[Mesh] Fwd: [Commotion-discuss] Seattle Police mesh network for surveillance?
Steve Berl
steveberl at gmail.com
Sun Nov 10 13:40:01 PST 2013
So how does one use a mesh network without letting anyone know where you
are? Seems like it is the nature of mesh that the network will know what
mesh nodes you are near.
-steve
On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Mitar <mitar at tnode.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> We don't. They have to protect themselves end-to-end. They should never
> be trusting us or anybody else.
>
>
> Mitar
>
> > Couldn't a community mesh network be suspected of having the same sort of
> > tracking abilities?
> > How do we convince potential mesh network users that we aren't collecting
> > location data on them?
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> > On Friday, November 8, 2013, Jenny Ryan wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >> From: Preston Rhea <prestonrhea at opentechinstitute.org<javascript:_e({},
> >> 'cvml', 'prestonrhea at opentechinstitute.org');>>
> >> Date: Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 6:49 AM
> >> Subject: Fwd: [Commotion-discuss] Seattle Police mesh network for
> >> surveillance?
> >> To: Jenny Ryan <jenny at thepyre.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> >> 'jenny at thepyre.org');>>, Shaun Houlihan <shaunhoulihan at gmail.com<javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'shaunhoulihan at gmail.com');>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> Thought this would interest y'all, I don't know if you are already on
> >> the Commotion listserv Jenny.
> >>
> >>
> >> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >> From: Dan Staples <danstaples at opentechinstitute.org <javascript:_e({},
> >> 'cvml', 'danstaples at opentechinstitute.org');>>
> >> Date: Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:32 PM
> >> Subject: [Commotion-discuss] Seattle Police mesh network for
> surveillance?
> >> To: commotion-discuss <commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net<javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net');>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/you-are-a-rogue-device/Content?oid=18143845
> >>
> >> You Are a Rogue Device
> >> A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has Been Installed Throughout
> >> Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What It Is, and Officials Don’t
> >> Want to Talk About It.
> >>
> >> by Matt Fikse-Verkerk and Brendan Kiley
> >>
> >> If you're walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You'll see off-white
> >> boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to
> >> utility poles. If you're walking around downtown while looking at a
> >> smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or
> >> three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: "4th&Seneca,"
> >> "4th&Union," "4th&University," and so on. That is how you can see the
> >> Seattle Police Department's new wireless mesh network, bought from a
> >> California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include
> >> the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining
> >> interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.
> >>
> >> The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?
> >>
> >> How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone,
> >> laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its "media
> >> access control address"—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous
> >> to a device's thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a
> >> database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given
> >> time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?
> >>
> >> The SPD declined to answer more than a dozen questions from The
> >> Stranger, including whether the network is operational, who has access
> >> to its data, what it might be used for, and whether the SPD has used it
> >> (or intends to use it) to geo-locate people's devices via their MAC
> >> addresses or other identifiers.
> >>
> >> Seattle Police detective Monty Moss, one of the leaders of the
> >> mesh-network project—one part of a $2.7 million effort, paid for by the
> >> Department of Homeland Security—wrote in an e-mail that the department
> >> "is not comfortable answering policy questions when we do not yet have a
> >> policy." But, Detective Moss added, the SPD "is actively collaborating
> >> with the mayor's office, city council, law department, and the ACLU on a
> >> use policy." The ACLU, at least, begs to differ: "Actively
> >> collaborating" is not how they would put it. Jamela Debelak, technology
> >> and liberty director of the Seattle office, says the ACLU submitted
> >> policy-use suggestions months ago and has been waiting for a response.
> >>
> >> Detective Moss also added that the mesh network would not be used for
> >> "surveillance purposes... without City Council's approval and the
> >> appropriate court authorization." Note that he didn't say the mesh
> >> network couldn't be used for the surveillance functions we asked about,
> >> only that it wouldn't—at least until certain people in power say it can.
> >> That's the equivalent of a "trust us" and a handshake.
> >>
> >> His answer is inadequate for other reasons as well. First, the city
> >> council passed an ordinance earlier this year stating that any potential
> >> surveillance equipment must submit protocols to the city council for
> >> public review and approval within 30 days of its acquisition and
> >> implementation. This mesh network has been around longer than that, as
> >> confirmed by Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install it. Still, the
> >> SPD says it doesn't have a policy for its use yet. Mayor McGinn's office
> >> says it expects to see draft protocols sometime in December—nearly nine
> >> months late, according to the new ordinance.
