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DoD: Turn Off Your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Watch GPS (breakingdefense.com)
292 points by smacktoward on Aug 6, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 210 comments



I occasionally did onsite support many years ago for some weird proprietary equipment.

One military site had the rule that nothing electronic left the main gate site without being handed over to the guards, processed, and i believe destroyed before it left (not that you ever saw it again anyway). They were serious...

You drove to the site knowing it would all be gone and a strong warning not to turn around if you were near the gate because you just remembered you had your phone in your rental car.

We went through a lot of equipment.

But that site as far as anything I could have done, secure. I don't even know what the faculty looks like as it was blind folds and guards all the way to the equipment (well you could see the bathroom....with an MP.. there).

I feel like those kind of policies are the way of the future. There is no other way at this time.


I feel like those kind of policies are the way of the future. There is no other way at this time.

For military, yes. For civil, that's going a bit too far into the dystopian realm.


  >that's going a bit too far into the dystopian realm.
Imagine it's the year 1999 and someone tells you what flying in 2018 will be like.

I expect you'd say the exact same thing. And yet here we are. :(

People will get used to any degrading inconvenience if you claim it's for their own good and are willing to pay a lot of money to get the initial momentum going.


Are we that far off? Granted, I was still in high school in 1999, but I fly pretty frequently for work now and while it is different on it's surface, it doesn't feel that different overall.

I think part of that is the fact that the TSA is so bad at their jobs that it feels like a joke going through it. The worst part is that they know that they are a joke -- they freely admit that they miss between 70%-80% of weapons passing through.


Here's the worst part about it - if you are TSA-pre, it's really no different than travel in the '80s or '90s - you keep all your gear on, walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you didn't pay for TSA-pre, then it could be an hour+ worth of waiting in line to go through a degrading and yes incompetently administered experience.

So to my thinking it isn't even the dystopian aspect of big brother watching and prodding, it's the further disgust of big brother separating the haves and have nots. Some animals are more equal than others.


> if you are TSA-pre, it's really no different than travel in the '80s or '90s - you keep all your gear on, walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds.

And here's the kicker, you can get TSA pre by paying for premium seats. At this point having non-pre passengers having to take their laptops, shoes and jackets off is just a way to inconvenience us and has nothing to do with security.


It has always been security theater. It's meant to make people feel like a lot is being done for their security.


> it's really no different than travel in the '80s or '90s

Don't forget that getting TSA Pre involves an in-person background check interview (complete with fingerprinting). There's no escape; you just get to decide if you want to pay to have a "not a criminal" permanent file created for you, or be treated like a criminal for free, repeatedly and in small doses.


Innocent until proven guilty, right?


Imagine how the kids of today will feel about the lack of internet privacy tomorrow.

Growing up without something really makes you not know what you're missing; if you don't know what you're missing, it won't feel so awful when you don't have it.


They have no idea what privacy mean. They upload their all life on internet.

The problem with privacy is not that people try to take it away. It's that most people don't care.


I think it will feel awful, but in ways people cannot articulate and will blame themselves for.

A tiger born in a cage who experiences nothing but being fed every now will behave and feel very much worse than a free one. Children who were never treated with respect and never saw anyone else treated with respect don't suffer less harm in their development just because they don't know the difference.

I think at some very basic level, privacy is an obligatory requirement of becoming an individual person. An important part of the person grows when reflecting, when being alone with one's conscience, that's just as necessary as facing others. If you get all of either and none of the other, there's going to be a price.

Or take lead for example, if we increased our average exposure by a lot, that wouldn't mean that it now doesn't damage our central nervous system and organs anymore, not even for those who never knew lower levels of exposure. You can have the negative consequences without awareness of what is going on, and without any means to make it better.

A lot of the pressures already get relieved by consumerism at best, cruelty towards victims and identification with abusers at worst -- instead of being channeled towards the causes, it gets channeled towards what will make it worse. I think the rock bottom of that would a world unrecognizable even to Edgar Allan Poe.


I was in junior high in 1999 and boarding is immensely different. You could go with your family to the gate or meet them upon arrival. I recall running down the exit to meet my grandparents as a child. I hear there are passes available but the feel now is all wrong.

Why no one set off a bomb in a TSA cattle line I cannot understand. USA built a perfect target. I assume the TSA is some sort of jobs program but I cannot understand who benefits from it.


In many airports they’ve started using contract workers for line management, machine support, etc.

Those contract workers come from giant firms like Aramark.


I flew when I could exit a departure lounge and walk up mobile stairs to enter the aircraft with no screening whatsoever. Like, none.

Yeah, it feels really different.


Domestic or are you talking about the sixties here?


Both.


By flying I assume you mean flying in the USA because I don't have any issues with Australia, Asia or Europe.


Having to throw away your water bottle at security is ridiculous.

Buying something in the duty free shop, only to have them take it away at the next airport on connecting flights.

On some flights they don't even serve drinks anymore (unless you pay). Great recipe for dehydration.

Seats are so cramped that more and more people suffer from thrombosis after flying.

There's no space for your hand luggage because the airline charges extra for checked baggage and everyone takes the biggest suitcase they are allowed to take on the plane.

Ridiculous forms you need to fill out online (hoping you don't fall for a scam website), where you can pay only by credit card (not so common in many countries), just to fly through a country that is visa free? Flying via US or Canadian airports has become a major hassle...

Flying used to be different.

I remember that on one flight you could just walk to the front, and watch the pilots fly the plane through the open cockpit door.


Unrequested advice: drink your bottle, pass security with it, refill your bottle at any fountain, bar, toilet after security.

If you're dehydrated tell a hostess, free water will be provided (costs them a lot less than being sued).


I just empty my water bottle before the security line. Take the top off when it goes through the X-ray and fill it up after.


