He knows when you are sleeping...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?

While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.

But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.

The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked.

"We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to."

Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.

Via http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/22/technology/malls_track_cell_phones_black_friday/

ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

"Law enforcement officers are known, on occasion, to encourage citizens to cooperate if they have nothing to hide," ACLU staff attorney Mark P. Fancher wrote. "No less should be expected of law enforcement, and the Michigan State Police should be willing to assuage concerns that these powerful extraction devices are being used illegally by honoring our requests for cooperation and disclosure."

A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

"Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps."

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

"With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity," Fancher wrote. "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched."

The national ACLU is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security for its policy of warrantless electronic searches of laptops and cell phones belonging to people entering the country who are not suspected of committing any crime.

Via http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp

I confess, though I consider myself a spiritual person, I'm not very religious. People born of a particular faith have all kinds of excuses for their lack of observance. But, usually, it just boils down to a matter of convenience. That's not my problem. I take my kids to religious school every week. I Facebook with a rabbi, a minister, a Jogye, a couple Hasidim, and members of an entire profession that most modern religions have determined to be Satan's disciples. I have plenty of opportunity, and ample reason, to pray and ask for forgiveness.

But, for those of you still searching for excuses, here's one less: If you happen to be Catholic, you no longer have to schlep your tuchas to the confessional. Now the "Jesus Phone" will bring the power of the confessional to the palm of your hand. What's more, this app not only received the coveted blessing of St. Jobs himself, but it even got the Pope's blessing for goodness sake. Which is impressive and shows great benevolence on the part of the church, considering that this app clearly duplicates existing ecclesiastical functionality.

I'm impressed that the Vatican is willing to embrace technology with open arms. Science, after all, is not their strong subject. The only question I have is, should one's iPhone become an item of evidence in a legal context, is it possible that this app will confess your sins to the police as well?

Once again, Verizon isn't pulling any punches. I caught this commercial during the SuperBowl. Though there are actual differences between the iPhones sold on At&T and Verizon networks -- some favoring Verizon, and at least one, that I know of, favoring AT&T -- Verizon has chosen to make it all about The Network.

Some have suggested that our legislation would empower the president to deny U.S. citizens access to the Internet. Nothing could be further from the truth.
-Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)

In a statement issued this week, Senators' Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and  Tom Carper (D-Del.) said that their intent was to allow the president "to protect the U.S. from external cyber attacks," not to shut down the Internet.

Aside from the obvious civil liberties concerns, the problem I see is largely a mechanical one, and it demonstrates the Senators' lack of fundamental understanding when it comes to the world in which they legislate: By the time a cyber attack is apparent, it's no longer likely an "external" threat. The most effective attacks known today are distributed amongst a multitude of machines in various locations, making it impossible to protect citizens without shutting down the Internet -- if such a thing could even be accomplished in this country.

The U.S. network infrastructure is much more complex and diverse than that of Egypt. In part, that has to do with the shear differences in scale. But, perhaps surprisingly, it also has to do with the age of our network. Parts of our interconnected network go back five decades. Some interconnected networks predate the Internet itself. And these are interconnected with new infrastructure being added every day without the need for government knowledge or consent.

Most importantly, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was conceived, it was specifically designed to survive and reroute against an outage. That means, depending on the final draft, the law would likely be either ineffective, dangerous, or both.

A byproduct of life in the 21st Century is that many of the perks of a post-centennial lifestyle require the abdication of a fair bit of privacy to cyberspace. That means that the paper records that once required a search warrant to read (and maybe the forceful extraction from your cold-dead-hands), are now in the possession of companies who don't. Of course there's Facebook and Twitter. Those didn't exist in the 20th. Century. But, what about your phone records and email? While your phone company has long been subject to a warrant or subpoena, in the 21st. Century new "self-service" tools have been developed to help telcos manage the onslaught of requests made particularly attractive by the fact that most of us carry what amounts to a homing-beacon in our pockets. Similarly, while email has always been an attractive source of discovery, until recently most of it resided on each correspondent's physical, and virtual, desktop waiting to get written-over by something more current. Today, it's more likely been put out to pasture in a seemingly-endless "server farm", waiting to be picked by a custodian of records.

Even our personal computers, which have always required a search warrant, and often require a cascading series of search warrants covering various regions of storage space and categories of searches, are rapidly being replaced by windows to the web -- sleek sheets of glass and sculpted-aluminum that act as a portal to your virtual existence. Like a supermodel, these tablets are thin and beautiful, but two-dimensional, with very little substance inside. What makes these devices a reality today is a combination of near-ubiquitous Internet connectivity and access to your personal online data once it's established. Even the notion of "backing up" is becoming a thing of the past, because the data you see, isn't really here. It's somewhere else, presumably safe from destruction, but not necessarily from dissemination. Like many things in life, it's a trade-off.