> >>
> >> Second, and more importantly, this mesh network is part of a whole new
> >> arsenal of surveillance technologies that are moving faster than the
> >> laws that govern them are being written. As Stephanie K. Pell (former
> >> counsel to the House Judiciary Committee) and Christopher Soghoian
> >> (senior policy analyst at the ACLU) wrote in a 2012 essay for the
> >> Berkeley Technology Law Journal:
> >>
> >> The use of location information by law enforcement agencies is
> >> common and becoming more so as technological improvements enable
> >> collection of more accurate and precise location data. The legal mystery
> >> surrounding the proper law enforcement access standard for prospective
> >> location data remains unsolved. This mystery, along with conflicting
> >> rulings over the appropriate law enforcement access standards for both
> >> prospective and historical location data, has created a messy,
> >> inconsistent legal landscape where even judges in the same district may
> >> require law enforcement to meet different standards to compel location
> >> data.
> >>
> >> In other words, law enforcement has new tools—powerful tools. We didn't
> >> ask for them, but they're here. And nobody knows the rules for how they
> >> should be used.
> >>
> >> This isn't the first time the SPD has purchased surveillance equipment
> >> (or, as they might put it, public-safety equipment that happens to have
> >> powerful surveillance capabilities) without telling the rest of the
> >> city. There was the drones controversy this past winter, when the public
> >> and elected officials discovered that the SPD had bought two unmanned
> >> aerial vehicles with the capacity to spy on citizens. There was an
> >> uproar, and a few SPD officers embarked on a mea culpa tour of community
> >> meetings where they answered questions and endured (sometimes raucous)
> >> criticism. In February, Mayor Mike McGinn announced he was grounding the
> >> drones, but a new mayor could change his mind. Those SPD drones are
> >> sitting somewhere right now on SPD property.
> >>
> >> Meanwhile, the SPD was also dealing with the port-camera surveillance
> >> scandal. That kicked off in late January, when people in West Seattle
> >> began wondering aloud about the 30 cameras that had appeared unannounced
> >> on utility poles along the waterfront. The West Seattle neighborhood
> >> blog (westseattleblog.com) sent questions to city utility companies,
> and
> >> the utilities in turn pointed at SPD, which eventually admitted that it
> >> had purchased and installed 30 surveillance cameras with federal money
> >> for "port security." That resulted in an additional uproar and another
> >> mea culpa tour, much like they did with the drones, during which
> >> officers repeated that they should have done a better job of educating
> >> the public about what they were up to with the cameras on Alki.
> >> (Strangely, the Port of Seattle and the US Coast Guard didn't seem very
> >> involved in this "port security" project—their names only appear in a
> >> few cursory places in the budgets and contracts. The SPD is clearly the
> >> driving agency behind the project. For example, their early tests of
> >> sample Aruba products—beginning with a temporary Aruba mesh network set
> >> up in Pioneer Square for Mardi Gras in 2009—didn't have anything to do
> >> with the port whatsoever.)
> >>
> >> The cameras attracted the controversy, but they were only part of the
> >> project. In fact, the 30 pole-mounted cameras on Alki that caused the
> >> uproar cost $82,682—just 3 percent of the project's $2.7 million
> >> Homeland Security–funded budget. The project's full title was "port
> >> security video surveillance system with wireless mesh network." People
> >> raised a fuss about the cameras. But what about the mesh network?
> >>
> >> Detective Moss and Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh mentioned the downtown
> >> mesh network during those surveillance-camera community meetings, saying
> >> it would help cops and firefighters talk to each other by providing a
> >> wireless network for their exclusive use, with the potential for others
> >> to use overlaid networks handled by the same equipment. (Two-way radios
> >> already allow police officers to talk to each other, but officers still
> >> use wireless networks to access data, such as the information an officer
> >> looks for by running your license plate number when you've been pulled
> >> over.)
> >>
> >> As Brian Magnuson of Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install the
> >> Aruba system, explained the possible use of such a system: "A normal
> >> cell-phone network is a beautiful thing right up until the time you
> >> really need it—say you've just had an earthquake or a large storm, and
> >> then what happens? Everybody picks up their phone and overloads the
> >> system." The network is most vulnerable precisely when it's most needed.
> >> A mesh network could be a powerful tool for streaming video from
> >> surveillance cameras or squad car dash-cams across the network, allowing
> >> officers "real-time situational awareness" even when other communication
> >> systems have been overloaded, as Detective Moss explained in those
> >> community meetings.
> >>
> >> But the Aruba mesh network is not just for talking, it's also for
> tracking.
