I was training to be a 911 dispatcher a while ago. When they told us about getting someone’s location from the cell company outside of what was available automatically from e911 or whatever— which required them to be on the phone with you, so not useful if you get a text saying they just drove off a cliff in the middle of nowhere, or something— you had to sign an affidavit testifying that there were exigent circumstances, fax it to them, and then wait, sometimes for hours, until their legal department approved it. And you always risked being dragged to court if you made the wrong call. That’s the price of privacy, and the potential for abuse is rife, so it makes sense.
Yet these jackholes can just snag it whenever because, ya know, profit. That is obviously insane. Our corporate culture has driven our society insane with normalized greed. The unholy alliance of tech and marketing is largely to blame.
IOW: We must end this "privacy" thing - think of people who might be dying!
It's all about power, anyway. The NSA doesn't need a warrant at all. When the police want to get an alleged criminal they can get a warrant in minutes. But when it's your life in danger, it takes hours. The purpose of a system is what it does.
In 2026, it's Israel. The NSA is so last decade, and doesn't even factor into this article.
Silicon Valley and global communications infrastructure has been compromised by Israel. Quoting TFA:
> This analysis identified 4G infrastructure associated with operator networks based in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Channel Islands. Notably, in prior public reporting these same countries have been linked to CSVs targeting mobile users.
> Israel has long been a focal point in the global surveillance industry, with multiple companies developing and exporting advanced spyware, cellular communications interception, and monitoring technologies.
One of the biggest lies about the surveillance state is that it'll be professional.
NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. There's even a cute term for it, LOVEINT.
In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general's report.
People aren't able to imagine the ramifications of pervasive surveillance because there never has been such pervasive surveillance in human history. And humans are terrible at predicting how this is going to change things. Especially, with LLMs in the mix.
Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
> Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
The future black markets are going to be filled with all sorts of illegal "private comms" devices to give us our privacy back. I am sure there are sci-fi novels with this theme.
> Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board;
> many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
We already live in this world. Most of the conversations here on HN are naturally America centric, and the situation with the rest of the humans on the planet is secondary. The more distant, the less interest.
For most of that world, please for help are sent via stomach churning amounts of appeals on via WhatsApp. The hope is that someone knows someone at a platform to get them help.
Something like being having your non-consensual intimate imagery shared, means you are pretty much done. Since a majority of people live in nations with more conservative mores (on average) than the west, this means an absurd number of lives ruined.
Fraud, pig butchering scams, are examples of outright crimes. Tech isn’t much better when it comes to customer support. You want to recover your account, or reach a human? Good luck.
I’d love to hear a counter argument for this position: Tech platforms are as valuable as they are, because they do not pay the support costs they incur.
Yeah, a friend of mine was tracked by a stalker ex boyfriend who worked at a Telco.
It was irritatingly difficult to avoid because it seemed he could look up her SIM card by name and then get her location no matter what (new SIM, new phone)
Anyone who reports this kind of thing to the police just sounds irrational and crazy and gets ignored.
It's literally a known thing at telcos in various roles they find people looking up folks dox regularly. If someone registers a complaint that someone access their data they'll look it up and deal with them.
I once asked someone on the security /investigations side if you are logging what everyone is doing can't you easily find when folks are looking up stuff unrelated to their job? Their answer: we'd have to fire over half the people here - everyone is constantly looking up people's PII - celebrities, friends, enemies, etc. it's almost considered a unofficial perk of the job. This was from one of the largest US Telco carriers circa 2010. Maybe things have changed, hopefully.
In Western Europe they would get fired and go to jail. That's why Western Europe doxx information is considered the most valuable in the world. It wasn't complicated to create that situation. They can just fire a few, drag one to court, and rely on the chilling effect.
Sounds like something worth reporting as it is an offence in Australia at least. The police would certainly investigate such an allegation and charges could be laid if there was sufficient evidence and a conviction was possible.
> The police would certainly investigate such an allegation and charges could be laid if there was sufficient evidence and a conviction was possible.
I'll let you know when I finish laughing.
This is 100% false. You can serve up all the evidence on a silver platter the the police will ignore it. I know, I've tried, specifically in a stalking case. They don't care.
It's true in Australia, true in the US, true broadly in the UK and Europe. Where do you live where it's not the case? I once got mugged, had the perpetrator's ID and a video recording of them doing it, and they got a slap on the wrist.
