FBI Activates Cell Phones Remotely for Wiretapping

[TheCigSmokingMan]

FBI Activates Cell Phones Remotely for Wiretapping
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5184

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.


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Never owned a cell phone or beeper And I plan on keeping that way! I even unplug my phone jack when I'm not using the phone! But with Radio headsets I'm probably wasting my time

I'm sure the NSA has been doing this with regular phones for decades anyway...

TheCigMan

 

[TheCigSmokingMan]

FBI Uses Spyware To Track Bomb Hoax

FBI Uses Spyware To Track Bomb Hoax

Frederick Lane, newsfactor.com
Thu Jul 19, 12:08 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20070719/bs_nf/53970;_ylt=Ak1roLKfxPuBUweEbTBk0p0jtBAF

A recently released FBI affidavit in the prosecution of a suspected bomb hoaxer has revealed the development and deployment of an FBI spyware program called the Computer & Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV).

According to Special Agent Norm B. Sanders, Jr., who applied for an affidavit authorizing the use of CIPAV, the program is capable of secretly sending to the FBI information about a computer's IP and MAC addresses, other environment variables, and certain registry-type information.

Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People for Internet Responsibility and moderator of the Privacy Forum, said he was not surprised by the information contained in the affidavit.

"Look, many people have known or suspected for a significant time that various agencies are using this technique for surveillance," he said. "It was inevitable that this type of software tool would be developed by law enforcement, particularly given the advances in techniques for concealing and encrypting electronic information."

Bomb Hoax Investigation

The search warrant authorizing the use of CIPAV was sought in the case of 15-year-old Josh Glazebrook, a student at Timberline High School in Washington who was suspected of making bomb threats. A handwritten note containing a threat was discovered on May 30, and the high school subsequently received e-mail threats and was hit by a denial-of-service attack.

A week later, another student reported receiving an invitation from a MySpace account with the handle "Timberlinebombinfo," asking her to post a link to the bomb threats on her MySpace page. She reported the invitation to local law enforcement, which subsequently learned that 33 students had received a similar invitation.

When the FBI traced the IP address of the e-mail and MySpace accounts, they were led to a hijacked computer in the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy. Having reached a dead end, they determined that the next step was to send CIPAV to the e-mail address from which the bomb threats were sent.

The information collected by CIPAV led to the arrest of Glazebrook, who pleaded guilty on Monday to identity theft, felony harassment, and making bomb threats. He was sentenced to 90 days in juvenile detention.

CIPAV a Powerful Weapon

While noting that the Glazebrook case is not particularly remarkable, Weinstein said that it does raise concerns about the power of CIPAV and what types of information is being gathered by law enforcement. "Once you've got something like this on someone's computer," he noted, "you can basically do anything and learn everything about what that person is doing."

The recent revelations about the scope of the FBI's use of National Security Letters, Weinstein said, undermines the overall confidence in security and law enforcement agencies, and raises questions about whether a program like CIPAV will only be used as the FBI says it is being used. National Security Letters are subpoenas allowing FBI agents to require phone companies, banks, credit agencies, and ISPs to turn over customer records.

"If techniques like this are going to be used by the FBI and other agencies," Weinstein said, "then we need to have 100 percent trust in the agencies about when such tools will be deployed and under what circumstances. That's the challenge for this society."

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Tapping Cell Phones and Computers... It seems the FBI is learning from their task master the NSA...

TheCigMan