This one is for Kat

[Pat K]

Live Tracking of Mobile Phones Prompts Court Fights on Privacy
By MATT RICHTEL
Most Americans carry cellphones, but many may not know that government agencies can track their movements through the signals emanating from the handset.

In recent years, law enforcement officials have turned to cellular technology as a tool for easily and secretly monitoring the movements of suspects as they occur. But this kind of surveillance - which investigators have been able to conduct with easily obtained court orders - has now come under tougher legal scrutiny.

In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants.

The rulings, issued by magistrate judges in New York, Texas and Maryland, underscore the growing debate over privacy rights and government surveillance in the digital age.

With mobile phones becoming as prevalent as conventional phones (there are 195 million cellular subscribers in this country), wireless companies are starting to exploit the phones' tracking abilities. For example, companies are marketing services that turn phones into even more precise global positioning devices for driving or allowing parents to track the whereabouts of their children through the handsets.

Not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies want to exploit this technology, too - which means more courts are bound to wrestle with what legal standard applies when government agents ask to conduct such surveillance.

Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on. Even if the phone is not in use it is communicating with cellphone tower sites, and the wireless provider keeps track of the phone's position as it travels. The operators have said that they turn over location information when presented with a court order to do so.

The recent rulings by the magistrates, who are appointed by a majority of the federal district judges in a given court, do not bind other courts. But they could significantly curtail access to cell location data if other jurisdictions adopt the same reasoning. (The government's requests in the three cases, with their details, were sealed because they involve investigations still under way.)

"It can have a major negative impact," said Clifford S. Fishman, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office and a professor at the Catholic University of America's law school in Washington. "If I'm on an investigation and I need to know where somebody is located who might be committing a crime, or, worse, might have a hostage, real-time knowledge of where this person is could be a matter of life or death."

Prosecutors argue that having such information is crucial to finding suspects, corroborating their whereabouts with witness accounts, or helping build a case for a wiretap on the phone - especially now that technology gives criminals greater tools for evading law enforcement.

The government has routinely used records of cellphone calls and caller locations to show where a suspect was at a particular time, with access to those records obtainable under a lower legal standard. (Wireless operators keep cellphone location records for varying lengths of time, from several months to years.)

But it is unclear how often prosecutors have asked courts for the right to obtain cell-tracking data as a suspect is moving. And the government is not required to report publicly when it makes such requests.

Legal experts say that such live tracking has tended to happen in drug-trafficking cases. In a 2003 Ohio case, for example, federal drug agents used cell tracking data to arrest and convict two men on drug charges.

Mr. Fishman said he believed that the number of requests had become more prevalent in the last two years - and the requests have often been granted with a stroke of a magistrate's pen.

Prosecutors, while acknowledging that they have to get a court order before obtaining real-time cell-site data, argue that the relevant standard is found in a 1994 amendment to the 1986 Stored Communications Act, a law that governs some aspects of cellphone surveillance.

The standard calls for the government to show "specific and articulable facts" that demonstrate that the records sought are "relevant and material to an ongoing investigation" - a standard lower than the probable-cause hurdle.

The magistrate judges, however, ruled that surveillance by cellphone - because it acts like an electronic tracking device that can follow people into homes and other personal spaces - must meet the same high legal standard required to obtain a search warrant to enter private places.

"Permitting surreptitious conversion of a cellphone into a tracking device without probable cause raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns, especially when the phone is monitored in the home or other places where privacy is reasonably expected," wrote Stephen W. Smith, a magistrate in Federal District Court in the Southern District of Texas, in his ruling.

"The distinction between cell site data and information gathered by a tracking device has practically vanished," wrote Judge Smith. He added that when a phone is monitored, the process is usually "unknown to the phone users, who may not even be on the phone."

Prosecutors in the recent cases also unsuccessfully argued that the expanded police powers under the USA Patriot Act could be read as allowing cellphone tracking under a standard lower than probable cause.