After being stalked myself, for years, across borders, I can tell you the police doesn't care unless you can prove real, imminent danger. I have no idea how to prove that short of a written confession. A message from the stalker with a picture of them holding a knife at the door of my building, and the text I came to "visit" you but you had guests/witnesses for example didn't reach the bar of imminent danger.
The police is made of people who want to do the job but are swamped with bigger problems, and people who don't want to do any real job.
Things are very different in the US. Police do not exist to uphold the law or protect civilians from anything. There are specific rulings in our legal code that flatly state police are not obligated to protect anyone.
Police in the US exist mainly to suck up tax money and harass and murder civilians and escalate peaceful protests into riots to justify suppression and murder. They're merely an instrument of an increasingly authoritarian government.
Yeah, if you gave police here a complaint with all the evidence in the world, there is absolutely no obligation for them to investigate or take any action. And there's really no recourse.
Maybe you're being Naive? Just because there are laws doesn't mean there going to be enforced. Especially with what's going on right now with governments becomming authoritarian.
Yeah it was reported, but the telcos systems were such a load of slop there wasn’t any specific evidence recorded (logs etc), and besides nobody knew what to ask for, so it couldn’t be taken seriously.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances of how they got a confession years later, I think bragging, but he did get convicted and the Telco eventually fired him, which stopped the stalking.
I’m spitballing here but it seemed like his job was a kind of ITS/technician job in the core infrastructure, and it seemed like he didn’t need to go through normal channels to get the information he wanted, ie he could just like pcap a tower with a filter or whatever in a routine kind of way that I guess didn’t create any specific logs. If there were any relevant logs they would have had to give them to the police. And I know that at a high level Telcos are heavily regulated, so there should have been logs.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. I signed up for an internet plan with a provider once, but they never let me login to pay the bills. After they started threatening me with collections and several phone calls layer it turned out they were billing someone in a completely different city. Complete shambles.
I have a comparable dispute with an old ISP from an old apartment. Their system had me as still receiving services there for many months after I cancelled and moved. Every year they send me a final warning saying it'll go to collections (the fact that it hasn't actually gone to collections more or less tells me I'm right, lol). Every year I'm grateful it's "just" an ISP and not the government because the government would've escalated the fine to a bajillion dollars and issued a bench warrant by now.
I've seen people getting fired in BigTech for using the platform to stalk their ex-es. It's usually an alert that goes off when employees access internal dashboards for a certain profile, too many times.
Some systems, like lawful intercept, are designed to be hidden even from telco network management systems. The LI console that set up a wire tap might log activity at that particular console at that particular law-enforcement agency. But if you don't know where to look exactly, good luck.
This is why the Chinese picked lawful intercept as a hacking target for the salt typhoon exploit. It's almost impossible to know whether that exploit is continuing or when exactly it began.
SS7 access - you still have to hack the system to acquire the data yourself, and I believe it creates a log that you roamed to that country, and briefly disconnects your cellphone from the network? It's far from invisible.
Assuming he had access to a database with (lat, long, SIM) data, if she got a new phone he could just use the known (lat, long pairs) from the old sim and lookup to get the new sim. Then bam, you can get all of the new lat longs.
It’s impossible to avoid unless you simultaneously move to a new house / apartment when you get your new phone, and never bring the new phone to any previous low-traffic location you brought the old phone to.
If the person was deep enough into the system to have access to location data, then they'd probably be able to just directly look up customer details (likely easier).
Are you in a small company where most people wear lots of hats, or in a big company that has siloed off groups? Am guessing it's more of the big company approach that silos things off?
Well, my privacy-o-meter made me have my phone with no sim card and always airplane mode, and the sim card is in a dumb phone in my house, that I also barely turn on unless needed. Not perfect, but still far better than being tracked with telecoms.
So what you’re saying is if you were secretly a psycho and wanted to stalk your ex-girlfriend, you work at a Telco and basically have access to the tools to do it?
So putting aside the fact you’re a reasonable person, anyone who works themselves up to a similar seniority and job description in a Telco as you, could in fact do exactly what the article is saying is an issue for the victims.
I'm glad to hear that your random telco's governance and influence has spread around the entire world to every other telco.
