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The Use of Stingray Devices by Law Enforcement Agencies

BlahBlog — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:22:39 +0000

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal had an article describing how the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are using electronic and cellphone monitoring and tracking devices known as stingray. As described in the article, the Stingray device functions as a mobile cellphone tower and can trick near by cellphones from connect with it. When a cellphone connects with it, the signal strength can be an indicator of how close the cellphone is and in this fashion you can collect enough information to triangulate the suspects location. This technology will work even if you are not using your cellphone an law enforcement has used it in situations where they don’t have a search warrant.

If the use this device without a search warrant alone was not problematic enough, the government does not disclose the information about it’s use or the data gathered by using the device even on the subsequent trial for the suspect whom they tracked with such device. From the article…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.

There is a big glaring error in the above sentence, the FBI delete the data gathered in the use of stingray devices to keep the general public in the dark, not the suspects. Because stingray devices mimic cell towers, hundreds and thousands of cell phones will connect with it that are nearby. To catch one suspect, law enforcement is using sweeping powers and technology that log and track a whole wide range of people. If you use a stingray device in New York City, you are gathering data from thousands of cell phones not just the suspect.

Another big problem with this technology is that it can monitor voice and data transmissions. Since stingray devices mimic a cell tower it can intercept voice and data transmissions. To this point the article quoted a law enforcement officer from the sheriff’s department in Maricopa County, Ariz. describing that they “can’t listen in on communications.” This means that the sheriff’s department there doesn’t have the latest model. If you can mimic a tower you can definitely intercept, capture, and log all data the flows through the fake honey pot cell tower.

Another point not mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article about the use of stingray devices is that they are not necessary. Law enforcement agencies can get the location of a cell phone by going to the cell phone carriers. Telecommunication companies like Comcast, AT&T, and even Google have portals where law agencies can request information on their systems on a suspect.

So if law enforcement agencies can get the location of a suspect without the use of stingrays, why are police departments stocking up on these devices? So if law enforcement can track the location of a suspect by having a warrant and going to the cell phone carriers, they prefer the use of stingray devices because they don’t require a warrant, they can delete the data they gather afterwards, they can cast wider nets, and because it’s a cool gadget!

Filed under: Search warrants? We don’t need no stinkin’ search warrants!

Sting Ray II

Small Business Internet Phone Service

BlahBlog — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 05:38:41 +0000

A good phone number is still one of the principal methods of doing business. Most small business still list the phone number in yellow pages or other small business listing service. A phone number allows your customers to reach you about your store hours, store locations, and available services. A good domain name, Twitter account, and Facebook page are important but a business phone number is essential.

There are a lot of online services that can help you manage your phone line and number for your small business. At this point I would not use a fixed land line, but a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service to provide all my telephony needs. The primary phone number I give personal friends and contacts to reach me is provided by Google Voice. For my small home business, I use Skype phone service. And there are other telephony services that can be useful for small business owners.

What I like about Google Voice is that your GVoice phone number can be forwarded to any other phone, or multiple phones. You customers call you at your GVoice phone number and Google forwards the call to your cell phone, store phone number, or any other number until someone answers it or it goes to voice mail. If the call goes to voice mail Google will transcribe the message and email you the text transcription.

I also use Skype and have a Skype Call-out account which provides me a phone number where my customers can reach me at from a cell phone or landline. In addition, Skype also has some great chat messaging, video conference, screen sharing, and collaboration option that make it an integral solution for my small business communication needs.

Yahoo! has the Yahoo! Voice phone service that fits somewhere between Google Voice and Skype. All of these services can be managed and used to call out and receive calls on your smart phone. The iPhone and Android app for Google Voice allows you to call out and receive calls. In the US, the iPhone app for Skype only allows you to call out when you are on a WiFi internet access.

The one feature I really wish either Google Voice, Skype, or Yahoo! Voice had was the ability to send and receive faxes. Fax support is a popular and commonly request feature in Google Voice that I think that Google will build support for it but there are other online telephony services that already include this feature.

Ring Central is a paid mobile business phone system that includes internet fax services. You don’t need a fax machine in your office to send and receive fax documents. Ring Central also provides a 1 800 toll free number. In addition to Ring Central, I would consider Grasshopper. Grasshopper is a virtual phone system designed for businesses and entrepreneurs. Grasshopper has toll free numbers, unlimited extension, call forwarding, voicemails transcriptions, and other feature suitable for small to mid-sized companies.