As Judge Smith noted in his 31-page opinion, the debate goes beyond a question of legal standard. In fact, the nature of digital communications makes it difficult to distinguish between content that is clearly private and information that is public. When information is communicated on paper, for instance, it is relatively clear that information written on an envelope deserves a different kind of protection than the contents of the letter inside.

But in a digital era, the stream of data that carries a telephone conversation or an e-mail message contains a great deal of information - like when and where the communications originated.

In the digital era, what's on the envelope and what's inside of it, "have absolutely blurred," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.

And that makes it harder for courts to determine whether a certain digital surveillance method invokes Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

In the cellular-tracking cases, some legal experts say that the Store Communications Act refers only to records of where a person has been, i.e. historical location data, but does not address live tracking.

Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group that has filed briefs in the case in the Eastern District of New York, said the law did not speak to that use. James Orenstein, the magistrate in the New York case, reached the same conclusion, as did Judge Smith in Houston and James Bredar, a magistrate judge in the Federal District Court in Maryland.

Orin S. Kerr, a professor at the George Washington School of Law and a former trial attorney in the Justice Department specializing in computer law, said the major problem for prosecutors was Congress did not appear to have directly addressed the question of what standard prosecutors must meet to obtain cell-site information as it occurs.

"There's no easy answer," Mr. Kerr said. "The law is pretty uncertain here."

Absent a Congressional directive, he said, it is reasonable for magistrates to require prosecutors to meet the probable-cause standard.

Mr. Fishman of Catholic University said that such a requirement could hamper law enforcement's ability to act quickly because of the paperwork required to show probable cause. But Mr. Fishman said he also believed that the current law was unclear on the issue.

Judge Smith "has written a very, very persuasive opinion," Mr. Fishman said. "The government's argument has been based on some tenuous premises." He added that he sympathized with prosecutors' fears.

"Something that they've been able to use quite successfully and usefully is being taken away from them or made harder to get," Mr. Fishman said. "I'd be very, very frustrated."



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[Kat Kanning]

I was just joking before when I said cell phones were evil, but turns out they are!   

[Pat McCotter]

Can You Fear Me Now?
The cell phone goes from annoying to evil.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, at 3:45 PM ET

In your right hand, you hold the source of all the evil in the world. A few days ago, it was the source of some medium-sized evil?a stray ring in a movie theater or a mournful text message to an ex-girlfriend after midnight. But things have changed with your cell phone. It is no longer just a nuisance. It is death incarnate.

In the recent months, cell phones have become newly terrifying. Our once-mundane cellular-inspired fears?of brain cancer, of terrorists using them to detonate remote devices?have been replaced by more gruesome visions. Horror maestros from Stephen King to Takashi Miike have taken our ambivalent post-9/11 feelings about cell phones (they played a crucial role in nearly staving off a terrorist attack, but they were also the source of incredibly painful goodbyes) and reworked them into a vehicle for evil?ghosts, plagues, and rampaging psychos. The cell phone, in their hands, is not a tool of empowerment but another instrument of terror. Humanity's going to hell, and you don't dare call your mother.

Stephen King's Cell, which sits at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, is the bloodiest encapsulation of this worldview. A pulse sent out over cell phones by someone?Islamic terrorists? disgruntled hackers??turns cell-toting humans into predators who bite one another's necks and club one another's children. Soon, the zombified masses are roaming the streets by day and pausing to "recharge" by night?lying side-by-side in moonlit stadiums, like a thousand Nokias resting in their cradles. It's up to a crusty band of outsiders?read: Luddites who cling to land lines?to battle their way out of the cities and regroup in wireless-free zones up north. "What's the market penetration?" one of them asks, surely the first time those words have been uttered in a Stephen King novel. So despicably evil is the cell phone that the survivors rarely speak its name?they indicate it with a sad gesture, a thumb at the ear and a pinky held at the mouth.

Cell-phone terror rules the cinema, too. In When a Stranger Calls, a remake of a 1979 horror movie that opened on top of the box office last weekend, a teenage girl is forced into indentured babysitting for going "over plan" by 800 minutes. While looking after two children in a giant house, she's terrorized by a cell-phone-wielding maniac?Hollywood's favorite villain, it seems, since similar psychos appeared in Hostel (2005) and the Scream trilogy before that.