FYI: from the fact it's hard (not impossible) to see the data mentioned and it's possible (not guaranteed) that the caught offender would be punished is a VERY long way to "you lie".
Theirs was anecdata, yours is anecdata but you're additionally rude.
Even in pretty dysfunctional countries, or pro-business ones like the US, where nothing like the GDPR exists, telcos management have a strong interest in not letting just any rank and file employee spy on subscribers.
Most breaches are not in the interests of management, but they happen anyway as management wants to save money or doesn't understand how it could happen.
Ah, I remember back in the day when "trust me I work in a telco and this is just dumb" people were really really silent after the room 641a stuff got leaked.
> And obviously, a simple email to the data governance and privacy office would be taken extremely seriously.
What is this based on? I used to work for a data governance and privacy vendor that supplied data for audits. Tons and tons of customers asked us to fudge their data.
This is after the Delve scandal, where the hottest tech compliance company was completely fraudulent and numerous other hot tech companies also had completely fraudulent audits.
you are close to a system in a way that those guardrails are clear and present; the story is from the point of view of a victim, and it is possible that they were indeed a victim. Therefore the means of the stalking is not known at all via this story, but somehow, something did occur. It is not surprising on either side, and they do not necessarily contradict each other IMHO
I'm specifically talking about the technical aspect. Even with non-existent separation of concerns, and abysmal practices related to data governance which would be breaking the law in most of the developed world, the story sounds like bullshit. Extracting points of interest and reconstructing paths from raw network telemetry isn't trivial.
The likelihood a random employee could run a quick SQL join to stalk someone based on their name is zero.
> Gary Miller, one of the researchers who investigated these attacks, told TechCrunch that some clues point to an “Israeli-based commercial geo-intelligence provider with specialized telecom capabilities,” but did not name the surveillance provider. Several Israeli companies are known to offer similar services, such as Circles (later acquired by spyware maker NSO Group), Cognyte, and Rayzone.
This is just par for the course in Russia. Government has telcos track people, and that data ends up available on the black market for anyone to purchase, for a fairly modest fee. The government has been recently trying (with uncertain degree of success) to crack down on the latter, as this was frequently used by the opposition journalists and investigators to uncover the details of the government's own nefarious plots.
The data is cross-referenced with other telcos, other SIM cards, Wi-Fi hotspots (anonymous public hotspots are outlawed), street cams, and many other databases, so it's basically impossible to avoid being tracked.
Probably inevitable to become the norm everywhere in the world.
> ... as this was frequently used by the opposition journalists and investigators to uncover the details ...
Seems like Ukrainians assassins targeting Russian VIP's would be the most compelling motive for a crackdown.
Or perhaps Mr. Putin provides a feed of "currently in favor" VIP's to the black market folks, who know better than to sell intel on anyone on that list?
nice deflection there, ofc bad russia! you did surely notice that this article is about the uk? oh, and (big surprise!) israeli cell and surveillance companies ...
In my country 95% of people don't mind Meta tracking their location with WhatsApp, so I think the days of people caring about tracking are long gone!
I am the exception and believe in privacy, and I've not used a Meta app since I tested Facebook/WhatsApp back in 2010 and soon uninstalled them as I don't want a digital portfolio to be developed on me for advertisers. Same with Google, they can whistle for my personal information, but they won't get it!
I'm sure surveillance companies have an even easier time buying data from Meta/WhatsApp so that's even more worrying as people use different ISPs so 95% of people won't be traced by any one ISP, but Meta and Google have the location information of anyone gullible enough to use their services.
One of the first bits of infosec advice I give to my non-technical friends and family, when they ask for it, is to turn off background location access for all apps on their phones.
Needless to say, I know plenty of technical people who don't care about it.
They run a mass surveillance operation so they can target individual people with exploding pagers. It's just another aspect of the longstanding war between Israel and Iran (via Hezbollah etc).
They are a country surrounded by countries that either dislike them or want them wiped from the face of the earth. It only makes sense that they have a significant intelligence and spying industry.
The genocide they're undertaking does place that industry in a whole new light, of course.
I was reading news this morning about Lebanese journalist killed in airstrike. I was thinking very likely she was tracked wherever she was taking shelter. These kind of surveillance probably helps track such people on large scale and we most of the time meh at such reports and think what have I to loose. But it is affecting everyone now, not some ambigious high profile targets, they are the people amongst us.