But, not when it comes to fighting crime. The shift of discovery from physical space to cyberspace is a decided advantage for law enforcement. In fact, Google reports that it responded to more than 4200 discovery requests in the first-half of 2010 alone. One of the reasons these requests have become so popular is that online data is easier seize than a laptop, and often much more useful. Much of what can be had requires no search warrant at all, and thanks to online tools, can be had without even so much as contacting the service provider. Why? Because, unlike the data on your hard drive, you don't necessarily own your data when it's stored in cyberspace.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was enacted by Congress in 1986 -- long before most people had access to the Internet, email, or a cellphone. When Mark Zuckerberg's only friends were his stuffed animals. Mind you, it was revolutionary for it's time -- enacted to extend government restrictions on wire taps from telephone calls to also include transmissions of electronic data by computer. But, it doesn't address current evolution. Today, far more can be gleaned from a historical records search than any telephone wiretap. Perhaps that's why last year the Department of Justice argued in favor of warantless email searches. Or why in the same year the DOJ argued that cellphone users had abdicated any expectation of privacy by using a service that stores location data.

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10privacy.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&ref=technology

If security firm McAfee is right, 2011 may be the tablet computer takes over corporate America. Or more specifically, the year the tablet takes over corporate networks. McAfee predicts that the onslaught of consumer-owned and lent smartphone and tablet devices entering and exiting the office space may pose a new unanticipated threat to corporate security. Their concern is that, not only is the consumer largely ill-prepared to secure devices that may amount to a hole in the Trojan wall big enough to drive a wooden horse into, but that the lack of comprehensive security tools designed around the likes of iPhones, iPads and Android devices, leaves them ill-equipped, even if they were prepared. Potentially, this could mean that personal gadgetry may become the host du jour for new infectious computer viruses, malware, and most alarmingly, remote access to the network the form of "Trojan horses".

While McAfee, one of the world's largest anti-virus software manufacturers, is understandably concerned about the interconnection of consumer-maintained -- and largely unsecured -- devices to more secure corporate networks, I think they may be missing an even bigger threat. While for years USB "thumb drives" have been cheap and affordable, and available in sizes small enough to swallow, they still required the physical removal of data from the premises. This meant exhaustively copying and then walking data out of the building. (See "sneakernet".) And, while every year these storage devices hold more and more data, so does the average corporate server. It's unlikely that portable media will ever quite catchup.

On the other hand, the prevalence of high-powered personal computing devices (yes, I'm talking about your average smartphone) connected to the corporate network allows, not only for the immediate transmission of data off-the-premises, but potentially even the cheapest, least sophisticated, pre-paid Android phone, left "cradled" overnight to a desktop computer, (the same cradle used to charge the battery, and synchronize contacts and calendar events,) could allow for unrestricted unauthorized remote network access over a hard-to-trace personal cellular data connection. Not only is this possible today, but it doesn't require a sophisticated computer virus to accomplish.

Read more at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/71541.html

Sprint EVO 4G Stops Bullet

With all the news on this site about the misuse of personal data, it's nice once in a while to read about how a device can save a life, even when it's severely abused in the process.

The HTC EVO 4G, while a workhorse of a phone, has gotten a very bad wrap for its less-than-stellar battery life. Meanwhile, it looks like Sprint will be facing some real stiff 4G Android competition from its rivals, in the aftermath of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Thus, we're sure Sprint will appreciate a little good press for its flagship phone, no matter how decidedly un-technological.

Via Engadget:

We knew the HTC EVO 4G was a pretty super phone, but we didn't know it was an actual superhero. A nightclub valet in Atlanta was recently the victim of two disgruntled patrons' wrath, falling in the middle of a five-shot bullet volley, but luckily for him, he had his EVO in his chest pocket. While the phone's glass shattered on impact, its battery did not and absorbed much of the impact of the one bullet intent on ridding him from this mortal coil. The fortunate chap is still with us, uninjured but stupefied by the event, and he promises he'll never buy another brand's phone again.

Read full article at http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/08/htc-evos-battery-deflects-a-bullet-earns-life-saver-badge-v/

Your Cellphone Is Subject to Warrantless Searches in California [Privacy] http://bit.ly/fTsSnb

Disgruntled Hacker [Debt Collector] Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely

Pay Technology's Webtech Plus

Cleveland-based Pay Technologies is a company that sells hidden wireless black boxes that allow car dealers to remotely disable a car’s ignition, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a not-so-gentle reminder that a payment is due. The Webtech Plus responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network.

A car dealer in Austin Texas began receiving complaints from hundreds of stranded customers late last month. According to the dealership's manager, the complaints stopped several days later, when he reset all the Webtech Plus employee passwords. Then police obtained access logs from Pay Technologies, and traced an IP address to a former employee. Police say he hacked into the dealership's computer system to deactivate the starters on the cars and set off their horns.

To call the suspect a "hacker" is really an insult to hackers. On the other hand, anyone who's ever spoken with a debt collector probably isn't very surprised by allegations of unethical behavior.

According to the dealership, the employee's account had been closed when he was terminated last month, but they allege he got in through another employee’s account. They claim he was working his way alphabetically through a database of all 1,100 customers whose cars were equipped with the device.