Your
Cell Phone Makes You A Prisoner Of A Digital World
Where Virtually Anyone Can Hack You And Track You
http://endoftheamericandream.com
http://albertpeia.com/cellphoneprisonershackedandtracked.htm
If you own a cell phone,
you might as well kiss your privacy goodbye. Cell phone companies know
more about us than most of us would ever dare to imagine. Your cell phone
company is tracking everywhere that you go and it is making a record of everything
that you do with your phone. Much worse, there is a good chance that your
cell phone company has been selling this information to anyone that is willing
to pay the price - including local law enforcement. In addition, it is an
open secret that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone
calls. The "private conversation" that you are having with a
friend today will be kept in federal government databanks for many years to
come. The truth is that by using a cell phone, you willingly make
yourself a prisoner of a digital world where every move that you make and every
conversation that you have is permanently recorded. But it is not just
cell phone companies and government agencies that you have to worry
about. As you will see at the end of this article, it is incredibly easy
for any would-be stalker to hack you and track your every movement using your
cell phone. In fact, many spyware programs allow hackers to listen to you
through your cell phone even when your cell phone is turned off. Sadly,
most cell phone users have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff.
The next time that you get a notice
from your cell phone company about "changes" to the privacy policy,
you might want to play close attention. Your cell phone company might be
about to sell off your most personal information to anyone that is willing to
write a big enough check. The following is from a recent CNN article....
Your
phone company knows where you live, what websites you visit, what apps you
download, what videos you like to watch, and even where you are. Now, some have
begun selling that valuable information to the highest bidder.
In
mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy to allow the company
to record customers' location data and Web browsing history, combine it with
other personal information like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of
other customers' data, and sell it on an anonymous basis.
So who is buying this information?
We just don't know.
But we do know that local law
enforcement agencies all over the country are increasingly using cell phone
data to nail suspects, and often it is the cell phone companies that are the
ones selling them the cell phone data that they need.
According to a recent New York Times article, many
local police departments are doing this without getting a warrant first....
"Law
enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province
mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance
tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small,
often using it aggressively with little or no court
oversight."
That same article says that cell
phone companies have standard prices that they charge to local law enforcement
officials for information that they request....
"Cell
carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police
departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200
for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect."
So if you are breaking the law, your
cell phone may be used to gather evidence and to track you down. In the
Sometimes the police don't even use
the cell phone companies. Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran
an article that discussed the capabilities of the "stingray devices"
that many local law enforcement agencies are using now.
A "stingray device" acts
like a cell phone tower and it can gather any information that a normal cell
phone tower can. The following is how a recent Wired
article described these "stingrays"....
You
make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing
standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is
connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law
enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your
calls.
So-called
stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to
track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a
legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into
connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone
tower.
The
government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights,
since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent
from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
Isn't that just great?
The attitude that law enforcement
agencies seem to have is that once we use a cell phone we are essentially
willingly throwing our Fourth Amendment rights out the window.
In some areas of the
The
devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can
download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of
cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with
different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some
information.
Fortunately these "extraction
devices" are being challenged in court. Let us hope that they will
be banned.
But what local law enforcement
officials are doing pales in comparison to what federal agencies are doing.
For example, the FBI claims that it can demand to see
your cell phone data whenever it would like to.
Not only that, the FBI has also been remotely activating the microphones on the cell
phones of suspects that they want to listen to. This can be done even
when the cell phone is turned off....
The
FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in
criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and
using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The
technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top
Could the FBI be listening to you
right now?
If there is a cell phone in the room
they could be.
But some other federal agencies
listen to a lot more cell phone calls than the FBI does.
It has been an open secret for a long
time that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone calls that are
made for national security reasons.
In fact, the federal government is
even trying to collect records for calls that have been made in the distant
past. According to USA Today, the goal is "to
create a database of every call ever made"....
The
National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of
tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and
BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told
In addition, the federal government
has been constructing the largest data center in the history of the world out
in the
Under
construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named
But isn't it illegal for the federal
government to intercept our phone calls?
Well, the cold, hard reality of the
matter is that they use all kinds of loopholes and legal technicalities to get
around that.
For example, if a call is
"intercepted" outside of the
Of course that is a bunch of
nonsense, but that is how they think.
And it is very frightening thing for
governments around the world to be able to monitor and track us like this.
Increasingly, governments around the
world are using cell phones to hunt down people that they do not like and haul
them off to prison. For example, a recent Bloomberg article detailed how
the Iranian government is aggressively using cell phones to crack down on
dissidents....
The
Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the
opposition journalist. Held in Evin Prison for weeks
following his arrest early last year for protesting, he says, he learned that
he was not only fighting the regime, but also companies that armed
Pourheydar,
30, says the power of this enemy became clear as intelligence officers
brandished transcripts of his mobile phone calls, e-mails and text messages
during his detention. About half the political prisoners he met in jail told
him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell
phones, he says.
Christians in
Most Americans don't need to worry
about getting hauled off to prison for political or religious reasons at this
point, but there is another aspect of cell phone security that could
potentially affect all of us.
Most Americans are completely unaware
of what stalkers can potentially do if they are able to hack into a cell
phone. For example, did you know that spyware can make it possible for a
stalker to monitor where you are 24 hours a day and listen to everything that
you say even when your cell phone is turned off? The following is from an
article posted by WTHR....
Spyware
marketers claim you can tap into someone's calls, read their text messages and
track their movements "anywhere, anytime." They say you can
"catch a cheating spouse", protect your children from an evil
babysitter and "hear what your boss is saying about you." And while
you're spying on others, the Spyware companies say "no one will ever
know" because it's supposed to be "completely invisible" with
"absolutely no trace."
Security
experts say it's no internet hoax.
"It's
real, and it is pretty creepy," said Rick Mislan,
a former military intelligence officer who now teaches cyber forensics at
Mislan
has examined thousands of cell phones inside Purdue's Cyber Forensics Lab, and
he says spy software can now make even the most high-tech cell phone
vulnerable.
For much more from WTHR about what
stalkers can do to your cell phone, just check out this amazing video. It is one of the best
news reports that I have ever seen.
Are you starting to see how your cell
phone makes you a prisoner of a digital world?
The police can listen to you and
track you any time that they want to.
The federal government can listen to
you and track you any time that they want to.
Big corporations can buy all of the
personal information that cell phones gather any time that they want to from
certain cell phone companies.
Stalkers can listen to you and track
you 24 hours a day if they are able to hack in to your cell phone somehow.
If you own a cell phone and you still
want to have some privacy, then you need to take the battery completely out of
the cell phone when you are not using it.
Our world is becoming a much less private place, and we all
need to be mindful of the changes that are happening.
Unfortunately, as our world becomes
even more interconnected and even more dependent on technology, the amount of
privacy we all have is likely to continue to decrease. A digital Big
Brother control grid is being constructed all around us, and in the future that
control grid could potentially be used for very malevolent purposes.
So let us be as wise as serpents and
innocent as doves. Our world is changing, and not for the better.
