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Comment by anonAndOn | Hacker News Reader

Stunning. Apple has built a surveillance system that no government in the world could ever afford. Despots, dictators and duly elected presidents around the world are rejoicing at how cheap and easy it is to keep tabs on your political enemies, opposition leaders and those meddlesome human rights campaigners. Put a small tag on their cars, their briefcases, their kids' lunchboxes and just watch where the little tags go. Got a secret meeting with your fellow revolutionaries? Better hope nobody with an iPhone passed nearby on the trip to, from and during the meeting.

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Yep, AirTag has definitely enabled all of that. No other, better options exist, AirTag is the first way for the baddies to covertly track people.

Oh, unless the people they want to track also have an iPhone, because then they'll get alerted to the tracking. Damn!

Is there another tiny tag that automatically pairs with a billion mobile listening stations? If so, where can I buy it?

You can get a GPS device that automatically pairs with satellite in the sky, regardless of the devices around it.

Are you worried about someone putting a GPS device in your bag?

GPS trackers don't work well inside, they are large due to battery requirements, and are easily jammed. They are really only practical for tracking vehicles, where they can be wired in or use a large battery. It is significantly incriminatory if you are found to be using one.

Depends on your definition of "large": https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32639620194.html That's about the size of a matchbox. Add a 18650 battery on that and you're good for days.

If you live in a world where it's "easy to jam GPS", you shouldn't be worrying about BTLE trackers or cellphones either. You do know that GPS jamming is highly illegal pretty much everywhere?

If your threat model includes enabling a GPS jammer, I think it also includes other methods to prevent tracking too.

I don't know about days from a single battery, depends on logging frequency I guess. It is certainly a threat. Days of tracking isn't in the same realm as months of tracking though. With months of lifetime devices can be secreted at a time convenient to the attacker.

Jammers are illegal but widely available, and used frequently by people who don't want to be tracked. $50 for a good one. A low power jammer isn't going to get picked up very easily if it's moving. Jamming BTLE is also possible, and likely to be more common in the future.

The coming ubiquity of these trackers is the problem, they are going to be everywhere. Makes it hard to filter which ones are valid. Not just Apple, but their network is the most pervasive.

Jamming GPS or cell phones is a federal offense in the US...

If you're operating on a level where committing federal-level crimes is an every day occurrence, your threat model is not in the public median :)

It's not even hard to get days or months of use from simple GSM-GPS loggers. It's quite trivial to put them in deep sleep modes with different wake up triggers (external motion detector, clock, etc) to update their state. They can even operate over SMS so the amount of data transferred is minimal.

If you want to be extra paranoid, there are devices that only respond to "where are you/where have you been" SMS messages and stay offline most of the time (SMS messages are cached on the network side for a few days). Stuff like this won't be detected by equipment looking for active RF transmissions.

I really don't see how AirTags are supposed to be this super ubiquitous nefarious tracking device used by everyone from foreign governments to disgruntled exes.

Jamming may be a Federal offence (it is illegal in pretty much every country) but nevertheless jammers can be picked up for not much money, and are used widely by truckers, OCGs (avoiding surveillance, hijacking or warehouse theft, kidnapping, and especially stealing cars), even taxi drivers and couriers (and these guys are the ones using el cheapo jammers which cause lots of interference.)

People facing serious surveillance threats (like law enforcement or OCGs) will have to start scanning and mapping BTLE now, which is a serious pain.

The real advantage is ubiquity and deniability. I'd like to see Apple provide a way for police to identify the iCloud account owner, and other iCloud devices, for a suspect AirTag. This would significantly raise the bar for effort required for covert use. Still allows controlling boyfriends a great tracking technique though.

GPS-based trackers don't pair with satellites, the antenna and radio to do that would be enormous.

i get your point, but surely despots, dictators and presidents would already have access to GPS tracking technology? i thought those things were basically commodities by now

How big is a GPS tracker? Can I slip one into a dog collar/belt/shoe tread without anyone noticing? Will it still work where there's no cell signal but you still have WiFi?

https://www.amazon.com/GPS-Trackers/b?node=617650011

I'd love to see how you casually disguise any of those sewn into a dog collar! Pics, please!

Right back at ya with pics of an AirTag sewn into a dog collar, lmao.

Challenge accepted! I'll order one and post a pic of an airtag hidden in my dog's dog collar if you post one of a GPS tracker hidden in your dog's collar. We'll then compare which one is not even noticeable and which one is a giant block hanging off your dog's neck. Deal?

Most just grab location data from your cell phone which is already tracked.

i don't mean Tile and such devices, i mean the ones where you can put a SIM in it and have them text GPS co-ords. something like https://www.onlinespyshop.co.uk/sms-tiny-tracker/

i know that AirTags are way more accessible, but i just mean these kinds of tools have been available to adversaries for a while.

(i also don't really know how well these trackers really work.)

Well, not really. Apple has built in specific ways of monitoring un-wanted tracking. I have to assume the officials you mentioned have already had more flexible and purpose-built means of covertly tracking others for years if not decades now.

Who said it was cheap? There's clearly an opportunity for Apple here. Government premium plan: 1000$ per tag per day to disable the alerts.

Mobile phones already provide all of this data, any governments collect it all in bulk and mine it.

The GSM networks location surveillance is both larger and more effective than this technology. Your first claim is false.

Such a lack of imagination... Official third-party requests require paperwork and official approvals and ??? 10 out of 10 political parties/espionage front companies/ex-boyfriends endorse this product because there is no paperwork (and it's cheap, too!). Hooray!

It doesn't require much paperwork in the United States. The mobile phone providers have built convenient portals for law enforcement, they just plug in your phone number and get your location history from the day you opened your account to right now.

Sources:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/sprint_provid...

https://www.businessinsider.com/att-project-hemisphere-016-1...

Anybody with $29 can track a target by leveraging everyone else's iPhone. Whether the target uses a phone or not is of no consequence.

Batman showed us the future and Apple delivered.[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7AONv3FSg

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