Slave Technology

BlahBlog — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:10:34 +0000

As a people, we are becoming more reliant and dependent on technology, such as smart phones, laptops, web services, printers, etc. But this technology that we depend on can be used to turn against us. Government agencies and organized groups, such as the MPAA and RIAA, routinely use vulnerabilities, back doors, rootkits, identifying attributes, and other information in our technology to track, monitor, retaliate, and incriminate you.

Examples of slave technology include all of Google’s products. Google’s search engine tracks individuals via unique identifying IDs in cookies and singed-on sessions and saves all searches associated with those IDs. Even if you are not signed into Google’s other products like GMail, your online searches conducted on Google search are stored and associated with a unique identifier associated with your computer. You can try to delete your browser’s cookies, but if they wanted to they could use your IP address to track you.

In layman’s terms, the IP address of your computer is much like your home address. It uniquely identifies your computer in the internet. Your ISP, such as Comcast or AT&T, provided you with an IP address automatically when you connect to the internet. Every time you visit a website, your IP address is typically logged along with the pages you viewed. The IP address is the typical way to identify individuals based on blog comments, Facebook accounts, or emails messages that most users think are anonymous. Simply put there is no such time as being anonymous in the internet. You are being watched. Some groups, most notably the government, want to introduce a Internet ID or true identity for your online usage. If such a ID program would come to passed, you can quickly imagine the associated fees, taxes, renewal process, and the fact that your access could be revoked for some bureaucratic reason.

The government is not the only one tracking you, in fact advertisers have the most to gain from your online usage. Have you ever noticed how some online ads seem to know your location? I’ve noticed this more from Groupon ads where they post ads on random deals in my home town. How does Groupon know my hometown if I am not a member? I’ve never even been to their site so how do they know my location. Groupon and other advertisers use techniques involving your IP address and cookies to try to track what sites you’ve visited, what search terms you were recently looking for, and other identifying information.

In addition to an IP address, if you are using an iPhone you can also be transmitting the phone’s UDID. Th iPhone UDID is a unique identifier that app developers have access that uniquely identifies one iPhone from the millions of others.

You might not have suspected this, but even your printer is designed to turn you in. It is widely known that some models of printers print hard to see patterns of yellow dots in documents. These patterns can then be used to to match printed documented to a specific printer.

There is a lot more than just technology, but information you provide or is collected from or about you by mobile and personal devices and website operators is used. For example, in California police officers don’t need a search warrant to go through the contents of your cell phone or other devices that were confiscated at the time of your arrest. So if they find incriminating information about you, even about a case different from the one you were originally detained or arrested for, this can be used against you. Another example is how Facebook gives access to third-party developers and advertisers of personal information, such as email and phone numbers of it’s users. So now, Facebook advertisers can target you with their ads inside and outside of Facebook, in your email inbox, etc.

All My Wikileaks

BlahBlog — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 23:38:13 +0000

There is a saying that states that politics is show business for ugly people. Politicians and bureaucrats are like minor actors in a bad television soap, this has been made transparent with the latest leaks of US embassy cables released by Wikileaks. As you can imagine, the embassy cables have a lot of dirt on third word politicians, despots, and strong men.

The embassy cable leaks describe how China has been caught hacking into Google and other companies. How Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi have a bromance and secret deals going. The US spies on the UN. Saudi Arabia wants to attack Iran via a proxy like the United States or Israel. Hamed Karzai is a motivated by paranoia and cold hard cash. Iran has used the Red Crescent as cover for its agents.

Here is some synopsis of the coverage of the latest wikileaks.

Corporate Leaders Make Bad Political Leaders

BlahBlog — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 18:57:01 +0000

The failed gubernatorial attempt by Meg Whitman and the failed senate attempt by Carly Fiorina made me question if corporate leaders would make good political leaders. I think that a political needs to develop different skills than those required by a C-level executive. Can you imagine if the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was a state governor? As CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt has stated in the past that if web users want online privacy they should change their name. If he thinks that privacy is not a right, imagine what other rights he would want to googlefy. Google’s mission is to make all human knowledge accessible, searchable, and monetizable online as long as it’s not their executives personal information. Your personal information is fair game to be index by their web crawlers and large data centers but Google has a double standard when it comes to their information. For example, try googling for Google Customer Service. Back in 2005, a CNET was blacklisted when one of its reporters posted Google founders private information online. So, I would correct Eric Schmidt, if you want privacy online and you are an Google executive just censor news outlet, otherwise change your name.

