Soon, bar coded implants will be embedded within vital organs of new borns so they can not be extracted witout causing serious damage or death. Those implants will reveal every, life detail about one's daily coming and going and may well evolve to have deployment features causing one to think, speak, act and simply drop dead -- not at one's own will.

We might need to leave these cell phones at home - or on the store shelf - to assure our human right to privacy. In days of old this sort of information was simply tattoed on the left arm...

now I know why people are selling bags that block the signals!

Soon the government will demand the right to determine in advance who will commit a crime and then detain them indefinitely.

Oh, wait. They're already doing that at Guantanamo.

Telemetry - It is a way to locate a radio transmission using three other mobile radio transceivers and some other minor radio equipment. This has been around for a long time, nothing new here.

Now lets place a bunch of cell phone towers in an area and as a powered on cell phone moves through the area the cell phone towers record when the cell phone enters into and exits its area of reception. Your cell phone is continuously broadcasting and receiving cell tower information, thats how you get your signal strength indicators on your phone. That data is recorded and when placed on a map of the area you can get a very good idea of the date and time a cell phone was in a particular area and for how long. Soon after they saturated urban areas with cell towers the "Enhanced 911" came into play. I think it was Chomsky who said that they will always present their means of surveillance as something you can use to improve your life.

Paranoid? When you travel don't just turn off the cell phone remove the battery. Some smart phones don't power off when turned off they enter into a sleep mode. The sleep mode allows the processor to wake up the phone to alert you of an appointment. The phones are not supposed to be transmitting, but unless you have some radio equipment that measures radio transmissions and signal strength you won't know what your cell phone is doing. Every hour just pop the battery back in and check for messages.

Remember a cell phone is a radio. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge can build a radio that intercepts radio transmissions in the cell phone spectrum and listen to your call (mostly one way). Also remember that a cell phone service provides an answering machine (phonemail). Get in the habit of turning the phone off and checking your messages instead of leaving it on and being a slave to it. Being available 24/7 via a phone is a double edged sword.

I have long stated that our level of technology has surpassed of level of maturity. Cell phone users validate my point. An addiction is something that you can not stop doing. Television, internet, cell phones, turn them off and see how long you can go without.

Last word on cell phone use. You Borg (fictitious race of people that are half human and half machine from the Star Trek series) out their with your blue tooth headsets; putting a "wireless" (radio) accessory that close to your brain all day long is never a good idea.

Okay, I'm done...

Thanks, wdmax3! That's much appreciated.

The Australian telecommincations giant Telstra announced that its GSM system was ready for use. ASIO (the Australian version of CIA) restrained Telstra from turning on the GSM system for 6 months, because it did not have its surveillance of GSM in place.

Later, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard enacted a law that gave ASIO the right (under Australian law) to access and modify any records on any computer around the world. An ex - ASIO personnel was interviewed on national television, and asked if ASIO would actually be able to do that. Yes, he explained, Microsoft had special back doors for security agencies. They were also able to look through a vidcam, if the computer had one installed.

The installation of key-loggers which record keystrokes, for later surveillance may be installed to record all that you type.

If you wish privacy from the government, there is not much use in putting it on a Microsoft machine attached to the internet. Some people I know have two machines. One is attached to the internet, and the other strictly off it. There are other good reasons for doing just this.

Also, be aware that your service providers keep internet access details. The domain lookup history is kept for government inspection and emails are also kept.

I have not read specifically anything about internet chat, but I am able to point out that ASIO has, on occasions, produced internet chat going years back in order to justify persecution of various people accused of terrorist related activities. (Normally these scares are brought up in order to justify new surveillance laws or indefinite detention - sound famiar - huh!). And, of course, there was no way to test if the ASIO account was, in fact, the true one.

The encryption standard D.E.S. was made deliberately weak. IBM's
proposed algorithm originally used a 128 bit key, but the U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA) convinced IBM to reduce the key size to 56
bits[11]. The US government allowed only a 40 bit key version of the
encryption to be exported. It is thought that the NSA's reason was to
allow an easier brute force attack, possibly by means of specially
crafted electronic hardware.

The NSA and the US Justice Department insisted that DES was unbreak-
able even as late as 1997. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
however, believed that the 56 bit key version of the algorithm could be rapidly
cracked, but saying so earned them the tag of "conspiracy theorists". To prove
their point the EFF started to design their own DES cracking hardware in 1997.
The EFF completed the DES cracker in July 1998 at a cost of cost of
$250,000.oo. It can test 254 109 keys per second. It can break 56 bit DES
encryption in less than 3 days by brute force.

"The news is not that a DES cracker can be built; we've known that for
years," said Bruce Schneier, the creator of Blowfish and President of
Counterpane Systems. "The news is that it can be built cheaply using
off-the-shelf technology and minimal engineering, even though the
department of Justice and the FBI have been denying that this was
possible".

Today's standard for encryption is AES (American Encrypton Standard).

AES is a 128 bit block cipher with at least a 128 bit key, which is 16
bytes or approximately 19 characters of alphanumeric password. Thus it
has 3.4e38 possible keys. 56 bit key DES had a 7.2e16 possible
keys.

Thus if we used the sort of hardware that could exhaustively
search the DES key space in a single second, then similar hardware would
take 1.5e12 years to search the AES key space. To put it another
way, it ought to be totally infeasible to create a brute force AES
cracker.

