Cell Phone Trafficking

Stories like this could be used to defend warrantless wiretaps or even granting retroactive immunity to Telecom providers. This is very misleading--we allow data mining in order to catch people who use "throwaway" phones, and rightly so. What we forget is that the activities of our intelligence agencies should ALWAYS be under scrutiny and that the rights of Americans should never be thrown away.

For less than $15, you can buy a cell phone loaded with minutes. You can buy more as you go whenever those minutes run out. Best of all, you aren't locked into a long-term contract. But in South Florida, New York, California, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, traffickers have figured out they can make big profits by purchasing thousands of these low-cost phones and tweaking the software so that calls can be made on any cell network. The altered phones are then sold all over the world - costing the phone companies tens of millions of dollars.

Some traffickers employ dozens of people full-time as "runners" to buy the phones at retail stores so they can later be hacked into and resold. The problem for the phone companies is that they often sell the phones at a loss, instead making their money when customers have to buy additional minutes from them - a guaranteed profit once the phone is sold. But the phone companies have no guarantee that customers will buy minutes from them after the phones are hacked or shipped to a far-off country.

This is probably the part that concerns intelligence agencies throughout the world, not just our own. There is always going to be a belief that "...if we could just listen to what they're saying!" is the end-all, be-all of intelligence gathering. This is true in the case of that rare undisciplined, chatty, gossipy terrorist. What you get from listening to conversations between people who practice good operational security (OPSEC) is next to nothing, except for cover terms and a few tics here and there. It would be of value to correlate what they say with what you know they have done or intend to do--that would help you crack their cover terms, if you were patient enough to try. Sometimes the most important aspect of collecting what they say is not what they say--but who they say it to and then who that person goes out and calls after the conversation is over.

That's why data mining is important. I will defend the right of our intelligence agencies to comb through the vast amounts of data in order to find associations and links to other pieces of data, but I will only do so if there is rigorous oversight to prevent abuse. I will only do so if there is a requirement that a FISA court will provide oversight if the actual conversations are intercepted AFTER the data mining reveals a legitimate reason for doing so. As it currently stands, we've forgotten to emphasize the oversight and compliance in the rush to save us from an unspecified calamity.

This article goes on to talk about what's going on in the unlocked cell phone world--a world long since past the moment when we should have shut it down. A deadlocked Congress and an administration that can't be bothered to put competent people in charge of agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission are to blame for allowing these egregious loopholes to remain open:

It's technically not illegal to unlock the software on your personal cell phone - but the companies are hoping to put a stop to traffickers that they say are siphoning away profits. Led by Miami-based TracFone Wireless Inc., makers of the low-cost prepaid cell phones are suing traffickers in federal courts around the country. One such lawsuit resulted in a criminal conviction in Houston when a man disobeyed a court order by refusing to stop selling the phones.

"There is a lot of profit in it," said James Baldinger, a West Palm Beach attorney with the Carlton Fields firm who represents TracFone. "Even as we continue to shut people down, we do find there are people still engaged in it. TracFone is going to keep going after them."

These phones are typically sold by traffickers for between $40 and $60 above the discounted TracFone price - and they are frequently marketed in lots of 10,000 or more. Web sites catering to these dealers boast about having huge numbers of unlocked cell phones.

You can't have tens or hundreds of thousands of unlocked cell phones floating around--it takes money to sustain cellular telephone networks and the added burden of all of that traffic puts strain on a system that should be used by the people who pay for the service. Beyond being an issue for intelligence gathering, simple criminal activity flourishes with calls that are not tracked or billed.

The US has been quite successful in keeping out high powered cordless phones--devices which look and behave like cellular telephones but use base stations and powerful signals that give the user the ability to have a personal phone or a closed network of handsets for communication. In many countries, users of these phones have 15 miles or more of range and can use them just like a cell phone or call dozens of other people with the same handset tied to the same base station. If we can stop this technology, why can't we stop the unlocking of throwaway cell phones?

For some reason, the telecom providers lobbied hard for immunity rather than regulations that would shut down the throwaway cell phone market. I guess they fear lawsuits more than having their networks used by thieves.

Landline Use In Steep Decline

The use of landline telephone services has been steadily declining for years. As more and more people switch to wireless or net telephony, the impact on political polling is negligible.

For nearly three in 10 U.S. households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percentage points since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just percent had only cell phones.

Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percentage point since the first half of last year.

The only thing keeping some families tethered to a traditional landline is the need for dial-up Internet access in areas where broadband is unavailable or unaffordable:

Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report.

This decline in revenue from landlines is typified by the predatory nature of some local telephone companies, who are doing whatever is necessary to continue to collect revenue from customers:

A widow rented a rotary dial telephone for 42 years, paying what her family calculates as thousands of dollars for a now outdated phone.

Ester Strogen, 82, of Canton, first leased two black rotary phones — the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger — in the 1960s. Back then, the technology was new and most people had to rent telephones as part of their basic phone service. It was pre-AT&T when the telephone business was monopolized by the company known as "Ma Bell."

Bell was disbanded in 1983 and split into seven smaller companies and AT&T was given the right to handle long-distance and telephone-leasing services. From 1985 to 1986, customers who leased telephones were given the option to continue leasing, buy them or opt out of their agreements.

Until two months ago, Strogen was still paying AT&T to use the phones — $29.10 every three months, the phone company says. Strogen's granddaughters, Melissa Howell and Barb Gordon, ended the arrangement when they discovered the bills.

"I'm outraged," Gordon said. "It made me so mad. It's ridiculous. If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?"