Now imagine, for a second, if Mark Zuckerborg of Facebook was president. If Mark Zuckerberg was president, he would nationalize Facebook and make it the de facto National ID system. He would place Naked Body Scanners not only at airports but at malls and movie theaters. TSA agents and other government officials would be able to force check you into locations, to tag you in police lineups, to force you into associations and groups without your permission. As President, Mark Zuckerberg would balance the budget by sharing private customer data with corporations and other agencies.

The candidate I can see myself behind would be a Jobs Ive 2012 ticket. Steve Jobs would redesign the White House to look like a steel and glass iPod nano with a single body aspect to it. He would force all senators to sign NDAs before they vote on any bill. He would simply ban all journalist that write any bad press on his foreign policy as he has to those that written negatively about his products. Steve Jobs’ Press Secretary would be David Pogue.

After seeing Meg Whitman campaign go down in flames I realized that most corporate leaders can’t connect with the every day people they manage. Just think about it, they live on corporate expense accounts and you struggle to keep a budget, they fly on private corporate jets and you practically get strip searched by the TSA, they have a second home and you mostly likely would have a second job (if you can find one).

Retweet March 2010

BlahBlog — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:20:05 +0000

Here I am reblogging some retweets for the past month that broken down by subject matter. Some of these tweets also cover events that occurred in March 2010. If you like to follow along, befriend xwoop and lolprez and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Obamanation

After a year in office, it seems that Obama’s idea of green jobs is to have no jobs.
Obama pays surprise visit to Afghanistan, yet he hasn’t been to California in a long while.
Obama: Change is political term for more of the same, but worse.
Obama: Read my lips, no new hope.

Got Gov?

I, for one, welcome our new death panel overlords.
We have a separation between church and state, I want a separation between sports and state.
How did we get from “no taxation without representation” to “taxation without exception.”
If they put fluoride in water, nuclear waste under mountains, and pollutants in the air what would they not put in flu vaccines?
China is censoring the details behind Google’s decision to move out of China due to China’s censorship.
Failing to obey an order from a security guard will be considered as an assault!
If your ex is spying on you on Facebook so is your government.
In a police state everyone is a suspect if not an inmate.
Do we really need a vice president? Why not just get a presidential double?

Econemy

How dare the state and federal government ask for a donation into the California Fund or Presidential Election Campaign Fund?
The women’s movement demanded equal pay for equal work. The investment banker’s movement demands equal ROI for unequal risk.
The television rights of state executions can bring in millions of revenue to cash strapped states.
If cash is king, then debt is bondage and credit is cards are chains.
Retire young, rich, and fabulous not old, broke, and ordinary.
Hedge funds are modern day alchemy.
The American dream is made in communist China.
Hollywood Video is renaming itself to Bankruptcy Video.

Question

Did dinosaurs also taste like chicken?
Is Lady Gaga the new Madonna?
When Ke$ha goes broke how will she spell her name?
Are you a pusher or a pleaser?
What is the cost of easy money?
Do we need black boxes in cars?
Is China broke?
Is NASA controlled by the greys?
Is your job holding you back?
Is the Prius the new Pinto?
Are hotel key cards the new baseball card?
Is there such a thing as tofu salmon?
Is PHP 6 the new Perl 6?
Is a great hack art or science?
Which is worse, a hater or a debtor?
Is there a sub-atomic unit of time that cannot be divided into smaller time elements?
If your body is an instrument, what part of your body needs some fine tuning?
What is your body language saying about you?
What color are your feelings?
Are you a revolutionary or a rebel?
Is what you like how you are like?

Randumb

95% of statistics confuse 82% of the population.
Two 50%s don’t add up to one 100%.
Headache in the membrane.
Time is not digital, it is a fractal.
Misfortune Cookie: What you are doing now is probably illegal, in bed.
I bet prehistoric animals would have been delicious, like a T-Rex t-bone steak.
Uncle Sam: The Puppet Master
Hate grows with compound interest.
Killing the Buddha in the name of! And now you do what they told you! And now you do what they told you!
I would like the my unauthorized autobiography to be named either Same Difference, It Wasn’t Me, or Who Dat Up In Herre?
Don’t trust the 800 pound gorilla as far as you can trow it especially if it is riding the elephant in the room.
People’s perception of others is often wrong, worse yet is our perception of other people’s perception of us.
Create a purple cow, make your competitors into a donkeys, and milk the golden goose out of everything it is worth.
Even a tough cookie softens up with a little milk.
A flower’s petal is nature version of a solar panel.
Math is the sum of all my fears.
Ignorance is always refreshening.
Engaged should be the new married.
Stuck between space and time.
Sometimes cheap is better than free.
In the future everything will buzz, tweet, or beep.
Control freaks usually want to control what they can’t do.
People pleasers don’t please themselves.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you unless you think the worst if everyone all the time.
There is no better time for happiness than now.
Allegedly Tiger Woods likes green jackets and golden showers
Tiger Woods and Jesse James should be on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew.