Yes that's my flying hack


> On some flights they don't even serve drinks anymore (unless you pay). Great recipe for dehydration.

Flights that don't serve free drinks tend to be (at least in my experience) SUPER cheap budget airlines. In the bygone age of luxurious leisurely air travel, you weren't flying from San Francisco to San Diego for $50 or from Paris to Barcelona for 30€.


> Flying used to be different.

Yeah, it was. Expensive.


Not in the period under consideration, and a generally overstated case regardless.

Robert Gorden in The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

surprisingly, the period of most rapid decline in the real price of air travel occurred before the first flight of a jet plane. As shown in figure 11–10, the price of air travel relative to other goods and services declined rapidly from 1940 to 1960, declined at a slower rate from 1960 to 1980, and has experienced no decline at all in its relative price between 1980 and 2014. The growth rate of passenger miles traveled has mirrored the rate of change of the relative price except with the opposite sign, because lower prices stimulate the demand for any good or service.


In total, perhaps. But deregulation had a huge effect on the cost of major long-haul routes with multiple competing airlines (e.g. LAX-JFK).


and inaccessible to the majority of people


> I remember that on one flight you could just walk to the front, and watch the pilots fly the plane through the open cockpit door.

And sadly, that's the only change that matters. Cockpits are now closed and locked.


  I remember that on one flight you could just walk to the front, and watch the pilots fly the plane through the open cockpit door
That changed in the USA even before 2001, at least by typical policy if not statute.

I recall a trip in the late 1990s flying Aur Canada (maybe YYZ-SFO) and while in Canadian airspace, I was invited in right behind the copilot to hang out for 20 minutes or so. I was surprised how much air traffic could be seen just with the naked eye.


[flagged]


It appears that there is some small risk connected to that, but the background radiation you get from actually being in the air is higher. So if you're scared of the radiation from the scanners, you should probably not check what you get from being in the air.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S168785071...


One is unavoidable if you want to fly, the other is security theatre. It's reasonable to complain about policies which are ineffective even if the harm is small relative to other sources of radiation.


It's reasonable to complain about security theatre from the standpoint that it is security theatre. It is not reasonable to complain about a policy for from the standpoint that it causes physical harm if the level of "harm" inflicted is orders of magnitude smaller than other aspects of the same activity.

This is not a what-about-ism, because the very act of flying (which is what border security policies are strictly related to) causes "more harm" in this specific context than the policy itself.

The harm caused by flying itself is also incredibly insignificant, but if someone is going to argue that scanner's radiation is the reason people are getting sick then they must agree that the radiation from the act of flying itself is a much larger issue (and discussing scanner radiation would make no significant difference to whatever harm they think the radiation is doing).


~0.9 μSv concentrated in on the surface of the skin is a much higher cancer risk than that same radiation spread over the body. A traveler that goes through these things 200 times a year for short flights really does have a significant increased risk of cancer. Even if they are slightly under the 250 μSv full body dose limits at 180 μSv due to that concented exposure.


> A traveler that goes through these things 200 times a year for short flights really does have a significant increased risk of cancer.

You are describing someone who travels on a plane four days a week, every week, and never takes vacation days. This person also must be checked using the full-body scanner on every single one of their trips (because the magnetic walk-through arches don't use x-rays and thus doesn't have any radiation to speak of -- they use magnets). I think it is more than fair to say that your example is ludicrously cherry-picked -- even if enough people traveled that often to be important enough to bring up in this discussion (the only example I can think of is airplane staff and crew) they almost certainly would not go through a full-body scanner every time they fly.

There was also a study in 2013[1] (which tested the actual scanners in LAX rather than some mocked up scanners), and it claims that a full-body scan only imparts ~11 nSv -- which is almost two orders of magnitude smaller than your ~0.9 μSv figure. I'm not sure which is correct, but I do have a source for my figure.

[1]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130627151642.h...


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S168785071...

Which is practically a love letter to these scanners and still has 0.88 μSv at the high end.

Again though it's not a question of full body does as this is highly concentrated radiation exposure onto high risk tissues.


> Again though it's not a question of full body does as this is highly concentrated radiation exposure onto high risk tissues.

I think you're missing my point on full-body scanners. As far as I'm aware (at least whenever I've traveled internationally), only a small number of passengers any given day will go through a full-body scanner. Most passengers just go through a regular magnetic scanner which doesn't have any radiation (and for domestic flights in Australia there isn't even the option of a full-body scanner). The point being that even if someone travels four times a week (200 times a year) they still won't go through a full-body scanner (and thus won't be exposed to the radiation from such a scanner) anywhere close to 200 times a year.


This is dependent on airport and timing. As initially developed in the US everyone at some airports where going through those scanners. But, various policies and types of scanners have been developed.

Under the current system few people are going to get cancer. But, in the past people where calling systems that where dangerous safe.


Who flies 200x a year and doesn’t have precheck?


That suggests precheck is a rubber stamp. Does nobody get rejected?


I'm sure people get rejected from precheck. I doubt that people rejected from precheck would take up a job where they have to travel on a plane four times a week on average (or rather, they travel enough that they go through a full-body scanner four times a week).


As far as I understand, precheck is not a rubber stamp - it is a shakedown.


The larger problem is that it's a degrading invasion of privacy that reeks of totalitarianism, and it does nothing for security.


Can your family give you a hug just as you enter the gate to board your plane? Because that's how it was before 9/11 in the States.


You can request a companion pass from some airlines. I know Delta allows it...one of th budget ones do t (Spirit?)

Essentially you ask their service desk for a companion pass and tbeu run your ID and print you our a ticket to go through security. I use it because I have family that do not speak English test visits me and I walk them to their gate...but if you just want a hug you can, they don't need a reason to issue one.

But I understand what you are saying, and the ability to be at the gate to drop off or meet domestic passengers brought back old memories.


Domestically?

