You know that for agencies that are so concerned about our security you would think that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice would be more than a little concerned about their own security when it comes to their radio communications.

However it seems that not only is it extremely easy to eavesdrop on their radio communications but with some of the radios they use it takes nothing more than a $30 toy pager to effectively jam their radio traffic.

In a new study released today researchers found that they were able to listen in on sensitive conversations that included things like descriptions of undercover agents and confidential informants as well as plans for forthcoming arrests and surveillance technology being used.

“We monitored sensitive transmissions about operations by agents in every Federal law enforcement agency in the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security,” wrote the researchers, who were led by computer science professor Matt Blaze and plan to reveal their findings Wednesday in a paper at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Francisco.

Their research also shows that the radios can be effectively jammed using a pink electronic child’s toy and that the standard used by the radios “provides a convenient means for an attacker” to continuously track the location of a radio’s user.

The authors say they are extremely concerned about the security lapses found in the radios, which are used by the FBI and Homeland Security as well as state and local law enforcement. “We strongly urge that a high priority be placed” on a “substantial top-to-bottom redesign” of the system, dubbed P25, they write.

via Wall Street Journal

The researchers have reached out to the various federal agencies possibly affected as well as creating a website that law enforcement agencies can use to help mitigate the problems.

Apparently the FBI hasn’t responded to to the news at this point.

Eavesdropping on the Fed’s radios is drop dead simple is a post from: The Inquisitr

There is no denying the fact that we all love our tech toys. Apple’s iPhone continues to sell, smart phones in general grow in popularity, GPS-based apps are just handy to have. Things like electronic swipe cards for subways, toll booths and quick payment at stores make life easier – and quicker. God knows I wouldn’t know what to do without my debit card – I hardly ever carry cash anymore.

The dark side to this though is that every time we use those ‘conveniences’ that data is collected and kept somewhere. Under the guise of aggregated data used for everything from profit projections to traffic flows this data is amassed painting a picture of where you have been and what you have done.

This collection of data has many privacy experts concerned as we are seeing cases of this type of data turning up in courtrooms. Whether it be the police using cell phone records to track people to things like E-ZPasses to show people’s travel routes at the times when crimes have occurred. Google searches have shown up in more than a few high profile murder trials.

As Adam Cohen notes in an editorial post at The New York Times this isn’t just the prevue of the police and lawyers.

Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

Sure we might realize empirically that we are probably being watched by an increasing number of CCTV cameras as we move around but in general people don’t realize the extent to which their everyday activity is recorded. People aren’t told that using that transportation card will also allow the transportation authority to track them (or that police have used those records in criminal investigations). Cell phone users aren’t told that even though they aren’t using the phone that if it is turned the companies can track their movements.

Not all of this information is being broadcasted and collected without our knowledge as the popularity of social media services like BrightKite which is a web service that let’s you broadcast your current location and the willingness of people to tell the world where and what they are doing. Sure the typical argument that advocates of these types of services, knowing or otherwise, is that if we have nothing to hide we shouldn’t be concerned about all this data collected.

Sorry but that’s a mug’s argument in my opinion. I can understand how some of this data can be helpful but in no way does it need any type of personal information attached to it. As Cohen points out in his editorial

As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form. There are many ways, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, to use cryptography and anonymization to protect locational privacy. To tell you about nearby coffee shops, a cellphone application needs to know where you are. It does not need to know who you are.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met. After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

While the lure of convenience is making this kind of data collection palatable that doesn’t mean that it is a good thing or that it should be being done.

Lure of technological convenience hides a nasty side is a post from: The Inquisitr

One has to really wonder just how bad the crime spree must be in a town of only 9,000 people that they feel the need to be able to photograph the license plates of every car entering, and leaving, the town. Especially since the town of Tiburon, on the shores of San Francisco Bay, only reported a total of 99 thefts, 20 burglaries and two auto thefts for all of 2008.

The advantage that Tiburon has in this case is that it is located on a narrow peninsula with only one road into the town and one road out of it. It is in these two spots that the Town Manager Peggy Curran is saying that the still cameras will be setup to only take pictures of license plates. According to officials the photographs would only be kept for 30 to 60 days, unless there was a crime committed during that time, before being erased.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, appreciates Tiburon officials’ efforts to limit the use of the license plate database.

But he is still not sold on the idea.

"The logic is always, well, wait a minute. If you keep pushing this, then that means we should track everyone just because some people might be bad guys. That’s not the way I think America is supposed to be."

Source: AP – Town on SF Bay wants to photograph every car

Town of 9,000 to set up photo database of visitor license plates is a post from: The Inquisitr

Back in 1600’s there was a growing feeling of discrimination against the English Roman Catholics to the point that there was a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament while King James 1 and the entire Protestant aristocracy and nobility were inside. Guy Fawkes was the man that the conspiracy put in charge of executing the plan but ended up being caught before he could light the fuse. Fast forward to today and we have a country that has the heaviest use of surveillance cameras and databases to watch its citizens. It is said that a person can be tracked as they travel from one end of London to the other.

Even though there have been numerable; and reputable, studies done that have proven that this type of surveillance does little to combat actual crime the English government continues with its surveillance of the countries population. Now it might be one thing to shrug off the use of CCTV and other forms of surveillance within you own country but it appears that the English government wants to take this one step further,

According to an article by David Leppard in today’s Times Online the government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60 million Britons. The data center will store the names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for each and every one of the 250 million passengers as they travel in and out of England every year.