Overheard

OH: Homelessness, such a turnoff.
OH: Your high horse is a pink pony, get off it. It makes you look stupid.
OH: You are going to choke on my positive energy.
OH: Did you cancel your mind?
OH: What is the point of caffeine free coke? Do I have to put coffee or crack into my coke?

Politricks

On certain countries in the middle east, women’s equal rights movements means they can also be suicide bombers.
I’ve heard of the Tea Party Movement, now the Coffee Party Movement, I’m waiting to start the Beer Party after my buzz goes down.

Propagandon’t

You are not a robot, you are just programmed to think like one.
The news are re-enactments.

War Racket

There is a cold war between China and Google.
To prolong war is to a crime against humanity.
The problem with having a large standing army is that someone will eventually want to deploy it.

Craporation

If China doesn’t care about basic human rights, why do companies think it cares about their copyrights?
Google deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for leaving China and giving up that market to Microsoft/Yahoo would collaborate with the gestapo.

Google’s Realtime Search or Mind Reading

BlahBlog — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:41:46 +0000

Google’s realtime search results are freaky fast. If you publish a new blog post, jump over to Google and search for your brand new blog post article, it would already have been indexed, cached, and showing up on Google’s results. How does Google do that? I think that in the future, Google will index our brains so that when you lose your keys, you can type “Where are my keys?” in the search box and the top result will be where you left your keys last. But on a serious note, I think Google has developed a Skynet, an artificial intelligent system based on the queries people search for. Currently, the Google Skynet project is stuck answering, HOW IS BABBY FORMEd?

Social Media Top Links February 2010: Google Buzz Privacy Debacle

BlahBlog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:38:03 +0000

Here are the top links, articles, and news regarding social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. The big news this month was the announcement and initial release of Google Buzz. Google Buzz generated a lot of buzz with users, mostly because of it’s thoughtless disregard for user’s privacy.

Twitter

Facebook

Google Buzz

Fuzzy Buzz February 2010: One Month with Google Buzz

BlahBlog — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:37:25 +0000

After using Google Buzz for a month I have started to find my grove and how that fits with my social networking self. If you are using Google Buzz, be sure to follow me I’ll follow back. Here are some recent buzz posts from a variety of topics.

All About Buzz

With any new service there is always a land rush for the best vanity url, profile name, and followers?
The short for Google Mail is GMail. The abbreviation for Google Voice is GVoice. Will Google Buzz be shorten down to GBuzz? What about Guzz?
That is the plural of buzz? Buzzes?
I expected Microsoft to blatantly copy Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare before Google.
Google Buzz is a new opportunity for the race to reach 1,000,000 followers. I hope @aplusk hasn’t heard of Google Buzz yet as it would give me a head start.
What I like about Buzz is that it has not been taken over by marketing and SEO bot accounts, just like the early days of Twitter.
What is the verb of using Google Buzz? Buzzing? Like, “I can’t talk cause I am buzzing right now.”
Having a buzz attack.
I’m going to buzz my facebook to tweet my tumblr post on myspace and blog about it.
Remember when following someone meant stalking… Now it means, friending.
I don’t know how to find the Google Buzz posts that I liked. Anybody know where to find liked posts?
I think that Google and Facebook are in a battle for your friends. But it feels more like a Belfast brawl cage fight… Google and Apple are battling it out in in the mobile space with tit for tat guerrilla warfare… i.e. you can use the word ‘Android’ to describe you app on the Apple App Store. Now Google will suck a lot of the hot air valuation from Facebook. I think Jason Calacanis stated that Facebook lost half it’s value because of Google Buzz… and Microsoft is trying to pick a fight with Google in the search space with Bing but it is not getting much traction.
When commenting in the middle of the Buzz stream, people notice the comment box flicker and jump around as other posts around the one you are commenting are updated with new comments. If you don’t like the flickering, I get’s me dizzy after a while, click on the post’s time stamp in the upper right corner. The link is to the page for this one post and it does have the jumpy flickering visible when commenting in the middle of your stream.
I am not sure how Google will combat the additional spam I expect because of Google Buzz and Google Profiles. But I imagine, spammers and marketers are already hard at work developing spam bots that will follow everyone possible and then it is very easy to figure out peoples email address by adding at gmail.com at the end of you profile user name which is public, visible, and searchable.
When Twitter first came out Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose had the most followers for the longest time because the early adopters where mostly technologists. But once celebrities and mass media discovered Twitter, and after the stop laughing at the concept, they quickly gained the most followers and brought on new users. Leo Laporte currently has over 6K++ followers. Just wait until Britney Spears gets her buzz on.
Ansel Adams would not have had used Flickr, Shakespeare would not had has used Twitter, Ghandi would not have had used Facebook, and Columbus would not have had used Foursquare.. But I am sure they would all have had used Google Buzz.
How does one get verified on Google Buzz/Profile? I certify myself. Does my mom need to call Google to verify my identity? What else will Google verify? What I really need is an alibi and some receipts from a convenience store in Albuquerque, New Mexico for last night.
There is a lot of negative reaction regarding the privacy failures with Google Buzz. I think that the problem with Google Buzz is not that it is integrated in GMail. The problem is the defaults of Google Buzz, including auto-follow, and public profiles, and the inability to use a public profile name other than your private GMail user name, the blocking functionality does not seem to work, etc. Google pulled a Facebook move in terms of privacy… Their motto of ‘do no evil’ did not stop them from doing something so stupid.
There are a few things I like Buzz over Twitter. The ability to edit buzzes after they have been posted and commented on, and the ability to post more than 140 characters at a time. What I don’t like is that, unlike Facebook, is that you can’t delete comments left on you posts from trolls or stalkers or folks buzzing on their own supply. Even after you block spammers their comments are still visible in your posts.
Posting on Google Buzz feels like posting a medium size blog entry. First we had blogs where we can post long form articles, then came microblogs like twitter, and now we are moving back up with medium size blogs like Buzz and Posterous were we can easily post a paragraph or two.

