Gurm]

This article:

http://email.about.com/od/staysecureandprivate/a/carnivore.htm

Utterly cracked me up. The description of the carnivore system was ridiculous. The very notion that one workstation could actively monitor the traffic coming from even the smallest ISP in the country ... is ludicrous.

------------

THIS article, on the other hand...

http://www.ecomputerlaw.com/articles/show_article.php?article=2006_carnivore_fights_online_crime

Would suggest something FAR more reasonable - that someone has built a system that can, when attached to the appropriate router at an ISP, sniff and store all packets coming to or from a single MAC address.

However, even that is a little iffy. My line is 8Mbit/512Kbit. I'm often pegging it out (yay for Bit Torrent!) 24/7. At 1.1 megaBYTEs per second combined, storing all my packets would require 66MB/min, or 4GB/hour. Monitoring me for a whole day would require a 100GB hard disk, and much of that data would be encrypted and take EONS to decode. If I were a criminal, it might take them weeks to find anything incriminating. They'd go through the biggest hard disks commercially available like they were water. A 2-week wiretap of my cable modem would require 2.4Terabytes of storage.

Now let's assume that I'm not a hypothetical retard, and that I want to conduct my hypothetical illegal activities somewhere other than my home. So I go to work. At the office in which I currently sit, there is a 100Mbit line running into a concentrator for the building. There are a couple dozen companies, all of whom were recently upgraded to 100Mbit. So, 25 companies at 100Mbits each. Now of course those lines aren't saturated, but ours is running replication to several remote sites at all times, so we're using a good 25+Mbit of it - in AND out. That's 50Mbit total!

The calculations for that are even MORE extreme. 50Mbit per second is 6.5MegaBytes per second combined. 400Mbytes per minute. 24GB per hour. A 2-week wiretap of this office alone would take up 8 Terabytes of largely nontrivially-encrypted data. But you can't tap JUST this office without planting a device in the building. You'd have to tap the entire building at the concentrator. That would mean tapping 25 companies, all of whom are using between 25 and 50 mbits of bandwidth each second! That's 123MegaBytes of data PER SECOND. 7.5GB per minute. 450GB an hour. A two-week wiretap would require 151Terabytes of storage.

Then you'd have to decrypt all that data - and everything except SMTP transmissions and web pages is probably 128-bit encrypted. Cracking 100+ Terabytes of 128-bit encrypted data would take YEARS with the fastest computers currently in existence.

So does the FBI/NSA have some whamma-jamma Internet wiretapping device? Maybe for single-address monitoring at a local concentrator. But to monitor ALL TRAFFIC on a network in realtime? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no.