The number of customers leasing phones dropped from 40 million nationwide to about 750,000 today, said John Skalko, spokesman for Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent Technologies, a spinoff of AT&T that manages the residential leasing service.

Polling impact

The CBS news article cited above makes a largely unproven assumption that the decline in landline use and the increase in cellular telephone-only households is having, or will have, an impact on organizations that poll or survey American households:

The trends have an important impact on polling organizations, which rely chiefly on calls to random landline phone numbers. Calling cell phone users can be more costly for pollsters, in part because federal law forbids unsolicited calls to cell phones made by computerized dialing systems used heavily by pollsters.

Studies have shown that so far, people who have only cell phones do not give significantly different answers to questions than those who use landlines. Pollsters, though, are under growing pressure to survey the growing number of cell phone users and some already do so.

There are plenty of indications that this is not a significant enough problem to distrust poll or survey results:

In particular, there is no evidence that the polling in the Democratic and Republican nomination contests is biased by the fact that most polls rely only on landline interviews. In the December national poll, support for no candidate in the landline sample changed by more than two points when the preferences of cell phone respondents were blended in. The same was true in the October national poll.

There is no doubt that Americans who rely solely on cell phones differ from the rest of the public in some key respects. However, in most cases these differences are the result of their demographic characteristics, particularly the fact they tend to be very young. Since adjustments for age are made in standard landline surveys, adding the cell-only component to the survey substantially increases the raw number of younger people surveyed, but does not alter the overall weight of younger respondents in the final estimates.

In most respects, the political attitudes and behaviors of younger people who are cell-only do not differ substantially from younger people surveys do reach on landlines, meaning that the overall results are virtually identical to those from the landline survey alone.

Who the Hell Thought This Was a Good Idea?

One company in Northern Virginia controls the database for all phone numbers in North America. And, no, that's not a great idea.

Sterling-based NeuStar is the carriers' digital directory for all phone calls in North America. More than 800 telephone companies have numbers in the database. NeuStar assigns blocks of available telephone numbers to carriers. It also manages the directory for common short codes: five- or six-digit codes that people punch into their cellphones to take part in sweepstakes or to vote for game-show contestants, for instance. And about one out of every four Internet transactions is routed using a NeuStar database, as NeuStar handles traffic for domains that include .biz, .us, .org and .info.

NeuStar's databases are so powerful that the FBI a few years ago sought direct, unfettered access to one containing 310 million phone numbers in the United States and Canada. The telephone companies that pay NeuStar to run the database denied the FBI's request, but they did allow NeuStar to create a site where authorized law enforcement officials with court orders can obtain carrier information on telephone numbers.

NeuStar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances. Its registries fall under international, U.S. government and trade association rules, including those set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The company is dependent on and crucial to telecom companies and state, local and federal governments, part of the government-industrial complex that drives the region's economy. Indeed, said Jeffrey E. Ganek, NeuStar chairman and chief executive, "this is a business that could only have grown up in Washington."

[snip]

NeuStar also helps optimize Web traffic for clients such as Amazon so that when a customer types in Amazon.com, NeuStar directs the request to one of Amazon's thousands of servers around the world. It provides the same kind of service for Oracle, Emirates Airlines and Forbes.

"We're at all the key Internet nodes in the world," Ganek said. "Depending on the time of the day and the point of origination, we send the traffic to Seattle, for instance, or to a data center in Miami or another data center in Singapore. If there's a fiber cable cut in the Pacific, we see it before [the carriers] do and turn the traffic in the other direction so it goes counterclockwise around the globe."

First of all, BULLSHIT. The FBI asked and they "turned them down?" How did that work? During 2005 and 2006, the FBI was going crazy with "National Security Letters" and they weren't taking "no" for an answer from anyone.

Second of all, they're not just operating here in North America:

Revenue last year was $429.2 million, and profit was $92.3 million, up from $73.9 million the previous year. Company officials expect revenue to exceed $500 million this year. Soon, they said, NeuStar expects to be providing digital directory service for about 85 percent of all wireless devices in the world.

How is that a good idea, either? How savvy are the foreign companies to the fact that US law enforcement can look at any and all numbers?

Third, they didn't "deny" the government. They winked and said, "here you go!"

In 2005, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted a direct link to the database in NeuStar's Sterling headquarters, according to a January 2005 letter from the Justice Department criminal division to a consortium of carriers that have given NeuStar the contract to run the database. The department wanted to use the data to identify which carrier to subpoena for records concerning telephone numbers in an investigation, the letter said.

"What they were asking for in a nutshell was a copy of the database," said Mike Warren, NeuStar vice president of fiduciary services. "They wanted us to send them an update of the database once a day."

Instead, NeuStar set up LEAP, or Local Number Portability Enhanced Analytical Platform, a Web site to help local, state and federal law enforcement in investigations that rely on phone call surveillance. The database gives basic information such as carrier but not more technical details such as whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline. Earlier this year, NeuStar added historical carrier information to that service.

Whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline can be gotten from the companies that already allow warrantless wiretaps. Or a simple telephone lookup. Or just "pinging" the phone with a single dialing from a piece of software designed to determine where the number traces to. That's a very cozy arrangement, designed to skirt the law. Telecom Immunity makes skirting these laws even easier.

In effect, they make a big deal of telling the Feds that they can't have their product, but they give them the whole thing simply by witholding the one thing the Feds can figure out themselves.

Remind me again how we lost our privacy rights? Did I vote for this shit? Because if I did, I really screwed up.