{"id":12352,"date":"2014-01-31T13:43:31","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T19:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=12352"},"modified":"2014-01-31T13:43:31","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T19:43:31","slug":"csec-used-airport-wi-fi-to-track-canadian-travellers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=12352","title":{"rendered":"CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts say that probably included many Canadians whose smartphone and laptop signals were intercepted without their knowledge as they passed through the terminal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

via CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers: Edward Snowden documents – Politics – CBC News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The above statement is misleading.\u00a0 A smartphone does not have\u00a0 signals that can be “intercepted,” a smartphone actively seeks out and asks for an IP address so it can check in wherever some app wants to check in.\u00a0 A lot of apps want to phone home and have access to a device’s network.\u00a0 Smartphones are always active participants in a network.\u00a0 The user of a smartphone has chosen to leave wifi active which means that user *wants* his device to scan for and connect to available bandwidth resources.\u00a0 This scanning is a feature not a bug.<\/p>\n

The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they \u2014\u00a0and their wireless devices \u2014\u00a0showed up in other Wi-Fi “hot spots” in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They simply store and key off the device ID or MAC address.\u00a0 Every device has a unique MAC address, the layer 2 address used by local routers in the final leg of a route to send packets to the right device.\u00a0 This address does not leave the local subnet unless through surreptitious means like a malicious app.<\/p>\n

This kind of sweep probably captures browsing metadata all keyed by device id.\u00a0 Not sure how useful any of that data will be to anyone.\u00a0 End to end encryption using SSL can protect content of a message data but not metadata, the where and how long one communicates.\u00a0 This kind of metadata could be useful nuggets in corporate espionage for all kinds of reasons.\u00a0 If you’re just using the open wifi at the airport to pass time none of this matters as long as they’re not attempting Man In The Middle attacks or 0-day exploits against you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experts say that probably included many Canadians whose smartphone and laptop signals were intercepted without their knowledge as they passed through the terminal. via CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers: Edward Snowden documents – Politics – CBC News. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[101,78],"class_list":["post-12352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networking","tag-security","tag-wifi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12353,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352\/revisions\/12353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}