noteworthy wrote:

Cell Phone Call Record $110

Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

I like this part:

This report is for informational purposes only. This is not for use in court. If you need the records for court, you will need to subpoena the records directly from the carrier.

The whois records are pretty opaque:

Registrant:
Ist Source Information
ATTN: LOCATECELL.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447

The site appears to be fairly new; the record was created on September 26 of last year.

UPDATE: You can read a recent Chicago Sun-Times article, "Your phone records are for sale", about Locatecell. This article was posted to the cryptography mailing list, which is probably what prompted the MemeStreams thread.

This was covered in the Washington Post more than six months ago, "Online Data Gets Personal: Cell Phone Records for Sale."

"This is a person's associations," said Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor who specializes in privacy issues. "... It's a real wealth of data to find out the people that a person interacts with."

The company that operates Locatecell is Data Find Solutions, and they are located in Knoxville, TN.

I like this part of the Locatecell order form:

Phone searches are provided by third party, independent search experts. These experts are independent researchers and Data Find Solutions Inc does not know how they do the research or what databases they access.

As the news articles explain, EPIC has asked the FCC to investigate. EPIC offers a compendium of 40 Websites Offering Telephone Calling Records and Other Confidential Information (PDF).

Looking for startup capital -- or a business model? MemeStreams could put the social network information behind a walled garden. But would anyone want in?

Well folks, it looks like you don't need unchecked presidential executive powers to get phone records without a warrant...

Cell Phone Number Research

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding".

The explanation did not, however, calm the bloggers. "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace's acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace," Ellis Yu wrote to the Blog Herald. "At the time, their CEO said nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has. MySpace was built on an open community and now they're trying to censor us, putting business interests above its members!"

I'm pretty sure I'm on the record, somewhere, predicting News Corp would do just this kind of thing. MySpace is, and will continue to be, a journey in learning about the necessary dynamics of Social Networking sites, and not the final solution to the online community.

Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites.

Let me give my complete assurance that Industrial Memetics will never entertain a buyout offer from News Corp.

Myspace stumbles

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

Google's Zeitgeist reports are always interesting, but I also always feel like they could do more. Google is sitting on top of one of the most amazing collections of information mankind has ever assembled, and has all the metrics on people's usage of it. If all the various TV outlets ranging from CNN to VH1 can assemble "year in review" programs every year that go into the year's events in such depth, Google can do better than this.

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

Was the secret NSA surveillance program legal? Was it constitutional? Did it violate federal statutory law? It turns out these are hard questions, but I wanted to try my best to answer them. My answer is pretty tentative, but here it goes: Although it hinges somewhat on technical details we don't know, it seems that the program was probably constitutional but probably violated the federal law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

This is a detailed analysis. The Administration's Position is also available.

Legal Analysis of the NSA surveillance program

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods...

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual...

Army and other Pentagon officials raised concerns that Mr. McCain would be furious at what could appear to be a back-door effort to circumvent his intentions.

"This is a stick in McCain's eye," one official.

Mr. McCain's measure, which the Senate has overwhelmingly approved, would require that only interrogation techniques authorized by the new Army field manual be used on prisoners held by the military....

So, if I understand this.. We have banned torture, but there is no way to actually tell if we just said we banned torture while classifying the information that pertains to how we torture... Or, ideally, if we have a good set of guidelines for interrogation that actually bans torture, but are keeping them secret so our interrogation methods are not publicly known so they can be trained for.

McCain is the only one who even has the appearance of being an honest broker here. Does he have access to see what the current guidelines are? This issue just can't fall off the radar without something happening that convinces the world, or at least many people like me, that we did in fact ban torture. So far, I'm not convinced.

New Army Rules May Snarl Talks With McCain on Detainee Issue - New York Times

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

This story is all over the media. That's a good thing.

Hopefully I'll have the chance soon to write some of my thoughts about the matter. It's very significant and will have massive long term ramifications.

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times

Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative.

But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community. "The domestic news blocking system is really interesting," wrote one blogger. "I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches." Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines.

If you remove the "hl=zh-CN" from that Google news search above you get VERY different results. There are some relevent links in the Chineese web search results right now, but the results seem odd given the amount of press coverage. This news search has relevent information, but its mostly coming from a handful of protesty news sources (peacehall & epoch times), same ones that show up in the google search, and not mainstream media. Its possible that these are approved dissenters. (Although VOA also shows up.) More totally unreliable information here. Stratfor has coverage here.

Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest - New York Times

Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, died Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Richard Pryor, Rest in Peace.

Comedian Richard Pryor Dies At 65

In a research paper appearing in the November/December 2005 issue of IEEE Security and Privacy, we analyzed publicly available information and materials to evaluate the reliability of the telephone wiretapping technologies used by US law enforcement agencies. The analysis found vulnerabilities in widely fielded interception technologies that are used for both "pen register" and "full audio" (Title III / FISA) taps. The vulnerabilities allow a party to a wiretapped call to disable content recording and call monitoring and to manipulate the logs of dialed digits and call activity.

In the most serious countermeasures we discovered, a wiretap subject superimposes a continuous low-amplitude "C-tone" audio signal over normal call audio on the monitored line. The tone is misinterpreted by the wiretap system as an "on-hook" signal, which mutes monitored call audio and suspends audio recording. Most loop extender systems, as well as at least some CALEA systems, appear to be vulnerable to this countermeasure.

John Markoff has a story on this today.

Ha... They were using old school dtmf techniques to detect call status! Thats a bizarre approach. You'd think they'd have some device that spoke SS7 and the network would simply send the digital call traffic to them. U: I just read the paper. Apparently there IS no good reason they are using inband signals. Its a good paper. Read it.

Of course, this kind of vulnerability isn't what I'm really interested in with respect to CALEA equipment. The big question is how does Law Enforcement get access to the CALEA system and is the security/authentication of that access method sufficient to prevent other parties from using the system. I've heard unsubstantiated whisperings that it isn't... U: The paper seems to allude to this suspicion as well...

Blue Boxing Wiretapping Systems

The Convention on Cybercrime will endanger Americans' privacy and civil liberties--and place the FBI's massive surveillance apparatus at the disposal of nations with much less respect for individual liberties.

For instance, if the U.S. and Russia ratify it, President Vladimir Putin would be able to invoke the treaty's powers to unmask anonymous critics on U.S.-based Web sites and perhaps even snoop on their e-mail correspondence.

There's an easy fix. The U.S. Senate could attach an amendment to the treaty saying the FBI may aid other nations only if the alleged "crime" in their country also is a crime here. The concept is called dual criminality, and the treaty lets nations choose that option.

Unfortunately, neither the Bush administration nor the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been willing to make that change, calling it too "rigid."

Fuzzy logic behind Bush's cybercrime treaty | Perspectives | CNET News.com