
A Cheap Spying Tool With a High Creepy Factor - jzwinck
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/08/02/a-cheap-spying-tool-with-a-high-creepy-factor/?from=global.home
======
Spearchucker
This reminds me of the comment from the NSA a while ago in which it said that
Snowden's documents have already changed many people's behaviour. I'm on a
reliable 4G network in London and (mostly) only go to places I'm familiar
with. The result being that location service, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC are
permanently turned off. My girlfriend has had location services turned off
since she first got an iPhone 3GS. And she won't let me use my Kinect when
she's home.

Justified or not, these things are coming up in conversation at work and with
friends a lot lately, which I find encouraging.

~~~
tspike
When the Snowden documents were released, I got into a heated debate with a
friend, who argued that he has nothing to hide.

He said he couldn't believe anyone was naïve enough to think the government
wasn't monitoring everything already, and that we elected them, so we should
trust them. He said that privacy concerns sound pretty trivial compared to
preventing incidents like the Boston Marathon bombings or apprehending the
suspects, and that he'll gladly cooperate to help stop the bad guys.

We pretty much ruined lunch for everyone with our arguing, but he has since
spent more time looking into the nuances of the topic and has said he has
changed his mind. The thought of not being able to trust the government is
really depressing to him.

~~~
jseliger
_When the Snowden documents were released, I got into a heated debate with a
friend, who argued that he has nothing to hide._

I heard Bruce Schneider being interviewed, and he said that people frequently
challenge him by saying they have nothing to hide. His two-second retort,
especially on call-in shows, is simple: "What's your salary?"

No one wants to answer in public.

~~~
lifeformed
I can list sooo many things people would want to hide:

\- Salary

\- Medical history

\- Home address

\- Phone number

\- DOB

\- SS number

\- Bank account numbers

\- Passwords

\- Photos of yourself

\- Photos of your children

\- Job search history (when you are already employed)

\- What time you'll be out of the house

\- Porn search history

~~~
diminoten
It's because you can't give that information out without also granting write
access to a person's life.

If there were a way I could give you my SSN/bank information/etc without also
granting you the ability to impersonate me, I'd gladly do it.

~~~
lifeformed
Yep, but that's only true for some of those things. Others, like salary and
photos of your kids, have other reasons for staying hidden (impact on social
situations and safety).

~~~
diminoten
Eh, if I didn't think my company would be upset with me telling you what I
make, I'd let you know. It's not a big deal to me. You could probably figure
it out based on where I live and what I do with my free time anyway.

As for pictures of my kids, I don't have any. But it's a pretty terrible
argument because it perpetuates the false idea that you must want to hide
something for privacy to be necessary.

I'd bet large sums of money Bruce Schneier has never used this line of defense
against the "nothing to hide" argument.

~~~
sixbrx
If you work somewhere that's anything like places I've ever worked, then I
think knowing your salary might have a bigger impact on some of your
colleagues than you might think, eventually causing some blowback to come your
way. Just my observation from past experience.

~~~
diminoten
Yeah I know, but that's not my burden, that's theirs.

~~~
diminoten
I'd also like to point out that I promised not to give that information away,
and regardless of the privacy implications, I can't in good consciousness
break my own word.

------
brianbreslin
Something we aren't noticing is, if he can build one that small with off the
shelf parts, the NSA could and probably does have devices like these as small
as quarters or perhaps embedded in dummy iPhone charging cubes. I would bet
the Feds can build out miniature versions for a few hundred bucks a piece.
Which in defense dollars means they are disposable.

------
tankenmate
The article also mentions that Weev exploited a security hole in AT&T's
servers; a complete misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the truth.

~~~
ra
What is the truth?

~~~
angersock
If I'm not mistaken, a bunch of GET requests against a public API,
unfortunately setup to not require authorization credentials and yet still
exposing nominally 'private' data.

Nuance is a hell of a thing.

~~~
fsckin
114,000 '200 OK' responses = 41 months in prison.

~~~
khuey
16 minutes in prison per request.

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anotherhue
This is a collection of media buzz words strung together to create an article,
it's about as insightful as claiming that network analysers can spy on network
data.

I wonder why he only used one pi per channel though, I think they have the
horsepower to sniff perhaps three.

~~~
nwh
The USB power is very very low with them. Even one is pushing it reall, any
more would need a bulky powered hub.

~~~
icebraining
Since the Pi takes 5V just like any USB device, he could re-use the same power
adapter and just get a splitter USB cable; he didn't need a full blown powered
USB with its own power adapter.

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siddboots
Can anyone give a technical account of how this is achieved?

The article makes it sound as though it relies on unsecured wifi data, but
also states that "Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors
could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.”" It also talks about iMessage,
and dropbox, and other application layer data.

I couldn't make sense of it.