Some immigration officials with knowledge of the plans admit there is likely to be public concern. “A lot of this stuff will have a legitimate use in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it’s what else it could be used for that presents a problem,” said one.

“It will be able to detect whether parents are taking their children abroad during school holidays. It could be useful to the tax authorities because it will tell them how long non-UK domiciled people are spending in the UK.”

The database is also expected to monitor people’s travel companions.

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, defended the plans. “The UK has one of the toughest borders in the world and we are determined to ensure it stays that way. Our high-tech electronic borders system will allow us to count all passengers in and out and targets those who aren’t willing to play by our rules.”

Source: Times Online

I have said this before and I will say it again – at what point to people say enough is enough when it comes to the government tracking us regardless of the country.

I bet Britons are wishing for a modern day Guy Fawkes is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the big problems with CCTV surveillance – from the point of view of the watchers that is – is that at some point there are holes where they can’t see. Along with that the cameras are only as good as the operators and their profiling skills. However some researchers at Ohio State University have been working on a supposedly smart surveillance system of CCTV camera to deal with these problems.

Their concept involves the stitching of digital images from the viewpoint of a network of camera to create a 360-degree view. then another piece of software will be used to create an overhead map that will be able to fix the ground coordinates of each pixel in the panoramic view. The third piece of the puzzle would then seamlessly track an individual as they move through that space.

From ScienceDaily

As a person walks across a scene, the computer can calculate exactly where the person is on the panorama and aerial map. That information can then be used to instruct a camera to follow him or her automatically using the camera’s pan-and-tilt control. With this system, it will be possible for the computer to ‘hand-off’ the tracking task between cameras as the person moves in and out of view of different cameras.

For the researchers the next step will be to develop an algorithm to spot unusual behaviour. Needless to say the project is being funded by the Air Force Research Lab.

[hat tip to the Danger Room blog]

Coming to a street corner near you – smart surveillance is a post from: The Inquisitr

Skype President Josh Silverman points out that all communications companies in China are required to abide by government regulations, which “include the requirement to monitor and block instant messages containing certain words deemed ‘offensive’ by the Chinese authorities.” He also says, however, that Skype had been under the impression that Tom was only deleting messages found to be “offensive,” and not storing them.

“We are now inquiring with Tom to find out why the protocol changed,” he says.

As far as the security breach itself, Silverman confirms that Skype addressed the issue with Tom immediately after learning of it, and that the breach has been fixed. He also notes that only instant messaging conversations were affected, not standard Skype voice-based communications.

“Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private,” he promises.

The promise isn’t reassuring enough to many in China, with some even worrying that those whose conversations were captured could have been imprisoned or “had their lives ruined in various ways” because of the issues.

“This is a big blow to Skype’s credibility, despite the fact that Skype executives are downplaying it as not such a big deal,” Hong Kong University Internet expert Rebecca MacKinnon tells Reuters.

Skype Responds To Security Breach — But Is It Enough? is a post from: The Inquisitr

It’s mainly in China, if that makes you feel any better. A report (PDF), by public interest group Information Warfare Monitor (affiliated with Citizen Lab), found Skype’s China-based service — called Tom-Skype — had been scanning messages for key terms such as “Taiwan independence” and other politically charged phrases. Messages with those terms were being snagged and stored along with the users’ personal information, the group says.

The problem? They were being stored on insecure servers, IWM says, and the key needed to decrypt the data was being stored there, too — so practically anyone could get into them. And we’re not talking small numbers, either: The group found more than 166,000 censored messages from 44,000 different users. The report suggests the Chinese government may somehow be involved with the process.

A Skype statement today indicated the security issue — which it said was related to the Tom servers, not its own — had been resolved. The statement also suggested that the “vast majority” of Skype users outside of China were not affected.

Sure makes you wonder what those messages are/were being used for…

Skype: Surveillance “Security Flaw” Fixed is a post from: The Inquisitr

iPhone hacker/data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explained the issue in a webcasted demo today. Zdziarski says the iPhone hangs on to a temporary cache of everything that happens on the handset — texting, surfing, you name it — for the purpose of pulling off its fading transition effect when you go back to the main screen. While those images are in a temporary cache, Zdziarski says they would be simple to recover. In fact, he says those very snapshots have already been snagged and used in various criminal investigations. Worst of all, Zdziarski claims there’s no way to keep the cache from being collected — or to permanently delete it at the end of the day.

Now, we hope you aren’t using your phone for any murder- or rape-related purpose, but maybe you’ve done a few less than moral things or sent some questionable messages that the iPhone might have witnessed — all stuff you probably wouldn’t want to become public knowledge if, for some reason, circumstances sent your phones into the wrong hands.

If it makes you feel any better, the cache feature isn’t the only way your iPhone could screw you if you’ve been screwing around. Zdziarski says forensics experts could also pull data from browser caches (deleted or not) and even from a keyboard cache.

The webcast also revealed a step-by-step way to completely get around the iPhone’s passcode and break into anyone’s phone. Good times all around.

iPhone Surveillance: Your Phone Is Watching is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company says it’s “carefully considering” a Web monitoring initiative, according to information just obtained by the New York Times. The revelation came in a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which had questioned several ISPs about their privacy practices.

AT&T, in contrast to other providers, said it would like to look into such a program for its advertising system — though as of now, execs say, they have no such system in place. AT&T did say it would most likely consider an “opt in” scenario rather than an “opt out” one, meaning you would have to actively agree to have your Web habits tracked.

Why, we might ask, would anyone possibly sign up for that?

AT&T May Start Monitoring You is a post from: The Inquisitr