Last time I flew in Australia domestic flights allowed non-passengers up to the waiting area, yes.


Flew domestically in Australia two days ago, and yep - no boarding passes needed for security. Liquids fine, no taking off shoes, no queue (and not even space for one to form). Like a whole different world.


Yes, the security aspect is ridiculous (and more than likely completely unnecessary) but also bear in mind that airports are busier than ever. If everyone flying took an average of one person to the gate with them, that's twice as many people in the airport. Most I've passed through lately (Europe and Asia) have been crowded as it is.


I remember those days very, very well.


In 1999 I had bags in the hold but had to respond to a page, by the time I had resolved the incident I had missed the flight. I was super-stressed but the check-in girl just laughed and said, get the next one, it’s fine. And it was. Can you imagine that now?


Yes that is very common, unless you buy the cheapest tickets available. I'm sure people in 1999 would be shocked to learn that a ticket from Berlin to London is available for around 50 USD if you don't have luggage and expect to actually board the planes you have booked.


Yeah, you get quantity, and lose quality. I've been overbooked few times (so sorry, please fly tomorrow unless we overbook you again, we don't care what this causes for your plans/further travel, and here go through crazy online forms and month-long process just to get those 250 euro you are entitled to by EU law).

Or cancelling flights for 'bad weather' reason, when all other flights departed just fine from the airport - in this case, airline doesn't have to compensate anything (freakin' Easyjet - I realized I am not rich enough and don't have enough extra vacation to use such a crappy random-quality services).


> In 1999 I had bags in the hold but had to respond to a page, by the time I had resolved the incident I had missed the flight. I was super-stressed but the check-in girl just laughed and said, get the next one, it’s fine. And it was. Can you imagine that now?

It actually literally happened to me in November 2001, even for an international flight: I missed my flight due to a 3-hour line at MDW, but my luggage had already boarded. I was assured by everyone concerned that it would be offloaded, but it flew ahead, and was (somewhat miraculously) still waiting for me at the luggage claim when I got there over 12 hours later.


Sure, happened to me last year in Europe.


They flew bags in the hold for a passenger who had checked in but not boarded?


Happens pretty often - by accident, that is. My luggage went on a trip all of its own (someone loaded it into a plane bound elsewhere than I was going), so I was peppered by e-mails where it's now for the next few days, while it was misrouted to all sorts of weird places "oops, lost it again! no wait, there it is! no wait, lost it again!". Got it back at last, no damage.


Why not? It's been through the same security as everything else, including all the air freight that's also on board that nobody seems to think about. Usually they'll offload it as a convenience for the passenger but not always if time doesn't allow.


Yep, it happened to me during a Lufthansa strike a couple of years ago.

They distributed us and our luggage across a couple of planes flying out to Vienna.

My luggage arrived on an earlier flight and had to hear from the Austrian police, while I explained that it was Lufthansa's own doing.


Sometimes this happens even without a strike. Once I flew San Francisco - Houston - Little Rock with about a four-hour layover in Houston. When I got to Little Rock my bag wasn't on the baggage carousel - it turned out they'd put my bag on an earlier flight. (I wasn't on that earlier flight because the long connection turned out to be a lot cheaper than a short one.)


Happened to me on a domestic flight in the US this year on American Airlines.


Yes?? This happens literally all the time. What's to be surprised about?


Any recent flight I’ve taken they delayed the plane while they offloaded the bags. I am genuinely surprised they they flew them anyway these days.


That doesn't make sense, how would they ever get misdirected bags to you if bags weren't ever allowed to fly without their owners being onboard?

It happens all the time that bags get to a flight that the passenger misses and passengers get to a flight that bags miss. Not remotely unusual. It's happened to me recently too.


I guess it’s different if the airline does it rather than if a passenger potentially engineers a situation that their bags fly but they are safely on the ground


Why? You think they just blindly load all of the bags up without putting them through any kind of security screening? What about suicide bombers?


Security screening isn’t perfect. Water bottles are banned now because there’s no process to screen just the content for example. The shoe bomber and the pants bomber both got on board despite active screening at the gates.


Yes? It's fairly common.


Domestic flights in Australia don't even ask for ID consistently. I don't think they have to


You can board a flight in the United States without ID as well, though I'm not sure you're strictly allowed to.

This happened to me in 2007. Arrived at a regional airport at 6am bleary eyed and without my wallet. Had to jump through some hoops and I assume some regulations might have been bent/broken but I made my flight. Someone made a judgment call and waved me through.


We are strongly heading toward a virtual light world.

The safest way to deliver a message will be on the beach, face to face. And a random uber courier is going to be more secure than electronic communication.


Some companies actually have set up special no-electronics meeting rooms in recent years...


It used to be common though. "Cloud" companies (computers and staff rented out to banks etc) of 1960's had very serious security.


It is certainly dystopian for civilians, but for military it seems surprisingly reactionary to me. While borders of military FOBs can be observed, these heatmaps offered info extending passed that including approximations of number of personnel.


> but for military it seems surprisingly reactionary to me.

probably because they know what one is capable off when able to access/compromise given devices.


> For military, yes. For civil, that's going a bit too far into the dystopian realm.

Destroying the devices might go a bit far, but there are plenty of jobs that require things like phones going into a drawer before a shift starts. Not everyone is always on all the time.


> there are plenty of jobs that require things like phones going into a drawer before a shift starts

It honestly frustrates me that so many of my friends and family can't fathom this. They're all on their phones 24/7 and can't seem to handle the fact that my job requires me to (from their perspective) ignore them for eight-to-ten hours a day.

Hell, back before mobiles it wasn't a problem to only call someone after hours, otherwise you'd get an answering machine.


I have done this, and also had to return a smartwatch that someone (very thoughtfully) gifted me, because I can't wear it at work. And if I can't wear it at work, it's not really going to be of enough use to justify keeping.


