GSM/GPS Tracking Device Found On Activist's Car At Circumvention Tech Festival 143
vivaoporto writes A GSM/GPS tracking device was found this March 4 on an activist's car attending the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain, a festival that proposes to gather "the community fighting censorship and surveillance for a week of conferences, workshops, hackathons, and social gatherings, featuring many of the Internet Freedom community's flagship events." They are now asking for the internet tech community for help in order to identify the device. Below verbatim is the plea for help published on the Tor Project website. The fine article also contains pictures of the device.
"On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.
If you have information about this device — please send information to jacob at appelbaum dot net using gpg.
The device was magnetically mounted inside of the left wheel well of the car. The battery is attached by cable to the tracking device. The battery was magnetically mounted to the frame of the car. The tracking device was similarly magnetically mounted. The device itself has an external magnetically mounted GPS antenna. It has a very simple free hanging GSM antenna. The device included a Movistar SIM card for GSM network access. The entire device was wrapped in black tape."
"On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.
If you have information about this device — please send information to jacob at appelbaum dot net using gpg.
The device was magnetically mounted inside of the left wheel well of the car. The battery is attached by cable to the tracking device. The battery was magnetically mounted to the frame of the car. The tracking device was similarly magnetically mounted. The device itself has an external magnetically mounted GPS antenna. It has a very simple free hanging GSM antenna. The device included a Movistar SIM card for GSM network access. The entire device was wrapped in black tape."
Heh. (Score:5, Funny)
...or a publicity stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
Or a publicity stunt by the "activist"
Re:...or a publicity stunt (Score:4, Funny)
Or someone crying in a corner telling her friend that he said he loved her but she couldn't be with him on the secretive trip out of town and not to call while he was gone.
This tech is availible to anyone. There are a ton of possible explainations.
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Yea, the device is a pretty amature build. Way too large for any TLA organizations, and the build sounds pretty fragile.
I'm fairly certain I could do better with arduino shields from radio shack.
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Aliexpress lists >50.000 of these, for all sorts of purposes, bikes, cars, kids, clothing...
http://www.aliexpress.com/whol... [aliexpress.com]
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It's not amateur. The external connections (the wires, the SMA) may be sloppy but tossing together some breakout boards makes a prototype not a product. I mean, the GPS I made for the tracker in my car [tindie.com] is amateur, but it's still a formal product on a PCB, not a bunch of wires sticking out of a breadboard.
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Radio Shack ain't no more, one of the first temples of Geekdom has been relegated to mythdom.
Re:...or a publicity stunt (Score:5, Informative)
Do you know who Jacob Appelbaum is? He is one of the core Tor team members. He has represented Wikileaks at HOPE and given lectures based on the Snowden leaks, which he had access to. He has been targeted multiple times by the US authorities, including getting a court order for his Twitter account and repeatedly stopping him at the US border. He has had several laptops and phones seized.
There is a huge amount of evidence that he is being targeted quite openly by various "security" services. This development is interesting but unsurprising.
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My bad, didn't parse the summary properly, ignore.
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Ironically, thats why most people shush it, because it is ioerror. The guy definitely knows how to make good PR, thats why Tor project keeps him aboard as a necessary spokesperson evil, however don't conflate talking heads with project contributors (he does basically nothing but ranting). Don't you think targeting someone who whines about it repeatedly since circa 2011 would be such a smart move?
Chances are it's just the usual wikileaks-tier PR, be it paranoia or calcu
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It struck me, that judging by how sloppy the tape job was, how poorly it was hidden and how non-state of the art the device was, it was more of a political statement than an serious investigation.
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I have a friend who is a repo man - and the tracking devices he drops onto cars (like if he doesn't know where the person lives - he'll attach one of these and track it to his/her work and/or living address) are 100 times better packaged and more discrete than this. Properly installed you'd likely have a hard time finding it.
Hence why I thought it was a prank - no way a government agency would be this sloppy and allow it to be found so easily. Who knows though.
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Ooh, you'd be great fun in a group of NRA activists...
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It could be
done by
1) them
2) a fan without their knowledge to whip up the skeer or
a) just as a prank
3) It could be done by a bewildering number of government, quasi-government, eiteh at the national, regional or local level.