Buzzing Enlightenment

For those that have not attained enlightenment it is some special to attain, for those that have achieve enlightenment it is not worth mentioning.
I feature I hate in my iPhone 3GS is that when listening to music, if you shake or jolt the phone it shuffles to some random song. I feel like shaking a bitch when that happens!
I think one problem with anything that Microsoft does is that everything they develop looks like Windows, which is based on Windows 3.1. Windows CE, Windows Tablet, Windows Mobile, it all looks like Windows. I mean, they ported Microsoft Office to their mobile platforms to look like it does on the desktop.
Is Comcast trying to re-brand themselves as XFINITY? Don’t they know that a rose with any other name smells as sweet, and that bad customer service with any other name sucks the same, if not worse because now they confused you as to who you are calling to complain about your cable being out?
Tiger Woods saying “Elin never hit me that night or any other night” is as truthful as Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
What is the must have Apple software? Apple Aperture, Microsoft Office for Mac, iWork, iLife, VMWare Fusion 3, MacSpeech Dictate, Pixelmator, Comic Life, Mobile Me, other? What other Mac software should I have?

Google’s Super Bowl XLIV Commercial

BlahBlog — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:49:27 +0000

Google ran an ad on Super Bowl XLIV for their search engine. The ad told a romantic story with a series of search queries but it was not as iconic as Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad but to privacy advocates it reminds them of Big Brother.

Google ran an advertisement during Super Bowl XLIV between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts. Google ran the Search Stories: Parisian Love on national television during the Super Bowl broadcast. The video received over a millions views on YouTube as of this writing. The ad is part of Google’s Search Stories campaign. You can view other views of the Search Stories campaign on the Google’s searchstories user account on YouTube.

The Parisian Love ad starts off with Google’s iconic search box. Over a series of search queries entered into the search box, the ad pieces together the love story between an American student studying abroad in France with a local Parisian girl. The queries speak volumes of this intimate courtship, but fails to bring up the privacy concerns voiced by privacy advocates.

The first query in the ad reads “study abroad paris france.” The following query reveals that the student is new to the City of Lights, the query reads “cafe near the louve” and this demonstrates how Google search corrects the spelling of the Louvre. The ad also demonstrates Google’s translation feature where you type a expression in a foreign language and have Google translate it into another. Another query, “chocolate shops paris france,” demonstrates Google’s local feature which lists business names, addresses, and phone numbers that match your search query. Another great Google feature in the Super Bowl ad is how if you enter a flight number Google will return the flight status on the search page. The last search query in the ad is “How to assemble a crib.”

The Google Super Bowl ad has inspired a series of parody ads, such as one titled Is Tiger Feeling Lucky Today? which plays makes fun of Tiger Wood’s infidelities. It is important to note that Google does store search queries and can easily piece together the search stories of your life, whether you are searching for a new job or long lost friend.