Eh, I'd keep the smartwatch to be honest. I have a collection of nice watches, but only my G-Shock regularly comes with me to work because it's the only one I'd trust to survive the rough and tumble when I'm not in front of the computer. But it's nice to have a collection I think.


I collect watches and have a G-Shock for similar purposes. I don't need it for work because I'm in a pretty sedate environment, but I wear it to work sometimes because I just like it.


I've got friends who work at places where company policy says that any electronics you travel to China with can never be connected to the corporate network again.

They don't destroy the devices, but all travel phones/laptops are "burners" and get given away instead of ever used for work again.


Every company I've worked with with business in China or Russia does this. Same rule was implemented last year when there was a ban on laptops on flights to/from Iran and the other Muslim majority countries the US put travel restrictions on, despite being UK based.

The devices aren't given away however, they're just wiped and reused as burners. Not 100% secure as a nation state would have access to BIOS rootkits but it's better than nothing.


X-ray and check flash content, also use tamper-evident seals (glitter nail polish) on internal parts.


care to go into more detail about the glitter/nail polish? I've heard of the "straw" technique[1], flour/baby powder by the door, but never this stuff.

(chucking a random assortment of straws on top of your laptop then taking a photo, with the idea that it will be more difficult/time consuming/impossible to recreate exactly like in the photo).


Same thing as the straws basically: paint glitter over screws and such, take a picture.


Seems utterly bizarre considering all of those devices must have come from China in the first place...


But they're _probably_ not installing exploits on the entire logistics chain "haystack, at least not exploits with the level of sophistication they'd use on a high-value "needle" with an evil maid (or an evil customs inspector) attack.

Also - the Australian Government banned the NBNCo from using any Huawei gear in out National Broadband Network. Sadly that's _probably_ either just racist political point scoring, or effective lobbying (or outright bribery) from the non-Chinese based network gear companies - rather than any real intent to improve security based on evidence from people/organisations capable of making that sort of determination...


Why? Couldn't you just format the drives if you were that paranoid? Are they worried about some kind of hardware bugging or sub OS exploits while the owner is not looking?


Quite simply yes. A modern "computer" is made up of multiple layered CPUs and OSs at this point. WiFi, sound, ssd, GPU all often have embedded cpu and firmware that could get "enhanced" and survive a recore


Hell - even the _batteries_ have embedded cpus and firmware...

https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-19/dc-19-presentations/...

(Note slide 116 there - about 7 up from the end: "Attacking the OS kernel")

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2099616/black-hat-charlie-mi...

http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/smbusb-hacking-smart-batteri...


In the end, if it runs code, you cannot trust it.


You could reformat the drives but what if someone has infected the firmware on the drive?

Check out: https://www.malwaretech.com/2015/04/hard-disk-firmware-hacki...


[flagged]


Downvoters care to explain? We have two options: owner wants to install spyware, or someone wants to do that. What’s the deal of going to spyware shop or flying in owner’s land and do simple social engineering there? These measures seem truly idiotic until explained, which you downvoters didn’t care to do.

As of military sites, only regular citizens don’t know where they are. Those who want to know just triangulate it to nearest towns and never have to do u-turns before the gate (where gps is scrambled anyway). It is trivial logic, but when it goes military everyone seems to lose their minds.


I think the downvotes are for the unwarranted and, frankly, childish "idiots" at the end.


I feel that for a lot of the IT workforce, the opposite (phone goes into a drawer when a shift ends, no constant unpaid onduty or evening answering of work e-mail) would be a good start, although not for security reasons.


This rings true for all of society. Who could have known there would be negative social implications to having an always-on, always-connected computer in your pocket?


I work in entertainment and security was moving in the direction of leaving your phone outside the building and using a isolated browser with no copy/paste. I was happy to switch jobs before I was required to do any of that. Those kinds of precautions were taken for specific, shorter projects, but I wasn't interested in doing that full time.

Not sure if it's apocryphal, but I heard a company in Seattle (Starbucks?) had a policy of no visible tattoos. At some point there wasn't enough people to hire and they overturned the policy.

I can see it playing out both ways.


>I heard a company in Seattle (Starbucks?) had a policy of no visible tattoos.

The vast majority of companies had this policy up until about ~2005.

I still remember being extremely surprised the first time I saw an employee with a nose ring working at CVS (around ~2005).


A secure locker system should probabbly be the SOP for a lot of places.


Ive had to walk customers around 'the long way' when showing new technology. (private sector)

Tape on phone screens and always with someone(me).

Although I feel like social engineering is really the easy way in. "forgetting ID" if you were a cute girl or young kid would be too easy.


> You drove to the site knowing it would all be gone and a strong warning not to turn around if you were near the gate because you just remembered you had your phone in your rental car.

Forgive my denseness (maybe it's because I just woke up), but I'm having a hard time figuring this bit out. If you're near the base, as in not-quite-on the property, you could be anyone, with any arbitrary selection of interesting equipment that needs to drive up to the base then away again. Is it timing - as in, driving away and back will take far too long and make you late?

> We went through a lot of equipment.

On your own dime? :/ I would hope a base like this provides all contractors a reasonable "security enforcement viability" fund, or something like that :)

> I don't even know what the faculty looks like

Wait. What gate were you referring to before, then? Some point you were transported from, but which wasn't the actual location? Hm, perhaps this explains the "don't turn around" bit.

--

Unfortunately I can't find it right now, but I remember the (possibly-apocryphal?) story of the random server, deep in a secure facility, that was part of a botnet. The person who found it didn't think it looked particularly like a honeypot; it was an actual database or equivalent sort of machine. The person informed various higher-ups, but despite the report being acknowledged nothing was ever done to fix it.


A random person going near the gate is, potentially, a spy who has used their equipment to capture data for SIGINT (think "war-driving.") Once they've come close enough to be in your emissions bubble—let alone close enough to photograph your site—you can't let their equipment leave intact.

