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    French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones

    news.movim.eu / Schneier · Wednesday, 12 July - 20:23

The French police are getting new surveillance powers :

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5.

[…]

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

[…]

During a debate on Wednesday, MPs in President Emmanuel Macron’s camp inserted an amendment limiting the use of remote spying to “when justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime” and “for a strictly proportional duration.” Any use of the provision must be approved by a judge, while the total duration of the surveillance cannot exceed six months. And sensitive professions including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges and MPs would not be legitimate targets.

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    Identifying People Using Cell Phone Location Data

    news.movim.eu / Schneier · Monday, 9 January, 2023 - 04:50 · 1 minute

The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested . This is the interesting part:

Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according to court documents.

Nowadays, it seems like an obvious thing to do—although the search is probably unconstitutional . But way back in 2012, the Canadian CSEC—that’s their NSA—did some top-secret work on this kind of thing. The document is part of the Snowden archive, and I wrote about it:

The second application suggested is to identify a particular person whom you know visited a particular geographical area on a series of dates/times. The example in the presentation is a kidnapper. He is based in a rural area, so he can’t risk making his ransom calls from that area. Instead, he drives to an urban area to make those calls. He either uses a burner phone or a pay phone, so he can’t be identified that way. But if you assume that he has some sort of smart phone in his pocket that identifies itself over the Internet, you might be able to find him in that dataset. That is, he might be the only ID that appears in that geographical location around the same time as the ransom calls and at no other times.

There’s a whole lot of surveillance you can do if you can follow everyone, everywhere, all the time. I don’t even think turning your cell phone off would help in this instance. How many people in the Washington area turned their phones off during exactly the times of the Washington power station attacks? Probably a small enough number to investigate them all.

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    Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls

    news.movim.eu / Schneier · Tuesday, 20 December, 2022 - 23:04

They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network :

“You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”

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“Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials,” the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yoto smartphones.

“But everyone just kept using the iPhone as a second mobile because it was much better. We would just keep the iPhone in the car’s glove compartment for when we got back from work. In the end, the ministry gave up and stopped caring. If the top doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect any discipline in the regular army?”

This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a Russian problem. Here’s a more general article on the problem from 2020.

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    What the advent of 5G—mmWave and otherwise—will mean for online gaming

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 24 August, 2020 - 13:00 · 1 minute

Artist

Enlarge / Artist's impression of gaming with 5G. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

There's been a lot of buzz about 5G over the last year—much of it, sadly, none too coherent. Today, we're going to take a detailed, realistic look at how we can expect 5G to improve cellular broadband, with a focus on the impact we might be able to expect on gaming. Surprise: the news is actually not bad!

What is 5G?

Before we can talk about what to expect from 5G, we need to talk about what 5G actually is—and isn't. 5G, short for "fifth generation," is the next cellular communications protocol. 5G is not, specifically, any given frequency or band. There are two major bands 5G can operate on—millimeter wave, and sub-6GHz. Exactly which frequencies within those bands your devices will use varies from carrier to carrier, and country to country.

Up close with a cellular transmission tower.

Up close with a cellular transmission tower. (credit: George Frey / AFP / Getty Images)

The sub-6GHz band isn't new territory; the frequencies in use there are the same ones carriers already use for 4G / LTE service. Sub-6Ghz can further be divided into low-band—under 1GHz—and mid-band, at 2.5GHz-3.5GHz. Low-band offers greater range from the tower, but at lower speeds; the mid-band offers greater speed, but lower range. It's worth noting that "lower range" isn't necessarily a curse—the greater the range from the tower, the more users you have sharing the same finite amount of airtime, and the lower the speeds and less predictable the latency you'll see.

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