Comments to Lozadas Testimony

Lozada’s expose on the interception of his texts and triangulating his whereabouts via cellular signals didn’t shock me as it should have. Although the interception of texts only worried me on one aspect, that it did not get to the addressee as if snatched or stolen by the interceptors. It turns out that these messages did get to Lozada’s wife and brother. Privacy and security is really defeatable using technology available out there. So it should not come as a surprise that it is being used now.

The only issue we should discuss is how to punish this violations. We really cannot stop technology’s advancement even if it is used in violation of one’s rights. But we should allow technologies such as these because it can also be used in many other good things. Legislators should then just focus on punishing illegal uses of technology but not ban or prohibit the use or development of it.

Smart has a product Smartkids where the Parents can track their kids’ whereabouts using their cellphone signals. This is available even for the private citizens. This technology is not limited to the knowledge of as Lozada said, an engineer like him. Who knows if his cellphone and sim card was a government issued one. In this case, it could have allowed the government for surveillance and regulation.

In Washington DC, a pair of researchers has created a low-cost and simple hack to crack the encryption in GSM mobile phones and intercept voice and SMS text messages within minutes. They claim that they have engineered a low-cost practical attack against GSM’s A5/1 algorithm. They were surprised on how easy it was to hack it. They were shocked to see the GSM specs floating around in the Net. And they used a combination of 2 terabytes worth of hard drives and one field programmable field array (FPGA) worth $1,000 to decode the encryption. They plan to release a commercial grade version of the tool which will crack GSM’s calls and texts in 30 seconds. GSM they said is not secure.

SOURCE: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=146616