The apogee of mobile-phone horror is Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, a 2003 Japanese film released in the United States last year. In it, Japanese teenagers robotically swap numbers and text messages the way their horror-movie predecessors used to trade sexual favors. One by one, their phones emit an unfamiliar ring tone indicating that they've received a message. The message, dated a few days in the future, is their own voice?a recording of their desperate last moments on earth.

To be sure, the cell phone is merely the latest piece of demonic hardware. It follows the evil computer (2001: A Space Odyssey) and the evil car (King's own Christine), to name just two. And its scariness springs from some of the same sources?it's a pedestrian object hiding in plain sight, and humanity is perhaps too reliant on it for its own good. But because of the eerie way it mixes the public and private, the cell phone, perhaps more than anything to come before it, seems like an ideal instrument for horror.

After all, we already hate cell phones. We hate the reception, hate other users, and hate our billing plans, and it comes as no surprise when the above are revealed to be the work of a demonic force from the beyond. But what really bugs us is that cell phones clumsily merge the public and private spheres?what sociologist Hans Geser has called a "transspatial version of particularistic communalism," and what the rest of us call rudeness. In Cell, King takes the usual complaint about cell phones to a new level. Before the phone plague, King depicts a woman ordering a sundae from a Mister Softee ice cream truck while absent-mindedly babbling into her phone. It was an "act which would have once been considered almost insufferably rude," he writes, and as the woman becomes infected and tries to take a bite out of the ice-cream man, it seems like only a slight loss of civility. Likewise, King's zombified hordes resemble the cell-phone users plodding down urban sidewalks, each grunting to his own tune and oblivious to the world around him.

Moreover, as King notes, the cell phone is the only truly populist menace. For all the attention lavished on the dark corners of the Internet, the Web remains a fairly rarefied domain. Cell phones reach across race, class, and gender?they're an equal-opportunity device. If cell phones make bourgeois life all the more livable, they also enable drug dealers and prostitutes who used to rely on pay phones and beepers. One of the delights of Cell is watching professional women in power suits join ranks with the criminal class, dopey teenagers, construction workers, and the elderly to create a roiling, multilayered zombie class?as King puts it, "the Tower of Babel all over again ? and on nothing but electronic cobwebs."

On the level of plotting, cell phones can make a horror story more difficult to conceive. Andrew Klavan, who is writing the American remake of One Missed Call, says, "If I had to pick two things that have changed the world of genre writing, one would be the fall of the Berlin Wall, which eliminated a whole genre of fiction. And the other would be cell phones. The question everybody asks about crime stories is, 'Why don't they just call they police?' And now, with cell phones, you have to come up with a pretty good explanation."

But on the flip side, cell phones have dragged horror into the light. The old idea of fear was being trapped in a dark house alone. The new fear is of interconnectedness, of being perilously joined to the rest of humanity. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1964 story "Dial F for Frankenstein," the world's land lines all ring at the same moment, signaling that the phone system had gained consciousness and was rising up to enslave humanity. "For homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled," Clarke wrote, and these days, market penetration being what it is, Armageddon is more likely to announce itself with a custom ring tone. The final gruesome twist of One Missed Call is that every time a teen dies, the demon spirit selects a fresh victim from his "contacts" list. It's enough to make you rethink your weekend nights. You seem nice, baby, but do you have to program me into your phone? Can't we do it like the old days and use a cocktail napkin?


Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.

[Kat Kanning]

I always knew it.  Stephen King has tapped into some cosmic, universal truth with this one.

[Lloyd Danforth]

King has a way of taking common everyday stuff and turning it into horror.  One of the best examples of this is 'Ten O'clock People'.  I think that is the title.

[Pat McCotter]

King has a way of taking common everyday stuff and turning it into horror.  One of the best examples of this is 'Ten O'clock People'.  I think that is the title.

Oooo, cool!

