Your Cell Phone Makes You A Prisoner Of A
Digital World Where Virtually Anyone Can Hack You And Track You
If you own a cell phone, you might as well kiss
your privacy goodbye. Cell phone companies know more about us than most
of us would ever dare to imagine. Your cell phone company is tracking
everywhere that you go and it is making a record of everything that you do with
your phone. Much worse, there is a good chance that your cell phone
company has been selling this information to anyone that is willing to pay the
price - including local law enforcement. In addition, it is an open
secret that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone
calls. The "private conversation" that you are having with a
friend today will be kept in federal government databanks for many years to
come. The truth is that by using a cell phone, you willingly make
yourself a prisoner of a digital world where every move that you make and every
conversation that you have is permanently recorded. But it is not just
cell phone companies and government agencies that you have to worry
about. As you will see at the end of this article, it is incredibly easy
for any would-be stalker to hack you and track your every movement using your cell
phone. In fact, many spyware programs allow hackers to listen to you
through your cell phone even when your cell phone is turned off. Sadly,
most cell phone users have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff.
The next time that you get a notice from your
cell phone company about "changes" to the privacy policy, you might
want to play close attention. Your cell phone company might be about to
sell off your most personal information to anyone that is willing to write a
big enough check. The following is from a recent CNN article....
Your phone company knows where you live, what
websites you visit, what apps you download, what videos you like to watch, and
even where you are. Now, some have begun selling that valuable information to
the highest bidder.
In mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its
privacy policy to allow the company to record customers' location data and Web
browsing history, combine it with other personal information like age and
gender, aggregate it with millions of other customers' data, and sell it on an
anonymous basis.
So who is buying this information?
We just don't know.
But we do know that local law enforcement
agencies all over the country are increasingly using cell phone data to nail
suspects, and often it is the cell phone companies that are the ones selling
them the cell phone data that they need.
According to a recent New
York Times article, many local police departments are doing this
without getting a warrant first....
"Law enforcement tracking of cellphones,
once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely
used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of
departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no
court oversight."
That same article says that cell phone companies
have standard prices that they charge to local law enforcement officials for
information that they request....
"Cell carriers, staffed with special law
enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars
for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect."
So if you are breaking the law, your cell phone
may be used to gather evidence and to track you down. In the United
States, cell phone companies are required by law to be able to pinpoint the
locations of their customers to within 100 meters.
So if you are a criminal, your cell phone could be leading the police right to
you even as you are reading this article.
Sometimes the police don't even use the cell
phone companies. Recently, the
Wall Street Journal ran an article that discussed the
capabilities of the "stingray devices" that many local law
enforcement agencies are using now.
A "stingray device" acts like a cell
phone tower and it can gather any information that a normal cell phone tower
can. The following is how a
recent Wired article described these
"stingrays"....
You make a call on your cellphone thinking the
only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your
carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just
might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals
and maybe even the content of your calls.
So-called stingrays are one of the new
high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The
devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in
order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into
connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.
The government maintains that the stingrays
don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate
expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other
wireless devices to a cell tower.
Isn't that just great?
The attitude that law enforcement agencies seem
to have is that once we use a cell phone we are essentially willingly throwing
our Fourth Amendment rights out the window.
In some areas of the United States, police are
physically extracting data from cell phones any time they want as well. According
to the ACLU, state police in Michigan have been using "extraction
devices" to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull
over. This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are
not accused of doing anything wrong. The following is how an article
postedon CNET News describes
the capabilities of these "extraction devices"....
The devices, sold by a company called
Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from
most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to
work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access
some information.
Fortunately these "extraction devices"
are being challenged in court. Let us hope that they will be banned. But what local law enforcement officials are
doing pales in comparison to what federal agencies are doing. For example, the FBI claims that it can demand to see your cell phone data whenever
it would like to.
Not only that, the FBI has also been remotely activating the
microphones on the cell phones of suspects that they want to listen to.
This can be done even when the cell phone is turned off....
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel
form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating
a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a "roving
bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use
against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of
conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping
him.
Could the FBI be listening to you right now? If there is a cell phone in the room they could
be. But some other federal agencies listen to a lot
more cell phone calls than the FBI does.