(And, even if someone's equipment doesn't look like the kind of thing that would capture signals, the thoroughness required to prove that a piece of equipment is benign, is too high a cost to pay for every random passer-by. You don't want a security strategy that allows guerillas to DoS your guards by just constantly bringing benign equipment near them.)

This response assumes, though, that the equipment isn't e.g. connected to a satellite uplink and streaming the data out in real-time. (These sites aren't in reach of any cell towers, but satellite phones will still work.) I'm not sure what answer modern military counterintelligence has for that particular threat.


Military bases are frequently in populated areas; it would be wildly impractical to harass everyone who drives by the perimeter. Half the SCIF spec (which is public!) is about containing sensitive emissions inside the SCIF. And if you did have concerns about the airwaves around the base, why wouldn’t you just draw a bigger perimeter, rather than risk having sensitive areas outside the fence?


This.

I work on Redstone Arsenal. I don't work with anything especially secured, but I've met people who do. They work inside a SCIF; no network, no personal electronics in the SCIF, but there's no particular requirements outside.


This too :-) not special about you. But people worry about information leaks by watches and fitbits, yet half the commenters here easily share where or what they have worked on in a public accessible site


Sure. I was more thinking about the bases in non-populated areas, esp. when the base is large enough that you can’t actually guard or fence the entire perimeter (like an Air Force base where the hypothetical SCIF would encompass thousands of square miles of airspace.)

People can just drive down a random stretch of desert road near Groom Lake and start catching signals from passing test craft. At some scale you’ve got to give up on the concept of an SCIF and just deal with the fact that people are going to be catching some of what you’re putting out, doing whatever you can to mitigate the damage from there. (Which—if you can at least know where such people are from a satellite view and get guards to them within 10mins of the perimeter breach when they’re still either making their way deeper in, or are driving back out through a bunch of nothing—translates to “you can catch up to them and wreck their equipment.”)

Like I said, I’m not sure how this strategy adapts to the existence of satellite phones. I don’t think it does. So far, instead, satellite phones have adapted themselves to it: you can’t get an Iridium phone without a security screening. I’m not sure what will happen if “private cubesat satphone networks” become a cheap commodity thing to insert into orbit—I think the US and other governments are simply trying to stall that process as long as possible. (Look at the history of satphone networks that competed with Iridium to see what I mean.)


Reporters, fisherman, and all sorts of mundane professional applications can get satphones. I’m sure the kind of foreign power that’s interested in our aerospace R&D can as well.


Yes, they can—but they still need a security screening to do so. The point of the security screening is precisely to figure out whether you're "just" a reporter/fisherman/etc., or you're actually a spy or catspaw for a foreign power.

Though, to be clear, "security screening" is a bit of a misnomer here. It isn't a one-time thing. The point of giving someone a security screening isn't really the pre-screening that occurs when you first sign up; it's the continuous monitoring you are implicitly signing up for.

My understanding, from conversations over beers with a few friends retired from the US Navy and NSA:

Signing up for a satphone (or a NEXUS card, or a private pilot's license, or any of a number of other things—including, obviously, secret clearance or access to a security compartment) marks you as a Person Of Interest in PRISM and other monitoring systems. In response, the monitoring systems begin actually caching the event data they see about you into an online data warehouse, rather than just feeding it all into a data lake. The data warehouse is queried out, for each new PoI, to build an individualized ML model (Palantir Intelligence, I think is the software?), where the data initially gathered during your pre-screen is used as the training data—in est, a behavioural baseline. Once the individualized ML model for you is established, it will be run as a batch process (along with thousands of other ML models), about once per day, against any/all newly-arrived PoI event data in the data warehouse. The ML model spits out prediction error; and the system flags anyone with consistently high prediction error as being in need of re-investigation.

In other words, by signing up for a satphone, you're asking the government to keep a detail on you to see if you do anything out-of-character. Just, y'know, a detail that's 99% automated.


I suspect the policy's inclusion of things outside the gate is more likely addressing traffic concerns. Military gates are serious choke points, and the bulk of people going through them have very similar hours, so irregularities can have significant impacts.


The facility was likely at the end of a long road with nothing else on it. It would be seen as suspicious behavior to drive towards it and then turn around without making contact at the gate, to say nothing of scheduling delays.

No idea on equipment costs; it's likely that OPs company had an overhead disbursement for mistakes.

The gate itself was probably a good ways away from the actual facility. If they weren't driven all the way from hotel to site by a driver, then they almost certainly stopped and parked at the gate and were driven the rest of the way under escort and blindfold.


It was a large facility... I think. There was much to see at the gate I went to, other than a gate and considering I knew how things were going to go (lots of making sure you knew the rules) I didn't want to startle anyone by looking around too much (for all I know there were others... who knows...).

I got the feeling the whole driving away thing was more about that if anyone felt things were suspicious, you weren't getting in, and just wasted everyone's time. Protocol was a big deal.

In theory some random joe could somehow drive to this gate, but I'm not sure how, it wasn't exactly on the way to anywhere. I was also told they would know you were coming long before you got there and not just because of the schedule (not sure if that was true, but someone told me that) ;)

It is all curious to talk about now but when you're alone and serious business guys are around you with guns you just behave as innocuous as possible.

As for equipment I belive the customer paid for each visit, equipment included. Everyone knew the rules outright so they paid a ton for everything.

Beyond just one visit sending hardware to sites for repairs and never getting anything back was SOP even for some security minded private companies, so that wasn't all that unusual. Laptops taken... was quite unusual as at the time laptops were quite expensive.


Thanks for replying!

> In theory some random joe could somehow drive to this gate, but I'm not sure how, it wasn't exactly on the way to anywhere.

Ah, that explains a lot.