The Ten O'Clock People
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Ten O'Clock People" is a short story by Stephen King published in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Unlike many of King's stories that which place in fictional places like Castle Rock, Maine, "Ten O'Clock People" takes place in the distinctly recognizable Boston, Massachusetts. In the story, the main character, who is a smoker trying hard to quit for health reasons, discovers a horrible aspect of reality that only those attempting to quit like him are capable of seeing - that many of the people living among us in positions of power, including many police and political figures and even the Vice President, are in fact inhuman monsters disguised as people. A unique chemical balance, caused by his smoking only on his morning break (thus the reference to Ten O' Clock in the title) makes him able to see the true nature of these creatures through their disguises.
In King's novels Song of Susannah, Hearts in Atlantis, and Dark Tower series, similar creatures called "can-toi" or "low men in yellow coats", appear as minions of the Crimson King. Whether those creatures are intended to be the same creatures as those appearing in this story is unclear.
In the book's ending notes, King relates that this story had one of the shortest gestation periods of any of his pieces--he conceived and wrote it feverishly over a mere three days.
The story has many similarities to John Carpenter's film They Live.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ten_O%27Clock_People"

[Lloyd Danforth]

Ever since I read that, whenever I drive past a building with smokers in front of it, or, worse, have to walk thru a gamut of smokers to get inside a building, I think: 'Ten O'clock People'.

[Kat Kanning]

 How to Kill RFID Tags with a Cell Phone

Scientific American | February 15 2006

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags--tiny wireless circuits that derive their power from radio waves and cost just pennies to make--have quickly found their way into identification badges, shipping containers, even ordinary store products. Because, unlike barcodes, the tags can be read surreptitiously, a number of groups have raised privacy concerns. To address these concerns, leading RFID makers have created so-called "Gen 2" chips that will divulge their data only after a reader transmits the correct password. The new chips can also be triggered by a different password to silently self-destruct, for example as a customer leaves a store.

Encryption protects the password transmission. But renowned cryptographer Adi Shamir of Weizmann University claims to have found a way to bypass the encryption scheme and obtain the self-destruct password using technology no more sophisticated than that in a common cell phone.

Shamir announced the discovery this morning at the 2006 RSA Conference, a large computer security meeting opening today in San Jose, Calif. "Everyone expects that there will soon be billions of these tags in circulation," Shamir noted. "We bought one of the major-brand RFID tags and tried to break into it by power analysis," he said.

RFID tags have no battery or internal power source; they obtain the energy they need to operate by sucking it out of the radio signals they absorb. But in doing so, every computation of the RFID circuit modifes the radio environment. Shamir and his coworkers used a simple directional antenna to monitor the power consumption of an RFID tag as they transmitted correct and incorrect passwords to the device slowly, one bit at a time.

"We could easily notice a power spike after the first bit that the chip didn't like," Shamir recalls. By starting over and modifying the offensive bit, the researchers were able to derive quickly the kill password for the tag.

"We believe that a cell phone has all the ingredients needed to detect these passwords and disable all the RFIDs in the area," Shamir says.

If confirmed by others, the flaw would raise serious questions about the suitability of current RFIDs for use in theft prevention, employee idenfication and other applications.

For more about RFID tags, see "RFID: A Key to Automating Everything," by Roy Want. Scientific American Magazine, January 2004.

[Lloyd Danforth]

So!  Cell phone are not evil!

[Kat Kanning]

No no no no no....they are only 99% evil, not completely evil.

[intergraph19]

No no no no no....they are only 99% evil, not completely evil.

Oh, the places I could go with that comment...but I'm only %60 evil myself, so I'll be good.   

[Kat Kanning]

Ask Lloyd about the vibro-setting on his phone.

[intergraph19]

Ask Lloyd about the vibro-setting on his phone.

... ...not saying a word....I'm being good....you are not making this easy!...

[Lloyd Danforth]

Ask Lloyd about the vibro-setting on his phone.

I ordered a Codpiece Phone Holster

[intergraph19]

Ask Lloyd about the vibro-setting on his phone.

I ordered a Codpiece Phone Holster

ROTFLMAO  the mental pictures THAT produces!  I can just see you at the next meeting sporting your phone...BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!