> >>
> >> After reviewing Aruba's technical literature, as well as talking to IT
> >> directors and systems administrators around the country who work with
> >> Aruba products, it's clear that their networks are adept at seeing all
> >> the devices that move through their coverage area and visually mapping
> >> the locations of those devices in real time for the system
> >> administrators' convenience. In fact, one of Aruba's major selling
> >> points is its ability to locate "rogue" or "unassociated" devices—that
> >> is, any device that hasn't been authorized by (and maybe hasn't even
> >> asked to be part of) the network.
> >>
> >> Which is to say, your device. The cell phone in your pocket, for
> instance.
> >>
> >> The user's guide for one of Aruba's recent software products states:
> >> "The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and
> >> associated devices." That software includes "a location engine that
> >> calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds
> >> by default... The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each
> >> MAC address."
> >>
> >> For now, Seattle's mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area.
> >> But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by
> >> The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have "citywide deployment" of
> >> the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the
> >> SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new
> >> meaning to the phrase "real-time situational awareness."
> >>
> >> So how does Aruba's mesh network actually function?
> >>
> >> Each of those off-white boxes you see downtown is a wireless access
> >> point (AP) with four radios inside it that work to shove giant amounts
> >> of data to, through, and around the network, easily handling
> >> bandwidth-hog uses such as sending live, high-resolution video to or
> >> from moving vehicles. Because this grid of APs forms a latticelike mesh,
> >> it works like the internet itself, routing traffic around bottlenecks
> >> and "self-healing" by sending traffic around components that fail.
> >>
> >> As Brian Magnuson at Cascade Networks explains: "When you have 10 people
> >> talking to an AP, no problem. If you have 50, that's a problem." Aruba's
> >> mesh solution is innovative—instead of building a few high-powered,
> >> herculean APs designed to withstand an immense amount of traffic, Aruba
> >> sprinkles a broad area with lots of lower-powered APs and lets them
> >> figure out the best way to route all the data by talking to each other.
> >>
> >> Aruba's technology is considered cutting-edge because its systems are
> >> easy to roll out, administer, and integrate with other systems, and its
> >> operating system visualizes what's happening on the network in a simple,
> >> user-friendly digital map. The company is one of many firms in the
> >> networking business, but, according to the tech-ranking firm Gartner,
> >> Aruba ranks second (just behind Cisco) in "completeness of vision" and
> >> third in "ability to execute" for its clever ways of getting around
> >> technical hurdles.
> >>
> >> Take Candlestick Park, the San Francisco 49ers football stadium, which,
> >> Magnuson says, is just finishing up an Aruba mesh network installation.
> >> The stadium has high-intensity cellular service needs—70,000 people can
> >> converge there for a single event in one of the most high-tech cities in
> >> America, full of high-powered, newfangled devices. "Aruba's solution was
> >> ingenious," Magnuson says. It put 640 low-power APs under the stadium's
> >> seats to diffuse the data load. "If you're at the stadium and trying to
> >> talk to an AP," Magnuson says, "you're probably sitting on it!"
> >>
> >> Another one of Aruba's selling points is its ability to detect rogue
> >> devices—strangers to the system. Its promotional "case studies" trumpet
> >> this capability, including one report about Cabela's hunting and
> >> sporting goods chain, which is an Aruba client: "Because Cabela's stores
> >> are in central shopping areas, the company captures huge quantities of
> >> rogue data—as many as 20,000 events per day, mostly from neighboring
> >> businesses." Aruba's network is identifying and distinguishing which
> >> devices are allowed on the Cabela's network and which are within the
> >> coverage area but are just passing through. The case study also
> >> describes how Cabela's Aruba network was able to locate a lost
> >> price-scanner gun in a large warehouse by mapping its location, as well
> >> as track employees by the devices they were carrying.
> >>
> >> It's one thing for a privately owned company to register devices it
> >> already owns with a network. It's another for a local police department
> >> to scale up that technology to blanket an entire downtown—or an entire
> >> city.
> >>
> >> Aruba also sells a software product called "Analytics and Location
> >> Engine 1.0." According to a document Aruba has created about the
> >> product, ALE "calculates the location of associated and unassociated
> >> wifi devices... even though a device has not associated to the network,
> >> information about it is available. This includes the MAC address,
> >> location, and RSSI information." ALE's default setting is anonymous,
> >> which "allows for unique user tracking without knowing who the
> >> individual user is." But, Aruba adds in the next sentence, "optionally
> >> the anonymization can be disabled for richer analytics and user behavior
> >> tracking." The network has the ability to see who you are—how deeply it
> >> looks is up to whoever's using it. (The Aruba technology, as far as we
> >> know, does not automatically associate a given MAC address with the name
> >> on the device's account. But figuring out who owns the account—by asking
> >> a cell-phone company, for example—would not be difficult for a
> >> law-enforcement agency.)