I do believe the law was specifically carved out so it could only be used against Palestinian prisoners. And there is no far-left in Israel, at least no far-left party that could ever be in government.
Oh would you look at that: “Israeli-based commercial geo-intelligence provider with specialized telecom capabilities.”
Make no mistake, the people of Gaza and Lebanon are being used as guinea pigs for highly invasive surveillance technology that could easily be pointed at any of us if we step out of line.
And yes I said people of Gaza, not tellhullists as they’re referred to in Zion.
That Gaza, the world's largest open prison, is an experiment playground for Israeli surveillance and military tech is a popular theory online that is now finding space in mainstream media too:
Yet these jackholes can just snag it whenever because, ya know, profit. That is obviously insane. Our corporate culture has driven our society insane with normalized greed. The unholy alliance of tech and marketing is largely to blame.
that just sounds pointless, won't they be dead by that point anyways?
It's all about power, anyway. The NSA doesn't need a warrant at all. When the police want to get an alleged criminal they can get a warrant in minutes. But when it's your life in danger, it takes hours. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Silicon Valley and global communications infrastructure has been compromised by Israel. Quoting TFA:
> This analysis identified 4G infrastructure associated with operator networks based in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Channel Islands. Notably, in prior public reporting these same countries have been linked to CSVs targeting mobile users.
> Israel has long been a focal point in the global surveillance industry, with multiple companies developing and exporting advanced spyware, cellular communications interception, and monitoring technologies.
NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. There's even a cute term for it, LOVEINT.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/loveint-nsa-letter-disclo...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-spouses-...
People aren't able to imagine the ramifications of pervasive surveillance because there never has been such pervasive surveillance in human history. And humans are terrible at predicting how this is going to change things. Especially, with LLMs in the mix.Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
And what pray tell do you do if you don't have anyone to report it to inside the government? Reports like that can easily get blackholed.
The future black markets are going to be filled with all sorts of illegal "private comms" devices to give us our privacy back. I am sure there are sci-fi novels with this theme.
> many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
We already live in this world. Most of the conversations here on HN are naturally America centric, and the situation with the rest of the humans on the planet is secondary. The more distant, the less interest.
For most of that world, please for help are sent via stomach churning amounts of appeals on via WhatsApp. The hope is that someone knows someone at a platform to get them help.
Something like being having your non-consensual intimate imagery shared, means you are pretty much done. Since a majority of people live in nations with more conservative mores (on average) than the west, this means an absurd number of lives ruined.
Fraud, pig butchering scams, are examples of outright crimes. Tech isn’t much better when it comes to customer support. You want to recover your account, or reach a human? Good luck.
I’d love to hear a counter argument for this position: Tech platforms are as valuable as they are, because they do not pay the support costs they incur.
It was irritatingly difficult to avoid because it seemed he could look up her SIM card by name and then get her location no matter what (new SIM, new phone)
Anyone who reports this kind of thing to the police just sounds irrational and crazy and gets ignored.
I once asked someone on the security /investigations side if you are logging what everyone is doing can't you easily find when folks are looking up stuff unrelated to their job? Their answer: we'd have to fire over half the people here - everyone is constantly looking up people's PII - celebrities, friends, enemies, etc. it's almost considered a unofficial perk of the job. This was from one of the largest US Telco carriers circa 2010. Maybe things have changed, hopefully.
I'll let you know when I finish laughing.
This is 100% false. You can serve up all the evidence on a silver platter the the police will ignore it. I know, I've tried, specifically in a stalking case. They don't care.
The police is made of people who want to do the job but are swamped with bigger problems, and people who don't want to do any real job.
Police in the US exist mainly to suck up tax money and harass and murder civilians and escalate peaceful protests into riots to justify suppression and murder. They're merely an instrument of an increasingly authoritarian government.
Yeah, if you gave police here a complaint with all the evidence in the world, there is absolutely no obligation for them to investigate or take any action. And there's really no recourse.
Be glad you live in a functional society.
Or maybe federal law enforcement, who are also abusing these surveillance systems to stalk their exes?
Or perhaps intelligence agencies, who are also abusing these surveillance systems to stalk their exes?