4) A vigilante
5) their ex.
6) a crazy person targeting them for kidnapping because they know how well they will taste with carrots.
i.e. apropos of nothing
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Whenever you find a tracking device on your vehicle - stick it to some other vehicle. Preferably to something that travels a long distance (train car, truck trailer) or make random calls (delivery truck, taxi, cop car).
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Sticking things to other people's vehicles is probably illegal (IANAL, but it's a fairly good guess), and certainly could get you in a whole hell of a lot of trouble. Now, sticking it in the mail, OTOH, probably isn't illegal, and achieves much the same result.
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Put it on a railroad car.
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Insightful not funny. THis does not look like work of the NSA this looks like hack-a-day.
Have some fun (Score:5, Funny)
Take SIM out of GPS/GSM device. Install in cheap phone. Pass around between your friends to call sex lines (do they still exist?) order contraband, make srange calls at 3AM to various powerful political figures.
Then see who's ass they go after in law enforcement.
Re:Have some fun (Score:5, Funny)
Better yet, go take the tracking device and stick it to the underside of a city garbage truck or something. The cops will be sent on a wild goose chase and whoever had the tracking device attached wont get tracked anymore.
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Better yet, go take the tracking device and stick it to the underside of a city garbage truck or something. The cops will be sent on a wild goose chase and whoever had the tracking device attached wont get tracked anymore.
I'd actually mail it to the headquarters of a TLA (CIA/NSA/FBI/KGB/GRU/MI5/MI6/ETC) - but first I'd pack it in a box filled with spare electronics, wire, and play-doh. The outside of the box might be liberally doused with Nitrogen (read: detects as explosives) based fertilizer that I use on my lawn. I'd also enclose a letter asking if it belongs to them. The same letter would also ask them to find the owner if is not theirs. Plus I'd have multiple copies of the video of me packing the thing up for shipment.
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I'm pretty sure that if you do this in the US, you'll get charged and convicted for terrorrism. And they'll give you the bill for the bomb disposal.
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The tracking will continue undisturbed by the discovery of their decoy device.
Re:Have some fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Or purchase a burner phone, call it from the devicevwith the sim and record the number on the caller ID. From there you can track down who owns the number.
Of course it probably sends GPS coordinates via sms. You could attempt to study the format and send bogus location reports like saying it is at the center of the fukishima reactor, the rim of some volcano, or in the middle of the ocean.
Just hope it is not a rental car and the car company starts charging you credit card for excess mileage or out of boundry insurance coverages.
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It's not that easy to purchase a burner phone in Spain. You can't legally buy a phone contract (regular billing or pay-as-you-go) without supplying proof of identity for the national register.
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You just need a phone, not a contract. Surely you can buy phones without sim cards?
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The idea in GPP was to call the burner phone with the SIM, not to put the SIM in the burner phone, so it does require both phone and contract.
Re:Have some fun (Score:4, Informative)
These types of SIM card usually don't allow you to make voice calls. They are machine-to-machine (M2M) SIMs that only do data, and sometimes text messages because SMS tends to be lower power and more reliable than data.
Russian or Asian (Score:2)
Based on how crappy this looks, I would guess either Chinese or Russian. I would also collect fingerprints - there must be a few dozen fingerprints on this device, if not on the black isolation tape, then possibly on the glue side of the tape. If you do find fingerprints, this isn't done by professionals, and you're probably OK. Could very well be the activist's wife suspecting he's not really going to a festival, and is instead planning on eloping with a secret lover. Everything is possible :-)
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Re:Russian or Asian (Score:4, Insightful)
My first guess is they're from some U.S. unit.
What makes you think that? What makes the US the more likely suspect over, say, the Spanish? What what it happening in Spain, and the Spanish text on the device...
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Spanish backed and supported by US resources?
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Why must the US be involved?
Or is just that Americans are simultaneously so angry at their government for spying on everyone, but also so proud of being top dog that they can't imagine the Spanish being able to do the same without US help? ;)
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The text in the unit is in Spanish. It has an ID...