~~~
asmithmd1
iPhones are very "chatty" when not connected to a WiFi access point. They
repeatedly try to find access points they have connected to before -
broadcasting both their MAC address and the SSID of prior access points.

Android phones are completely silent even with the WiFi on when not connected
to an access point.

~~~
voltagex_
I don't think they'll be silent any more unless you turn off 4.3's "Allow
scanning by services" option.

~~~
sangnoir
They'll still be silent: "Allow scanning by services" is listen-only with no
transmission.

------
noonespecial
Its awesome that Pi's are finding their way into stuff like this but its still
a tiny bit of round hole, square peg.

You could do it for 1/2 the price with a TP-Link TL-WR703N and OpenWRT. Lots
of these types of projects are already install-and-go ready for OpenWRT.

~~~
zokier
Indeed, like the somewhat well-known "WiFi Pineapple":

[http://hackaday.com/2013/04/29/wifi-pineapple-project-
uses-u...](http://hackaday.com/2013/04/29/wifi-pineapple-project-uses-updated-
hardware-for-man-in-the-middle-attacks/)

------
tomjen3
Screw unsecured wifi - most peoples wifi is encrypted, these days (at least
around here).

I wonder how secure 3g connections are? Because it would seem to one could get
a lot more information out of those.

Edit: speling

~~~
rickyc091
While I didn't attend this talk, someone mentioned that there was a talk at
Defcon where 3g networks were being sniffed.

[https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html](https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html)
Do-It-Yourself Cellular IDS "For less than $500, you can build your own
cellular intrusion detection system to detect malicious activity through your
own local femtocell. Our team will show how we leveraged root access on a
femtocell, reverse engineered the activation process, and turned it into a
proof-of-concept cellular network intrusion monitoring system.

We leveraged commercial Home Node-Bs (""femtocells"") to create a 3G cellular
network sniffer without needing to reimplement the UMTS or CDMA2000 protocol
stacks. Inside a Faraday cage, we connected smartphones to modified femtocells
running Linux distributions and redirected traffic to a Snort instance. Then
we captured traffic from infected phones and showed how Snort was able to
detect and alert upon malicious traffic. We also wrote our own CDMA protocol
dissector in order to better analyze CDMA traffic."

------
cupcake-unicorn
I think the author of this article doesn't really understand the technology
behind packet sniffing, open wifi, what packets iPhones are sending, etc.

The article makes it sound like somehow this "device" (really just a computer
- a Raspberry Pi) is somehow some special technology that people should watch
out for. When I can do all of these things on any laptop on an open network.
And in fact, that's going to be less attention grabbing in a cafe than some
mysterious black box under a table.

It's a shame that the take away message wasn't that _any_ open network is a
security risk, not just when someone happens to have one of these "gadgets",
but anyone on the network with a laptop can do the same thing.

~~~
jodrellblank
The point is not "your phone/tablet network traffic can be overheard", the
point is "it can be overheard and uniquely identified, therefore anyone
putting cheap access points around your area can track which ones you go near,
and when".

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cliveowen
Unencrypted data sent through public wi-fi can be snooped on, that's as new as
sliced bread.

~~~
patrickaljord
Don't despair, something great could come out of this article. A
representative could read it, freak out and propose a bill that would ban
raspberry-pi and regulate the hell out of the booming open hardware industry.

~~~
walshemj
you think the competitors of the Pi in the US are not doing this all ready.

There is a lot of NIH in the comments about the pi on HN and ./

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thejosh
See also: snoopy.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsn7_4qUdwk&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsn7_4qUdwk&feature=youtu.be)

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readme
How would these boxes pick up 3g/4g traffic? Also, to pick up WiFi wouldn't
the communications have to be unencrypted?

~~~
wikiburner
He said "public wifi". That gave me a bit of a jolt too at first.

I wonder if there are any known instances of someone monitoring and collecting
a high value target's encrypted home wifi (say a CEO before earnings, or
someone at the department of labor) with the goal of cracking it.

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b0z0
Definitely not even necessary to buy all that equipment. My friend and I do
this with Wireshark on his laptop all the time.

~~~
rickyc091
Yeah, wireshark can definitely sniff the network, but he was trying to point
out that for $57 you can make ten of these and plug it in to empty outlets
around the city, hotels, cafes, etc. and it would record data and send it back
to a server....

Now imagine the government placed these nodes everywhere... they would
basically have a fixed GPS on you.

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coin
Why do sites like this go out of their way to disable pinchzoom? Why remove
useful functionality?

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x0054
When they mention a wifi unique identifier do they mean a MAC address?

