Aug 07 2006
Pre-Paid Phones The Largest Security Risk
Pre-paid phones require no ID to trace the owner to any subsequent crime or terrorist attack that may need to be linked to these cheap, available phones and phone cards. Why should we allow such an obvious risk to thousands of Americans because some few, marginal people complain about faux rights abuses? We shouldn’t. And this should be an issue for every person seaking elected office this November. When did it become so hard to show and ID so that our neighbors and their kids might be a tad bit safer? When did we become so self focused that we cannot have our name associated with a purchase like this? Our ID is basically provided with each credit card purchase. The picture ID simply verifies the information is from the same person as on the credit card. Why is this a problem?
If this country were so concerned with our safety, we would worry less about cell phones and more about handguns. Why focus on anonymous cell phones, when we live in a country where we have anonymous guns. GUNS actually are used to kill people…cell phones are used..well…to make phone calls.
This is the sort of screwed up conservative thinking that makes me scream.
And baseball bats are used to kill people and knives are used to kill people and cars are used to kill people. Maybe we should ban all those things too. Hey, I have an idea … let’s just ban killing! We could make it against the law to murder anyone no matter WHAT weapon someone used. Yeah, that should do it! But the more I think about it, someone who is going to murder anyway isn’t going to be worried about having an illegal baseball bat, or knife, or car, or gun. That’s because they are criminals and they ignore those bans anyway. The only people you take guns away from and the law abiding … and they don’t kill anybody with anything.
I suspect you knew that already but simply wanted to use this space to spew some nonsense that many people actually believe. Maybe not the smart ones … but then again 50% of the population is of below the median intelligence level so if you can convince the dumb ones, you already have 50%!
Oh, and cell phones are the trigger of choice for IEDs the world over.
There are many, many ways to make anonymous phone calls. One of the simplest is simply by doing drive bys with a wireless card and a laptop. Al Qaeda could upload videos in this manner. What can you do?
(Aggressive hacking against these people for one, but that is another matter…)
This is a reason why passive monitoring off all phone calls or all internet traffic is a bad idea. Targeted surveillance, however, which we do not engage in enough, is another matter entirely.
As far as ID goes… I am expected to carry a picture ID with me when I go places, even if I am not driving. We don’t have a picture ID system. We have driver licenses.
I am not saying there is a conspiracy here, nor even that we should all be forced to have a national ID card. Rather, criminals should be targeted in these things, not innocent civilians. Why organizations begin to fall back onto more large net sort of situations initially is because of incompetence and a lack of understanding of the underlying technology.
I agree with you, Pull. Unless someone is already onto me, it is very easy for me to communicate in ways that would be very difficult to impossible for anyone to “stumble” onto my communications. As you say, simply driving up into the parking lot of a coffee shop with a hotspot will often do. I pull up, create a yahoo chat room, ping a certain ip address in a certain pattern (firewall software there alerts the user at the other end of the pings), the other guy logs in to yahoo, I invite him to the room and we have a “voice chat” for 30 seconds to a minite, I tear everything down and move on. The longest time is spent booting my laptop. If I already had it booted before I arrived, the entire thing takes 2 minutes max. I never get out of the car, nobody notices me, I didn’t use a phone, and nobody can trace me back to that physical location. Stupidly simple.
With new IP phones, I can do the same thing with what amounts to a cell phone. Drive up next to the coffee shop, get an IP address, place a phone call, leave.
This notion of being able to somehow stumble across someone doing bad stuff by monitoring communications is pretty much obsolete. You have to already be onto someone and specifically target their communications because to try to do it any other way, you are seeking a very tiny needle that could be in any of a thousand haystacks. So if you take away the idea that you can spot terrorists by monitoring the communications system then toss away cell phones really aren’t a communications risk. The greatist risk is that they are is a bomb component that can’t be traced. Forget the communications threat, they are simply bomb triggers you can buy at 7/11.