> As for equipment I belive the customer paid for each visit, equipment included. Everyone knew the rules outright so they paid a ton for everything.

Wow. Part of me says that's crazy, the other part wants to know where to sign up, since this sounds like it paid well :D

(Of course I'm inordinately curious what equipment was being maintained, but we'll just drop that one on the floor since it's probably quite boring)


I believe the rationale is that you're observed as you approach a military base - if you get close and then suddenly turn around it looks suspicious; then they'll have to go track you down, etc


Yeah I assumed that was the case.

Also I got the impression that even if they checked you at the gate and you didn't account for something in your car or on you and they found something you shouldn't have, they could deny you entry right there and you weren't getting back in anytime soon. Someone panicking and driving away might set off some dude's suspicions and you weren't going to fix things... and it took a while to schedule everything.

It was as much about protocol and just making good choices / customer service (don't scare your customer) as anything else.


Sounds like a great way to make the army bleed resources.


Dudes are at the gate are there regardless, them hopping in a vehicle to have a chat with you probabbly costs very little... if not nothing at all.

If the government wants to do something legally beyond that, they probabbly would feel it is worth it to discourage such behavior.


Presumably these special sites are on US soil. If repeatedly doing that or conspiring to do so with others isn’t in itself illegal there’s probably something on the books they could throw at you.


Conspiring to repeatedly drive around certain public roads? C'mon...


You are generally on military land for quite some distance before you get to the actual gate -- at least that's been the case for every facility I've visited.

Usually there's a large sign "Foo Air Force Base" (or whatever) by the civilian road, then you turn off and drive on a military road for half a mile or more (sometimes much more), then you come to the gate with the guards.

But you've still been on military land, and subject to military rules and laws, from the instant you enter their property.

Edit: just checked. The guardhouses for two of the gates at a local facility are respectively about 800/1,000 feet away from the public road, and about 600/800 feet inside the perimeter fence (the one with signs reading "patrolled by dogs", "deadly force authorized", etc.).


There are towns that have "no cruising" laws making it illegal to repeatedly drive around a certain area. And under certain circumstances repeatedly driving past someone's house could be harassment or stalking.


Ah, glorious freedom


You're very much not on public roads / property by the time you get to the gate, at least at the facility I went to.


It would also bleed your own, possibly at the same or faster rate.


I wonder what they do now that modern cars have GPS and all kinds of computers built in...


You leave your car at the main gate area and transfer to a military vehicle.


Taken to its logical extreme, Google "Janet flight".


You leave your vehicle (they still check it...) and you are taken for a ride from there.

It's expected that people will drive there and go from there ;)


IMINT measuring numbers of cars in parking lots for major military bases and other nations' Intel agencies is a very old, tried and true method. Correlate vehicle count with unusual times of day or active crises.


Leave a bicycle outside the gate...


Too much metal.

Horses only (can't trust donkeys).

Deposit your horse shoes here and we'll provide you secure shoes for the ride home.

/s


Can't trust mules neither.


Wow that's really nuts. Blindfolded in the facility is just extra crazy. Isn't that why security clearances exist?


Clearances can take time and become burdensome if it's an absolute requirement. When I was in school one of my teachers said his dad's company had to repair air conditioning equipment at a special forces training base, and what he described was similar (except this is prior to cellphones, so no electronics destruction). The alternative is costly and time intensive security clearances for every conceivable profession and to share it across the country. It makes sense for janitors and common forms of maintenance, but for less common things this is a viable workaround.


Not all clearances are created equal. I have heard of people being blindfolded at certain facilities, when they had vital work to do at a lower clearance level than would normally be allowed in that facility.

Also there's nothing like having different accesses than your boss, so when you go to certain meetings or do certain things, you can't tell him exactly what you're doing.


What I've experience whenngoing into an area I wasn't cleared for was the escort first turning on a bright flashing red light and then constantly shouting "uncleared" as I was led to the office in which I was needed.

Basically everyone had to turn off their monitors while I walked past.

Not as bad as a blindfold, but a bit embarrassing the times I've had to do it. That and being escorted to the bathroom while they wait outside.


> Basically everyone had to turn off their monitors while I walked past.

So essentially they had to interrupt a couple dozen people just to get you through a corridor. I can see why a blindfold may seem like a more pragmatic approach.


And that's how morality is removed from military operations.


> Isn't that why security clearances exist?

Clearance does not mean you can now see everything. There will be compartmentalisation and you will only see what you need to know.

I remember reading about sites in WW2 where people didn't know what the people in the next building did, or often what the project was. Bletchley Park is one example but I also saw a programme about a female chemist working in Cheshire ( I think ) who didn't know she was a key part of the atomic bomb project.


My assumption that was based on nothing but my own interpretation of the rules was that the facility in its entirety was a sort of need to know type situation. I personally might not have seen anything for all I know if I was given the chance, but the facility itself was part of some blanket policy.

Honestly.... that could be a good policy rather than have a dude leave something out or wrongly classify a building or something.


Even with clearances there might be something between Point A and Point B that you want to compartmentalize.


Blindfolds just seem unnecessarily humiliating, and not all that secure. Blindfolds can come loose. If it's really that important something stay secret, put it behind a wall.


> Blindfolds just seem unnecessarily humiliating

Humiliation would be if they mocked you for being blindfolded or once you were blindfold stripped you naked and paraded you through the canteen. It's just part of the process, everyone in your position goes through it and no one there would see any humiliation in that.


>If it's really that important something stay secret, put it behind a wall.

Unless you have so few visitors that building additional security infrastructure isn't cost effective.


No matter where you put that wall, there's a chance something on the other side of it will need servicing.

I'm sure the facility that makes nuclear warheads has an electronics inspection x-ray. If they need maintenance on that, you'd expect him/her to have a detailed background check, and to be shown as little of the facility as possible, and not to be allowed to leave with USB memory sticks or suchlike.