Not considering a misdirection it seems to be a standard issue for Spanish secret police.
They would buy the same material as the one in which they would have been educated, namely USA secret ops or FBI training.
If the ID is sequential there are, at least 2200 units like this roaming Spain...
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Here's what the FBI was using 4 years ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dmh5s/does_this_mean_the_fbi_is_after_us/
Re: Russian or Asian (Score:1)
You were right, it was the wife. Trouble in paradise, how embarrassing!
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Based on how crappy this looks, I would guess either Chinese or Russian.
Wow! You must be a master detective! I would have guessed Spanish or Italian based on the language printed on the device.
"Marron" could be French, but "Blanco" is definitely not French.
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Based on the Spanish silkscreen on the device and the fact it happened in Spain, I'd say Spanish is a way better guess.
How did they notice that? (Score:3)
How the fuck would they notice that? Do they make it a habit to effectively strip search their entire car every time they get in it?
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It's a gathering of people fighting censorship and tracking and you think people there WOULDN'T check their cars?
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One thing's for sure - we're all aware of the conference now...something which wasn't true 24 hours ago.
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I don't know about you, but I'd know pretty quickly if something was stuck in the wheel well of my car; it would sound funny when I was driving. I'd get out to see if there was something stuck in the wheel well, and... well there you have it.
It's also possible that a bunch of people there had these stuck on their cars, and it was a freak chance that this one got found (just happened to be on the right angle, was inspecting tires/repairing a flat) or, considering the conference, they could have swept the ar
Re:How did they notice that? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not all that difficult to open a hood. Sometimes you can stick your hand up from below the bumper cover, in between the radiator core support and the grille, and reach the mechanism. Other times you may need a tool, but it's easier to open a hood than it is to open a door.
Do you know where your antenna mechanism sits? There's a bit of a compartment between the inner fender liner, the outer fender, and the firewall. On some cars it can be accessed when the front door is open.
Some cars have plastic inner fender liners between the metal fender liner and the wheel, and often those are almost toolless to remove and install.
Most cars have a metallic inner bumper behind a layer of plastic or styrofoam that's hidden behind the bumper cover. On many cars one could reach that area from below even easier than reaching for the hood latch, and with little more than an AC condenser coil and some lights there's no reason for a mechanic to go poking in there, so a tracker would probably go unnoticed for some time if placed there.
Lastly, if they'd used a more automotive-looking project case they could have just attached it right next to the PCM under the hood, even tapping into a 12V wire to power it.
This was placed where it was placed because someone was in an awful hurry. It was probably a busy public place, and they probably couldn't use cover-of-darkness, so it was either in a well-lit area at night or during the day. I don't expect that whoever did this had much of a budget. No project case, not even heatshrink wrapping to make it look like it belongs, just some amateurish use of black duct tape that would stand out as not belonging to even casual people. Plus the whole poor placement aspect should mean that they weren't especially well trained to do this either.
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I once installed a new front bumper on a Honda CR-V.
I removed the front bumper cover, the grille... and found a screwdriver and a pack of cigarettes sitting in a depression on a piece of the frame. Knowing the history of the car, I'd never had anyone else do work in that area, so I'm guessing it was left there during some manual stage of manufacturing.
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The problem with placing it inside the car is that you won't get a good GPS or mobile signal there. That's why the antennas on cars are on the outside, not hidden under the bodywork. If you are going to mount the antenna somewhere where the signal won't be blocked you might as well just mount the whole thing there.
If anything, people are less likely to look in the wheel arch than the engine compartment. Wiper fluid, radiator fluid, alternator belts, fuses... All sorts of reasons to look in there. Under the
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Re:How did they notice that? (Score:5, Informative)
From the Google translated local article:
On February 8, after crossing the French border patrol agents of the National Police (CNP) was stopped at the toll Jonquera. "They told me it was a search routine, but it was very strange for an hour and a half because the vehicle was out of my field of vision, an agent took it and then came back to me" claims without understanding the reason for this police action.
