Social Media ---- sounds sort of 1984 on Steroids. "Mass Disturbance" could be defined as anything --- TEA party meeting, NRA dinner, afternoon at the range, Meeting your local congress critter.
SnT
the situation on the streets of Kiev, Ukraine, is much calmer today. Protesters are still out in force but now it appears that the government is ready to negotiate after violent clashes this week left at least three people dead.
Well, in the midst of all the protests, a strange thing happened earlier this week when protesters got text messages on their phone that said:
Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.
---were you surprised by this at all, that a text message like this could go out to all these people who were gathered in one place?
I was a little surprised that the government would advertise that it could do such a thing to try to quell a protest,
There is something called a
tower dump where you can just ask the phone company to pull down records from nearby cell towers to find out what's going on and what, you know, what subscribers connected to a particular tower at a particular time. You can get a bunch of data on the people who are nearby just by asking for that information at times. ---
The U.S. law enforcement agencies made more than 9,000 requests for tower dumps in 2012. ----
But you don't need to do that because you could also put up something called a
stingray, a rogue cell tower yourself if you were a government who wanted to find out what's going on in a given area.
Short of turning off your phone or not using a phone at all, is there anything that you can do to protect yourself from something like this, from a government, wherever it may be, tracking where you are and then sending you a text message to tell you that it knows where you are? ---
I can't think of anything offhand
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/01/2...etadata-lesson