Of course, who knows how many facilities really need that level of security, and how often it's paranoia or theatre?


Embassies often ask you to lock your digital stuff away when you go to them...and yes I know people who's job it was to image devices of guests....


Would that include your car itself?


Good question. Also what about personal assistive devices? I'd guess they just don't allow anyone with hearing aids to work there...


For all I know the regulars there could carry whatever (that would be crazy but who knows). I only knew the rules for me.


You leave your car at the gate, they weren't that crazy.


Then couldn't you leave your phone in the car?


The instructions I got basically said to have nothing in the car except what you absolutely needed, and that anything in the vehicle could be taken / don't have anything in there that might make someone wonder about what you would do with it (I'm thinking it would have been a bad time for photography hobbies).

This was before smartphones were super prevalent so not taking your phone really wasn't a big deal. Had my car broken down near the facility I suspect that I would have had "help" pretty quickly ;)

For all I know it was unnecessary, guys at the gate didn't talk much, although I did see them "inspecting" cars.

I got instructions from my company and folks familiar with that customer, it's possible they were just extra cautious. This wasn't like visiting a frequently visited facility or anything where you can look up the rules or anything.


Could you speculate on what they did? That sounds like some seriously extreme security.


No clue, didn't want to know anything.

I was naturally curious but I got the feeling knowing anything would be looked down upon. I could guess but it would be just wild speculation, there was no information to make anything near an educated guess. Military site is all I knew. It could have been anything.

I was happy to do the job and go home.


That just seems like such a fucking waste. One mistake destroys resources. These devices aren't disposable, and they sure aren't recyclable. We cannot keep going down this route of insanity.

Such a waste, just like most military spending.


This leaves out an important part: in sensitive areas like a SCIF. All they’re really saying is that modern smart watches can have similar capability to phones—we don’t allow those, so we shouldn’t allow the new watches either. Pretty straightforward.


That's not what this article is about at all. Anything that has any sort of transmission or recording capabilities has been banned inside of secure facilities for as long I can remember, fitness devices aren't something that would need to be covered by a new rule. They don't want you wearing devices that share GPS coordinates because it makes it simple to get accurate locations of buildings and troop schedules. Instead of blindly firing mortars into a base, just look for where the GPS signals cluster at night and you probably know where everyone is sleeping. See a signal that goes from the troop quarters to the base perimeter, then goes back a few hours later? Probably someone on guard duty, now you can start figuring out when the shift rotations happen.


More specifically, it's the recording and exfiltration of even step/step-count data that is dangerous. I have a lot of walking 1-1's on Mondays, which means my step count is easily double that of Thursdays (WFH days).

  - "5 minutes, 100 steps, 55 minutes zero steps" (meeting)

  - "5 minutes, 100 steps, 55 minutes zero steps" (meeting)

  - "8 minutes, 200 steps, 52 minutes zero steps" (bathroom)

  - "45 minutes, 999 steps, 15 minutes zero steps" (lunch)

  - "5 minutes, 100 steps, 55 minutes zero steps" (meeting)
By correlation stand/sit times you start to edge pretty close to a rough determination of who is in meetings together, or walking from room A to room B at the same time.


Related previous discussion from 6 months ago:

"Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249955 (267 comments)


This is pretty old news [0], I wonder why it took this long for an official statement.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...


It seems to take quite a while for official responses to pass through PA in the DoD. There are definitely considerations in acknowledging whether or not a specific point is a point of concern for security.


Yeah, I remember reading this.

Doesn't this really only apply to devices with GPS?


MEMS gyroscopes are a useful inertial navigation system that can be accurate enough. Some intelligence can be gathered with just pedometer.


Title should be "Turn off your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple watch GPS in operational areas"


Attacker: "Yeah so they told them to turn off their GPS devices when they go into operational areas so we just searched where there were holes in the GPS data and bingo we figured out the secret base's location."

By producing or removing signal, above what would have occurred normally information, leaks out of the system.


Check the "hole in the Strava data" maps at the bottom of this article:

https://charliesavage.com/?p=1173


If an adversary knows a person is a member of a sensitive agency, then everywhere they go can become an operational area. Security doesn't just stop at the checkpoint.


I just bought a Fitbit Alta HR and it cannot be turned off. Letting the battery run out is all you can do, and presumably the battery life is on the longer side.


According to https://www.fitbit.com/compare Alta HR doesn't even borrow your phone's GPS ("Connected GPS"). Surge and Ionic are the only Fitbit trackers with their own GPS, which is turned off most of the time anyway.


My favorite is the person who logged a bike ride at Area 51 using strava


reading the article about no phones/cameras/mics allowed makes me wonder what will happen if we ever get to the in eye AR word some of us envision where there is no turning that stuff on since it's embedded in your head and you're likely as depended on it as I am on mdn and stack overflow


One can't even sync Fitbit without the GPS on. I just want to count my steps, and bluetooth is not enough? For at least Fitbit, the rule should be not to own one.


That's because for Bluetooth pairing, Android requires location services to be on.

It's not fitbit, that's the problem with Android in general.


how come I don't need location services for some of my other bluetooth device?


Is the location permission really required every time when connecting to a paired device, after the initial pairing is donr?


I know that you need internet connectivity to sync a fitbit, but are you sure that you need GPS on? I don't believe that's the case


Not GPS per se, but location permission. "Google added the locations permission requirement to alleviate concerns that Bluetooth beacons can be used to track your location without your permission during a Bluetooth low energy scan, such as the scan required to sync your tracker."

https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2134


reminds how both sides - Ukraine and Russia - (as the telecom companies on both sides were either the same or tightly integrated, technically and financially, and had [easy] access to real-time tracking data as well as to registration data) tracked cell phones carried by the soldiers and volunteers of each other (like a bunch of cell phones of Russian paratroopers moving from their base in Pskov and coming to Donbass :). Especially during the first few months of 2014 until the people finally realized that the tracking had been going on and had actually even been used in real time to direct fire at them.