However, AES has a straightforward mathematical description, and it is
suspected that it was permitted to become the standard because the CIA
knows how to crack it. This has not been proven, but half of the
worlds cryptologist mathematicians are employed in Fort Meade in
Maryland USA. It houses a 10 acre multi story subterranean
communication monitoring facility.

Should you use encryption as a means to ensure privacy in your
communications?

You will most certainly become an interesting target if you do. Then
they will devote some resources to cracking your stuff. An they have
plenty of resources to spare.

But if your encryption was so heavy that they could not crack it, and if
you then hired some experts to make your PC unhackable, that would make
you a VERY interesting target.

On the other hand, if you want to give the spooks something to
do, you could send random garbage around as email attachments.
They are sure to be noticed, because the computers that analyze
your email wont be able to classify it. You will never know
if some highly payed cryptologist spends 3 months trying to
decrypt it, at a cost of say ... $40,000.

Cell phone tracking, cameras everywhere, EZ-Pass records, credit card and ATM records, Google turning over databases of what you have viewed on YouTube. It's pretty creepy. Does controlling technology give someone the right to be a stalker or Peeping Tom? Any enterprise that keeps databases on our habits is abetting in this and we should figure out how to make them pay or make life difficult for them.

I don't have a cell phone, but it is getting harder since they are phasing out public phones. Yeah, maybe we should all encrypt things just to make it harder for the snoops.

Am I the only one left who refuses to get a cell phone?

Somehow, (like air conditioning, I-pods and other crap the capitalists foist on us), civilization thrived just fine before these things.

No need to implant the chip, if the subject willingly carries the chip around with him.

USAn, you're far from the only one.

Today, for the first time, I used the GPS/Direction finder feature on my cell phone. Due to a law to enable 911 caller location info, all new cell phones have this function (i.e. the ability to locate the phone).

Now, if I were a totalitarian state, I'd get all the location/time information from the phone companies and use it to see who was at the same location at the same time.

So, everybody who brought their cell phone to an anti-war rally (and everyone else in the area for other reasons) would be in the government database.

Lecture by Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn: Attendees in the database.

Meeting of the Lynchburg County Democrats? In the database.

Silent, emotionless machines would be assembling a dossier of your every move

If we lived in a totalitarian society.

@ctrl-z July 5th, 2008 5:48 am

You can be pretty sure that they ARE keeping that sort of data in some sort of database. Why would they not? Most of the Patriot laws just legitimize what was already happening anyway. A single SQL command would tell them who attended an anti-war rally. And yes, just a few SQL commands would give them a good idea of who you met with.

Hmmm, on re-reading your comment, there is a sort of subtle sarcasm ...

I'm surprised at the surprise. When "Enhanced 911" technology was first presented, did anyone really think it'd be immune from co-option by Big Brother? This was the domestic grab: RFID passports were the international counterpart. The next step: RealID. Don't be fooled, but if you are, don't be surprised later on.

Am I the only one left who refuses to get a cell phone?

USAn, nope, me neither. Have decided to stop increasing my technology (also, the stats on brain damage are not clear, and cell phones use that ore - coltan - the mining of which partly fuels the bloodshed in the Congo.)

I would get one temporarily for safety should I travel alone, but that's all.

Interesting the way in which triangulation to find people is so often used in the cop/FBI/legal shows on the telly to show what a lifesaver it is. Episodes never show the other, main use.

Just because the display on your cellphone says its off, how do you know it really is off? As has been said, many are just in sleep mode. There are also passive location systems proliferating which can track you if you have any type of RFID (radio-frequency identification) on or in your person and pass close enough to a sensor. History shows us that if a technology can be abused, it will be.

As a side note to all the iPhone lemmings, do you think its a coincidence that Apple forces you to have a contract with AT&T? The same AT&T that got caught illegally spying on Americans for the Government and may now get retroactive immunity for their crimes.

Welcome to fascist, surveillance, police state America. Sieg heil, ya'll!

He had written a number of articles critical of our totalitarian government. Then he spoke at a couple of anti-war rallies.

He had to drive across the mountains to get to another meeting in San Francisco. Far overhead, the Predator drone was tracking his car by the GPS transponder in the "turned off" cell phone in his pocket. It locked the targeting in the missile to the transponder and waited until the car approached a curve.

The police report said he must have hit the curve at too high a speed. His gas tank must have exploded when the car hit the canyon floor.

GPS onboard, no need for triangulation, just query the device for it's coord. The Mic can be remotely activated and listened to, the FBI got a mobster that way last year. Plus the thing broadcasts a microwave signal that can't be good for brain tissue.
The tracking function of cel systems has already bitten US on the 4ss, the Stealth fighter/bomber disrupts cel traffic and when it overflew England on the way to Iraq, the Cel providers over there tracked it's flight.
My cel, goes out looking for signal every minute, if I set it next to the speakers at my computer, I can hear it, 2 blips at the top of the minute and 4 or 5 every five minutes.
Pull the battery.

Duct tape it to a rat and set it free.

Go, ACLU and the EFF! I have ot hand it to the ACLU for their long-standing history in stepping in there for the common citizen ;)

@Old Jeffersonian July 6th, 2008 2:57 am

eh?

Who is "he"?

Is that something that might happen in the future, or something that already happened.

The tmobile G1 has been unlocked, this will allow you to use a SIM card from any network, in any country. Hey guys FYI, T-mobile will unlock any phone for you for free if you are in good standing with the company, so don’t shell out the cash to get that iphone unlocked just call T-mobile.

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