> >>
> >> Geo-location seems to be an area of intense interest for Aruba. Last
> >> week, the Oregonian announced that Aruba had purchased a Portland
> >> mapping startup called Meridian, which, according to the article, has
> >> developed software that "pinpoints a smartphone's location inside a
> >> venue, relying either on GPS technology or with localized wireless
> >> networks." The technology, the article says, "helps people find their
> >> way within large buildings, such as malls, stadiums, or airports and
> >> enables marketing directed at a phone's precise location."
> >>
> >> How does that geo-location work? Devices in the network's coverage area
> >> are "heard" by more than one radio in those APs (the off-white boxes).
> >> Once the network hears a device from multiple APs, it can compare the
> >> strength and timing of the signal to locate where the device is. This is
> >> classic triangulation, and users of Aruba's AirWave software—as in the
> >> Cabela's example—report that their systems are able to locate devices to
> >> within a few feet.
> >>
> >> In the case of large, outdoor installations where APs are more spread
> >> out, the ability to know what devices are passing through is
> >> useful—especially, perhaps, to policing agencies, which could log that
> >> data for long-term storage. As networking products and their uses
> >> continue to evolve, they will only compound the "legal mystery" around
> >> how this technology could and should be used that Pell and Soghoian
> >> described in their Berkeley Technology Law Journal piece. Aruba's mesh
> >> network is state-of-the-art, but something significantly smarter and
> >> more sensitive will surely be on the market this time next year. And who
> >> knows how much better the software will get.
> >>
> >> An official spokesperson for Aruba wrote in an e-mail that the company
> >> could not answer The Stranger's questions because they pertained "to a
> >> new product announcement" that would not happen until Thanksgiving.
> >> "Aruba's technology," the spokesperson added, "is designed for indoor
> >> (not outdoor) usage and is for consumer apps where they opt in." This is
> >> in direct contradiction to Aruba's own user's manuals, as well as the
> >> fact that the Seattle Police Department installed an outdoor Aruba mesh
> >> network earlier this year.
> >>
> >> One engineer familiar with Aruba products and similar systems—who
> >> requested anonymity—confirmed that the mesh network and its software are
> >> powerful tools. "But like anything," the engineer said, it "can be used
> >> inappropriately... You can easily see how a user might abuse this
> >> ability (network admin has a crush on user X, monitors user X's location
> >> specifically)." As was widely reported earlier this year, such alleged
> >> abuses within the NSA have included a man who spied on nine women over a
> >> five-year period, a woman who spied on prospective boyfriends, a man who
> >> spied on his girlfriend, a husband who spied on his wife, and even a man
> >> who spied on his ex-girlfriend "on his first day of access to the NSA's
> >> surveillance system," according to the Washington Post. The practice was
> >> so common within the NSA, it got its own classification: "LOVEINT."
> >>
> >> Other Aruba clients—such as a university IT director, a university vice
> >> president, and systems administrators—around the country confirmed it
> >> wouldn't be difficult to use the mesh network to track the movement of
> >> devices by their MAC addresses, and that building a historical database
> >> of their movements would be relatively trivial from a data-storage
> >> perspective.
> >>
> >> As Bruce Burton, an information technology manager at the University of
> >> Cincinnati (which uses an Aruba network), put it in an e-mail: "This
> >> mesh network will have the capability to track devices (MAC addresses)
> >> throughout the city."
> >>
> >> Not that the SPD would do that—but we don't know. "We definitely feel
> >> like the public doesn't have a handle on what the capabilities are,"
> >> says Debelak of the ACLU. "We're not even sure the police department
> >> does." It all depends on what the SPD says when it releases its
> >> mesh-network protocols.
> >>
> >> "They're long overdue," says Lee Colleton, a systems administrator at
> >> Google who is also a member of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, a
> >> grassroots group that formed in response to SPD's drone and
> >> surveillance-camera controversies. "If we don't deal with this kind of
> >> thing now, and establish norms and policies, we'll find ourselves in an
> >> unpleasant situation down the road that will be harder to change."
> >>
> >> The city is already full of surveillance equipment. The Seattle
> >> Department of Transportation, for example, uses license-plate scanners,
> >> sensors embedded in the pavement, and other mechanisms to monitor
> >> individual vehicles and help estimate traffic volume and wait time. "But
> >> as soon as that data is extrapolated," says Adiam Emery of SDOT, "it's
> >> gone." They couldn't turn it over to a judge if they tried.
