At 03:08 PM 4/21/98 -0700, Phil Karn wrote:
This is a really difficult issue. Even the most diehard cypherpunk cannot doubt the usefulness of a cellular position reporting capability in an emergency situation, when the user *wants* the cops or whoever to know where he is. The big problem is how to keep it from being used (or abused) for "law enforcement" purposes without the consent of the user.
Arguments about the "utility" of the technology are distracting - lots of things are useful in some rare circumstances, not in others. If I were held hostage in my apartment, I might wish there were hidden video cameras installed in every room so the SWAT team snipers would be able to shoot the bad guys without endangering me. If I were injured badly in a single-car accident in a desolate place, I might wish that the government had the means to track every automobile's location. The rest of the time, I think those technologies are very distasteful and unwelcome. People dying of thirst drink urine. It's not necessarily useful to use a worst-case scenario when deciding how we'd like to organize and technologize our ordinary lives. The question is not whether or not cypherpunks want cellphone-locating technology to be built - because it will be built. People who aren't happy with that, for whatever reason, must fight that technology with technology - arguments and proclamations are helpless against technology, as the ridiculous export control "debate" makes clear. Once the technology exists, it will be used. What we need are cellphone remailers - they'll accept cellphone traffic sent via nonstandard means (a different spread-spectrum arrangement/protocol, or different frequencies for analog, or ..) and relay it onto the ordinary (subject to surveillance) cell frequencies/spectrum. Third parties who want to use ordinary/automated cellphone tracking systems will get the physical address of the relay, not that of the phone. And (hopefully) the relay won't keep logs of its traffic, nor attempt to track down its users. (Operators of relays likely won't have access to nearly the number of antennae/base stations that the regular cellphone folks do, so it'll be harder for them to use trianguation and timing to derive physical location. At least that's what my relatively RF-clueless understanding is.) Do you (or other folks familiar with ham radio technology and repeater technology) have any comments on the ease/difficulty of building a cellular remailer? I assume it'd be necessary to modify a cellphone to use the nonstandard remailer setup, which may be difficult.
I expect the main countermeasure to cellular position tracking will be the use of one-way pagers. Keep your cell phone turned off, and if you get a page when you're someplace you don't want them to know, wait until you leave before you return the page.
But one-way pagers are a dying technology - and I'll bet that within 3-5 years, it'll no longer be possible to turn off cellphones, at least without removing the batteries. I think that change won't be driven by surveillance needs, but because the setup time required where the phone and the network do their handshaking is annoying. It's likely to get worse as crypto is added to cellphones, and if batteries get better it won't be crucial to have the phone turned off when not in use. Then again, you probably know a lot more about cellphone design than I do.
Perhaps if the "just turn it off" approach is widely promoted, the carriers and vendors will see the threat to their business and press for some safeguards. Otherwise they just won't give a damn.
If we want safeguards, we're going to have to build them ourselves. Laws won't help, neither will carefully crafted, reasonable arguments. -- Greg Broiles |History teaches that 'Trust us' gbroiles@netbox.com |is no guarantee of due process. |_Kasler v. Lundgren_, 98 CDOS 1581 |(March 4, 1998)