Also, the leader of Chechnya, Dudaev, was killed in 1996 by tracking his satellite phone signal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_leg... (more detailed and more conspiracy style version - 2nd paragraph at https://jamestown.org/program/alla-dudaeva-describes-being-i... )


The ways of finding out information about militaries is getting more and more convoluted and hard to prevent


So would this preclude anyone with a medical device form working there? say like an insulin pump?


If you insulin pump has alway-on GPS tracking, then yes.

If you work in a secure facility consider the "insulin only" model.


It doesn't have GPS tracking but it does have wireless communication with a continuous glucose monitor which it uses to adjust delivery of insulin which gives measurably better outcomes. It even connects to a computer via USB.

In SCIFs all non-approved transmitting devices are banned, so if you are an attacker an insulin pump has a potentially excellent exfil method.


Which part of the article makes it sound like they could be talking about insulin pumps?


The part where insulin pumps are electronic equipment. It's becomming more and more common for devices like insulin pumps to upload data automatically to other devices. It'd be hard to get location data I think from glucose logs. But SoCs are getting more and more features, and an insulin pump that also tracks steps is not a huge stretch of the imagination, especially if the power draw was tiny.


> The part where insulin pumps are electronic equipment.

That's not a part of the article.

The article and memo clearly focus on geolocation data. Not a feature I can find in insulin pumps after a cursory search.


Not by default.

An attacker could change that.


An attacker in the building could just keep geolocation on on their regular device. That's not the point of this exercise


In SCIFs all non-approved transmitting devices are banned except for medical devices.

So when you consider new ones use wirelessly communicate with continuous glucose monitors (mine uses 802.15.4) which it then uses to adjust delivery of insulin. This feedback loop has been shown to give measurably better outcomes so it not something I would want to disable. Toss in that they connect via USB for reporting upload they become a potentially attractive platform for data exfil.


I'll go out on a leg and ask - why not brute force and use signal jammer. Or in SCIF, jam all incoming signals, except for the ones they want to whitelist. If there is wifi, whitelist devices that can be connected to it.


The DoD, Intelligence Community, and US government as a whole is subject to the same rules as everyone else, and would get into huge trouble from the FCC if it was found out that they did that.

On an side note, like other federal laws, the DoD is subject to endangered species laws, and actually take a lot of care to make sure they do not endanger them, which is made fun of here:

https://terminallance.com/2017/01/17/terminal-lance-453-ceas...


A jammer doesn't fix the fact that these devices could still record whatever when inside the facility and just transmit the acquired data later once the wearer goes outside.


The point of jamming GPS is that these devices then do not know what their location is, so the records wouldn't show anything.


The risk is not limited to location data. Leaking any audio or video could also be problematic. I also wonder how much location data could be inferred with accelerometers.


I'm going to assume that it's because it really isn't all that important. The military is looking to avoid headlines like "Strava heat maps reveal military base layouts" but they don't really care if the base layouts are revealed.

Back when this controversy was first stirred up it seemed unlikely that anything sensitive was really exposed. Other comments in this thread indicate that the military is perfectly capable of restricting the use of personal electronic devices when they care about it. This seems like a case of the public demanding "something must be done" and the military responding with "okay, we did something".


So you'd propose jamming the GPS satellite broadcast signals? That would pretty much just break GPS for everything nearby. Or do you mean just outbound communication from wrist devices? How are you going to prevent people from just going home with their Apple/Garmin watches and connecting/uploading from there (which is, presumably, what they already do)?


For a military operational area? Quite frankly I'm surprised that GPS signals aren't jammed today. At the very least, with the advent of cheap drones, and the dangerous payloads they can carry, I've got to believe that it will be forthcoming soon, regardless of the loss of intel that can be occurring.


The military created GPS. It wouldn't be very productive to jam their own signals on their own bases.

Military bases already have rules covering use of electronics like laptops, cameras, and phones, so adding smart watches to that list isn't very surprising.


The military uses a different GPS frequency than civilian gear.


Computer vision is becoming cheap and ubiquitous. The need for GPS is probably diminishing for this kind of application.


There are multiple GPS, you need to jam all of them.


Selective jamming like that is really hard to do, verging on impossible.


GPS is a fixed frequency transmitted at fifty Watts from orbit. You can't jam just it?


What? You can Trivially jam it.

Jamming is done at the receiver, not the transmitter. The fact that the power is so low makes it far easier to jam.


I'm kind of surprised that they published the memorandum here, especially with contact information. I suppose I don't see how it would be a security risk, I just assumed it would have been.


So, it takes the DoD about a month to write such a simple memo? Was there a preliminary “while we investigate this, turn it off” memo? If not, how, how does that compare to other countries?


I thought this was going to be some security issue with GPS in general. This is really just aimed it DoD employees.


They should hire Amish people ...


You joke, but I believe I read something about the CIA hiring a lot of Amish. Compared to the general population, their priorities are different meaning it’s a lot harder to corrupt them. Unfortunately I can’t find any citations (maybe it was a comment here?).


This is like how cellphones are forbidden in planes because their RF emissions- unsecure, unworkable and dangerous. Security theater at best.

A proper solution is technological, not social. Selective location GPS jammers, only letting through a different frequency or encryption for military GPS.


> A proper solution is technological, not social

If the last decade had a TL; DR, it would be "technology offers second-rate solutions to social problems." If your soldiers lack the discipline to turn off their phones on command, you've got a bigger problem than RF leakage.


A good solution to people forgetting is to remove the need to remember.

Disobeying is a social problem. Imperfect repetition is not.



I hope federal laws for protecting endangered species or respecting FCC rules will not cause a major military loss - and that there are exceptions in wartime.




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