On March 1, in the city of Valencia, where he traveled to participate in the Circumvention Tech Festival , the second incident occurred. Only when it was parked and unloading your belongings appeared agents also the CNP, which was asked to identify her and those who accompanied him. The girl identified out that while "the police were placed around the car." "The two incidents in a time interval of three weeks I did and suspicion was when I decided to inspect the car," he concludes with a certain tone of indignation. The activist said that it will soon agree with your attorney when you decide what steps to from now.
Tweet
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I'm going to guess, this was when police installed the tracker.
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It's more likely that she's suspected of being a Catalan separatist, but TFA doesn't give any hints as to what cause(s) she promotes or even what her name is. She's female, 37 years old, and lives in Barcelona. (Incidentally, I find it somewhat strange that Jacob Appelbaum, and thus also the copy-paste summary, talks about "the local media". It's local to where she lives, not to where the conference is taking place and the device was
They needed a tracker to find an advertised event? (Score:2)
So, while the car was out of his sight for the first incident, some evil government agency placed a tracker, and used it to track him to...a "Circumvention Tech Festival"? An advertised event, at a physical venue, with sponsors and a website. They needed a tracker to find people who went to this event. I see.
Re:How did they notice that? (Score:5, Informative)
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All of them.
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That makes a bit more sense then.
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Given that these people being to
the community fighting censorship and surveillance
it's not entirely implausible that they do check their wheel wells every now and again.
Of course, it's also not too unlikely that one of them did it for attention/publicity stunt.
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Given the history of terrorism in spain and the nature of the conference (free speech related) and the france issues, they probably used mirrors at an entry point of the conference and did a once over in all cars parking in the event lot on entry. They likely did this looking for cars rigged to explode and found this tracking device and investigated it.
Its a quick and easy way to show a security theatr is present.
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That's an interesting idea, but I'm afraid that it's wrong for the simple reason that the venue doesn't have its own parking spaces. People arriving by car would have to park in the road or in a near-by shopping centre.
how was it detected then found? (Score:2)
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Re:how was it detected then found? (Score:5, Informative)
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Stingray (Score:4, Informative)
This would be ideal to find out who it's calling, and changing what it's sending...
Aluminum FTW! (Score:2)
Or... (Score:2)
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Very few cars have a non-metal frame. What you're looking for is a car without accessible ferrous surfaces, or places to zip-tie things. (note: there's steel in a Morgan; it's not 100% wood.)
Plus, these aren't the type of people I would expect to be rolling around in expensive, exotic "super cars".
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There's currently only one production vehicle with an all-aluminum body on the market today. But it has a conventional steel rail frame. Saturn used to make body panels out of plastic as well, but they never looked as good. Steel body panels are light and cost effective and aren't going away anytime soon.
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Serial Port anywhere? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are ways to poke around inside one of these if you can inject commands and read from the GPRS modem port. Many chipsets implement at extended AT [wikipedia.org] command set. There are registers with IP addresses of the target server for the data sent.
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U-bloc GPS Chip (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know who owns it but the module with 2209 written on it is a U-blox GPS receiver. I recognise the circuit around it from their reference designs.
http://www.u-blox.com/en/gps-modules/pvt-modules.html
Time to pull that Breaking Bad trick (Score:2)
Slap the GPS tracker on another vehicle as unrelated to yours as possible, say a Finnish tour bus parked in the area. In the following weeks, the security forces would trace the vehicle to an obscure suburb of Helsinki, then to Cappadocia or Palermo, at which point they would spring their SWAT trap on...nothing.
Cry for attention... (Score:3, Insightful)
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To me, this stinks of home made stunt to get attention. The guy's reddit name, the shit build quality, the lack of any detail as to how it was found... etc etc etc. It's a millennial cry for attention, for whatever reason.
I have to agree on the build quality -- that soldering is not very professional looking, unless some unskilled tech at the police department (or where ever) builds their own devices, that screams out "home made". The white/brown wires are barely soldered to the pad on the back side of the board.
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It doesn't seem like they say who the activist is?
Re:Cry for attention... (Score:5, Insightful)
> The guy's reddit name,
What exactly about the name "ioerror" [reddit.com] screams attention whore to you?
> the shit build quality,
So, your contention is that someone went to the effort to layout and fab up at least a two-layer circuit board with surface mount components specifically to hoax the internet?