Did I mention they're all friends with each other and usually help each other and cover for each other?
I don’t remember the exact circumstances of how they got a confession years later, I think bragging, but he did get convicted and the Telco eventually fired him, which stopped the stalking.
https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
This is why the Chinese picked lawful intercept as a hacking target for the salt typhoon exploit. It's almost impossible to know whether that exploit is continuing or when exactly it began.
Most simple criminals get away with their crimes. Anyone with any level of sophistication does as well.
It’s impossible to avoid unless you simultaneously move to a new house / apartment when you get your new phone, and never bring the new phone to any previous low-traffic location you brought the old phone to.
- Very few people have legit business cases requiring access to enriched network telemetry, at least non aggregated.
- Of which, only a handful have any reason to see the MSISDN in clear.
- Of which, none can get access to clear CRM data.
- Lawful interception and emergency services use completely separate paths, exposed via user interfaces that aren't available to employees.
And obviously, a simple email to the data governance and privacy office would be taken extremely seriously.
Also why not simply switch to a different phone operator?
So putting aside the fact you’re a reasonable person, anyone who works themselves up to a similar seniority and job description in a Telco as you, could in fact do exactly what the article is saying is an issue for the victims.
FYI: from the fact it's hard (not impossible) to see the data mentioned and it's possible (not guaranteed) that the caught offender would be punished is a VERY long way to "you lie".
Theirs was anecdata, yours is anecdata but you're additionally rude.
What is this based on? I used to work for a data governance and privacy vendor that supplied data for audits. Tons and tons of customers asked us to fudge their data.
This is after the Delve scandal, where the hottest tech compliance company was completely fraudulent and numerous other hot tech companies also had completely fraudulent audits.
This is not a reasonable assumption.
The likelihood a random employee could run a quick SQL join to stalk someone based on their name is zero.
The data is cross-referenced with other telcos, other SIM cards, Wi-Fi hotspots (anonymous public hotspots are outlawed), street cams, and many other databases, so it's basically impossible to avoid being tracked.
Probably inevitable to become the norm everywhere in the world.
Seems like Ukrainians assassins targeting Russian VIP's would be the most compelling motive for a crackdown.
Or perhaps Mr. Putin provides a feed of "currently in favor" VIP's to the black market folks, who know better than to sell intel on anyone on that list?
Yes
> and that data ends up available on the black market for anyone to purchase, for a fairly modest fee
Probably not. Those DBs are fake most ( all ? ) the time.
nice deflection there, ofc bad russia! you did surely notice that this article is about the uk? oh, and (big surprise!) israeli cell and surveillance companies ...
I am the exception and believe in privacy, and I've not used a Meta app since I tested Facebook/WhatsApp back in 2010 and soon uninstalled them as I don't want a digital portfolio to be developed on me for advertisers. Same with Google, they can whistle for my personal information, but they won't get it!
I'm sure surveillance companies have an even easier time buying data from Meta/WhatsApp so that's even more worrying as people use different ISPs so 95% of people won't be traced by any one ISP, but Meta and Google have the location information of anyone gullible enough to use their services.
Needless to say, I know plenty of technical people who don't care about it.
The cost of opting out is very high.
"Mark of the beast"-- you want to participate in society, you need it.
why are they good at these kind of things - security, hacks, surveillance, 0-days?
The genocide they're undertaking does place that industry in a whole new light, of course.
https://citizenlab.ca/research/uncovering-global-telecom-exp...
The goal is dominance and control of the poor by the rich.
Fun fact, 62% of Israelis believe there are ZERO INNOCENT PEOPLE IN GAZA: https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-poll-62-of...
Israel will have a far left government when hell freezes over.
Cops and agencies trying to change this, (buuhuuu someone bought anonymous SIMs in bulk and sold them on darknet)
Surprisingly, there was major public pushback, pretty unlucky for cops.
Make no mistake, the people of Gaza and Lebanon are being used as guinea pigs for highly invasive surveillance technology that could easily be pointed at any of us if we step out of line.
And yes I said people of Gaza, not tellhullists as they’re referred to in Zion.
1. Gaza: a testing ground for Israeli military technology - https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-testing-ground-is...
2. Gaza “laboratory” boosts profits of Israel’s war industry - https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boost...
3. Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots - https://archive.is/P6mAQ