> >>
> >> Not that license-plate scanners have always been so reliable. Doug Honig
> >> of the ACLU remembers a story he heard from a former staffer a couple of
> >> years ago about automatic license-plate readers on police cars in
> >> Spokane. Automatic license-plate readers "will read a chain-link fence
> >> as XXXXX," Honig says, "which at the time also matched the license plate
> >> of a stolen car in Mississippi, resulting in a number of false alerts to
> >> pull over the fence."
> >>
> >> Seattle's mesh network is only one instance in a trend of Homeland
> >> Security funding domestic surveillance equipment. Earlier this month,
> >> the New York Times ran a story about a $7 million Homeland Security
> >> grant earmarked for "port security"—just like the SPD's mesh-network
> >> funding—in Oakland.
> >>
> >> "But instead," the Times reports, "the money is going to a police
> >> initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from
> >> around town—from gunshot- detection sensors in the barrios of East
> >> Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the
> >> city's upscale hills."
> >>
> >> The Oakland "port security" project, which the Times reports was
> >> formerly known as the "Domain Awareness Center," will "electronically
> >> gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases,
> >> analyze that data, and display some of the information on a bank of
> >> giant monitors." The Times doesn't detail what kind of "sensors and
> >> databases" the federally funded "port security" project will pay for,
> >> but perhaps it's something like Seattle's mesh network with its ability
> >> to ping, log, and visually map the movement of devices in and out of its
> >> coverage area.
> >>
> >> Which brings up some corollary issues, ones with implications much
> >> larger than the SPD's ability to call up a given time on a given day and
> >> see whether you were at work, at home, at someone's else home, at a bar,
> >> or at a political demonstration: What does it mean when money from a
> >> federal agency like the Department of Homeland Security is being
> >> funneled to local police departments like SPD to purchase and use
> >> high-powered surveillance gear?
> >>
> >> For federal surveillance projects, the NSA and other federal spying
> >> organizations have at least some oversight—as flawed as it may be—from
> >> the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA
> >> court) and the US Congress. But local law enforcement doesn't have that
> >> kind of oversight and, in Seattle at least, has been buying and
> >> installing DHS-funded surveillance equipment without explaining what
> >> it's up to. The city council's surveillance ordinance earlier this year
> >> was an attempt to provide local oversight on that kind of policing, but
> >> it has proven toothless.
> >>
> >> It's reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be
> >> shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram
> >> of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to
> >> institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff's
> >> Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.
> >>
> >> Fusion centers, if you're unfamiliar with the term, are
> >> information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security
> >> as "focal points" for the "receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing" of
> >> surveillance information.
> >>
> >> If federally funded, locally built surveillance systems with little to
> >> no oversight can dump their information in a fusion center—think of it
> >> as a gun show for surveillance, where agencies freely swap information
> >> with little restriction or oversight—that could allow federal agencies
> >> such as the FBI and the NSA to do an end-run around any limitations set
> >> by Congress or the FISA court.
> >>
> >> If that's their strategy in Seattle, Oakland, and elsewhere, it's an
> >> ingenious one—instead of maintaining a few high-powered, herculean
> >> surveillance agencies designed to digest an immense amount of traffic
> >> and political scrutiny, the federal government could sprinkle an entire
> >> nation with lots of low-powered surveillance nodes and let them figure
> >> out the best way to route the data by talking to each other. By
> >> diffusing the way the information flows, they can make it flow more
> >> efficiently.
> >>
> >> It's an innovative solution—much like the Aruba mesh network itself.
> >>
> >> The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to requests for
> >> comment.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dan Staples
> >>
> >> Open Technology Institute
> >> https://commotionwireless.net
> >> OpenPGP key: http://disman.tl/pgp.asc
> >> Fingerprint: 2480 095D 4B16 436F 35AB 7305 F670 74ED BD86 43A9
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Commotion-discuss mailing list
> >> Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> >> 'Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net');>
> >> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Preston Rhea
> >> Field Analyst, Open Technology Institute
> >> New America Foundation
> >> +1-202-570-9770
> >> Twitter: @prestonrhea
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > mesh mailing list
> > mesh at lists.sudoroom.org
> > http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/mesh
> >
>
> --
> http://mitar.tnode.com/
> https://twitter.com/mitar_m
>
--
-steve
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://sudoroom.org/lists/private/mesh/attachments/20131110/120664ca/attachment.html>
More information about the mesh
mailing list