It has been an open secret for a long time that
the federal government monitors and records all
cell phone calls that are made for national security
reasons.
In fact, the federal government is even trying
to collect records for calls that have been made in the distant past.
According to USA Today,
the goal is "to create a database of every call ever made"....
The National Security Agency has been secretly
collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data
provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of
the arrangement told USA TODAY.
In addition, the federal government has been
constructing the largest data center in the history of the world out in the
Utah desert. This data center will be used to house an almost
unimaginable amount of digital data (including your cell phone calls).
The following is how a
recent Wired article described this new facility....
Under construction by contractors with
top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for
the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final
piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to
intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s
communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground
and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The
heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013.
Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases
will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private
emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal
data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and
other digital “pocket litter.”
But isn't it illegal for the federal government
to intercept our phone calls? Well, the cold, hard reality of the matter is
that they use all kinds of loopholes and legal technicalities to get around
that. For example, if a call is
"intercepted" outside of the United States and then routed to a
government building inside the United States that is considered to be okay.
Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that
is how they think.
And it is very frightening thing for governments
around the world to be able to monitor and track us like this.
Increasingly, governments around the world are
using cell phones to hunt down people that they do not like and haul them off
to prison. For example, a recent Bloomberg
article detailed how the Iranian government is aggressively
using cell phones to crack down on dissidents....
The Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid
Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the opposition journalist. Held
in Evin Prison for weeks following his arrest early last year for protesting,
he says, he learned that he was not only fighting the regime, but also
companies that armed Tehran with technology to monitor dissidents like him.
Pourheydar, 30, says the power of this enemy
became clear as intelligence officers brandished transcripts of his mobile
phone calls, e-mails and text messages during his detention. About half the
political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their
communications and movements through their cell phones, he says.
Christians in Iran have learned that they must
take the batteries entirely out of their cell phones before they gather for
home church meetings. If they don't take the batteries out of their cell
phones, there is a good chance that the secret police will show up and drag
them off to prison.
Most Americans don't need to worry about getting
hauled off to prison for political or religious reasons at this point, but
there is another aspect of cell phone security that could potentially affect
all of us.
Most Americans are completely unaware of what
stalkers can potentially do if they are able to hack into a cell phone.
For example, did you know that spyware can make it possible for a stalker to
monitor where you are 24 hours a day and listen to everything that you say even
when your cell phone is turned off? The following is from an article posted by WTHR....
Spyware marketers claim you can tap into
someone's calls, read their text messages and track their movements
"anywhere, anytime." They say you can "catch a cheating
spouse", protect your children from an evil babysitter and "hear what
your boss is saying about you." And while you're spying on others, the
Spyware companies say "no one will ever know" because it's supposed
to be "completely invisible" with "absolutely no trace."
Security experts say it's no internet hoax.
"It's real, and it is pretty
creepy," said Rick Mislan, a former military intelligence officer who now
teaches cyber forensics at Purdue University's Department of Computer and
Information Technology.
Mislan has examined thousands of cell phones
inside Purdue's Cyber Forensics Lab, and he says spy software can now make even
the most high-tech cell phone vulnerable.
For much more from WTHR about what stalkers can
do to your cell phone, just check out this amazing video.
It is one of the best news reports that I have ever seen.
Are you starting to see how your cell phone
makes you a prisoner of a digital world?
The police can listen to you and track you any
time that they want to.
The federal government can listen to you and
track you any time that they want to.
Big corporations can buy all of the personal
information that cell phones gather any time that they want to from certain
cell phone companies.
Stalkers can listen to you and track you 24
hours a day if they are able to hack in to your cell phone somehow.
If you own a cell phone and you still want to
have some privacy, then you need to take the battery completely out of the cell
phone when you are not using it.
Unfortunately, as our world becomes even more
interconnected and even more dependent on technology, the amount of privacy we
all have is likely to continue to decrease. A digital Big Brother control
grid is being constructed all around us, and in the future that control grid
could potentially be used for very malevolent purposes.
So let us be as wise as serpents and innocent as
doves. Our world is changing, and not for the better.
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