> It's a millennial cry for attention, for whatever reason.
Looks like you have a stick up your ass about millenials. [slashdot.org]
Why don't you just shout "get off my internet" at them like a proper grumpy old man?
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I do not think, nor did I say, they "fabbed" this unit for this specific purpose. I do think it was probable a hobbiest creation that was just handy when the idea struck. The complete lack of any specifics about how it was found seems like a think story thought up on
Missed opportunity (Score:1)
They totally missed the opportunity to find out who planted it. Leave it untouched on the car for a day or two to make sure they have a good fix on the location, disable, film and photograph the repair guy(s) who show up to fix it. That's when you post what you did along with the images of the people.
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Next step after photographing it... (Score:1)
In Soviet Russia (Score:4, Informative)
The device looks very similar to the numerous GSM/GPS trackers that are sold in Russia in every security equipment store. When the police is busy with Bolotnaya square activists there is no other method to find your stolen car.
Looks improvised (Score:2)
May be components intended for a different use. Definitely not fit for longer-term usage or bad weather.
The PCB is rather low-density. This may be a custom-manufactured board (which may mean no way to track it) with the components placed and soldered by hand (iron and hot air). There may be some way of tracking the GSM module (the one marked 2209) as that is way outside of non-specialized shops to design and not a lot of manufacturers make them. May need to be opened for identification. The rest looks like
Call log is on SIM Card (Score:2)
Smash It! (Score:2)
Yep, that's right: smash it to little pieces, videoing the entire action .. and then post it to Youtube.
Wait and see which government agency comes whining around trying to arrest you for destruction of government property.
Remember this? http://www.wired.com/2010/10/f... [wired.com]
Of course now _I_ am open to charges of conspiracy to destroy government property, interfering with police actions, and who knows what else?
[fingers monitors]
She was suing UK police over past outrage (Score:2)
Additional information from The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-... [theguardian.com]
This was the the female political activist who is suing the Metropolitan Police for planting an undercover officer in environmental/animal activist groups who formed a sexual relationship with her for two years under a false identity "Mark Kennedy". See previous stories about him here:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/... [theguardian.com]
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Coins are stupid.
Most likely, a ruler is not the first thing you put in your bag when you go to a Hackathon/conference.
The Euro in the pictures has a diameter of 23.25 mm. It almost has the same diameter as an American quarter which is 24.26 mm (0.955 inches).
Metric Ruler? (Score:2)
Most likely, a ruler is not the first thing you put in your bag when you go to a Hackathon/conference.
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Most US readers are well aware of what a centimeter is
But they can't use Google to find the diameter of a foreign coin ?
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I've never needed to know the diameter of a coin, and it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me to search for that. There's also no denomination on the coin that I can see, so if I hadn't handled one in the past I probably wouldn't even know what to search for. That said, it seems like most folks in the US plop down a quarter next to something for scale, so I'd assume a similarly sized coin anywhere else.
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please explain why you still use Imperial Units for keeping time?
There are no imperial units [wikipedia.org] for time. However the second is part [wikipedia.org] of the metric system and we do use it even if we also use hours and minutes which are not part of the metric system. So our time system is more metric than imperial and so the question really is: why do you use partly metric time but insist on imperial for everything else? (well except for the gallon, pint, fluid ounce etc. for which you came up with a different definition from the imperial one but still called it by the same name).
metric is great for scientific applications, but not always the best for people to relate to in some situations
The 95% o
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Idealy they will use a tonsilometer but baring that, the oldschool five knuckle multiplyer will work.
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Who looks in their wheel wells? The kind of paranoid (and properly paranoid, judging by the article) people who attend security conferences.
Re:Garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
Not every government agency spends megabucks on top equipment when the off the shelf stuff is sufficient.
If you want to track someone and want plausible deniability then it's a lot better to use cheap off the shelf stuff and wrap it in tape. It's no big deal to defend that you lost a $100 device that anyone can buy, it's just written off as operational cost.
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And we all know exactly how thoroughly this was all screened for security and intruder resistance.
Somehow, I first read that as "intruder assistance".