Stealth Wear, Coming to a Store Near You | Hacker News Reader

Stealth Wear, Coming to a Store Near You

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

53 pointssrivast58 comments

There's one potential issue with this in that all electronic devices these days can store data. It may not be able to transmit while in the pouch, but there's no reason it could store and forward when you next come into rage of a wifi station. We already know malware exists for mobile devices; there's no reason a 0-day exploit can't be implanted to do just that.

Besides, it's not just your phone that could be transmitting signals. Whether accidentally or not, pretty much any gadget sophisticated enough to pick up audio may also be transmitting :

http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1le3if/so_i_discover...

Store and forward what? The only thing I'd want to prevent my phone from beaming to the mothership is my location. If your phone is inside this Faraday shield then it can't get a GPS location to store.

Edit: microphone will still work inside pouch

Why wouldn't the microphone pick anything up? Sound waves are unaffected by a Faraday cage.

Yea you're right, I thought the microphone itself wouldn't work but it still does.

Store and forward any audio it picks up. Why stick to GPS when your location can be triangulated by cross referencing the sounds around you? E.G. A fire engine/ambulance, school bus with loud children or garbage truck passing by at a particular time or the voice of someone else who's cell isn't protected and is being monitored.

Software to accomplish these things already exist.

Yea I understand what you mean now. I would still say that's a little aggressively paranoid given the nature of this pouch, but you're right -- the makers of the pouch seem to imply that you're "safe" when your phone's inside which apparently isn't 100% true.

Oh yes, it's definitely on the paranoid side. I would argue that an old fashioned feature phone with the battery removed is a much cheaper alternative, but the point of these items, I believe, is more symbolic than functional.

I mean, if you think about it, someone wearing one of those hoodies... they don't really care about the fashion statement or even the "protection" they offer. The reality is that someone wearing that would stand out like a sore thumb, and I think that's part of the point. It's more of a conspicuous protest in plain sight without being disruptive.

Maybe that's the real sales pitch all along. A bit of "I am Spartacus" with a high-tech woven mesh and face hiding.

Starting with the before and after GPS positions, one could estimate likely connecting paths using accelerometer and microphone inputs.

> Store and forward what?

1) Well, surprise, your location. Just store tuples of position and time where you were

2) Everything you type, passwords, patterns

3) Picture of your face if you have face lock

4) Accounts you use and maybe passwords

How would it know where you were if it can't use GPS or connect to wifi networks? Obviously if you take it out you're not protected anymore.

Presumably, you'll need to take it out of the pouch to make a call. At which point, it will upload all it has gathered via nearby open wifi access point or, with the cooperation of your carrier, through the data link. If the carrier has any special incentives, the extra upload of data won't count against your usage so you may not even know that the upload took place.

If it was in the pouch and you wanted to hide the time it was in the pouch during that time you never took it out, then yes that would work.

This kind of stuff has been around since 2005: http://difrwear.com/

If you want to turn off your cellphone... turn off your cellphone. It has an off switch and airplane mode. This kind of protective casing is really only needed for the type of things you can't turn "off" like all the RFID chips embedded in credits card you own (and probably don't even realize you have).

Also, this is pretty lol: "Mr. Harvey said that he could not afford to hire an outside firm to extensively test the effectiveness of his products, but that he tested them himself with most of the popular smartphones and major wireless carriers." If you haven't tested it, I doubt it works at all. http://difrwear.com/pages/certifications

Unless you take the battery out how do you know your phone is ever off. It doesn't just have hardware toggle button probably. So you'd have to take the battery out. Well then isn't it easier to put it in a Faraday cage than mess with the battery.

And how exactly do you plan to use your phone?

As soon as you take it out it can transmit everything it captured while in there.

This thing is useless for a cell phone.

It isn't going to be able to record without a battery...

If you take out the battery why are you using this pouch?

Again, this pouch is useless.

It prevents a straight forward tracking and forces anyone wishing to track you using a cellphone to throw a lot more resources at you than before. Inside the case it doesn't get any simple tracking info, the only thing it really gets would be physical orientation (gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass) and audio.

In order to turn the first into tracking the phone has to either do the inertial tracking itself (possible but computationally expensive and it diverges pretty quickly unless there have been some major improvements).

The second requires some luck involving an identifiable sound marker some where in the recording then the processing power to cross reference everything.

It's a mistake to confuse imperfect with useless.

It's useless.

Just turn the phone off. Or really just the GPS off since that's the only thing this thing blocks.

So we pay $400+ for these devices every couple of years. But we don't trust the manufacturers nor the carriers. Some are paranoid that they're tracking every detail and transmitting at every opportunity.

Yet we continue to buy them?

Seeing the picture of the phone in the case, I can't help but think that this is a rather ridiculous state of affairs. If we don't like being tracked, if we don't trust them and if they breach our privacy, why don't we stop using/buying them?

Reread your Kaczynski.

What are you trying to say?

New technologies are like ratchets. When they become commonplace, it's extremely hard to not participate. Cars were a luxury in 1908, but today (except for a few dense areas), they're a basic necessity. It's certainly possible to not have a mobile phone, it's just not ever going to be a very popular choice.

Some would ask why we keep using electricity and fossil fuels, when we know we're running out of energy.

The answer is that we think we'll arrive at a solution for energy before we run out of oil. And the reason we keep using cellphones is because we believe we'll fix the privacy issues before we become enslaved.

Boycotting cellphones would just be boycotting a symptom anyways. Governments have always been corrupted to spy on citizens, every government ever, through any means necessary.

> when we know we're running out of energy.

This is a side note, but we're not running out of energy, we have enough for at least 10,000 to 100,000 years (depending on the rate of energy use increase).

And that is NOT including solar - just nuclear.

If anything demonstrates failure of the marketplace, it's that people this stupid have the money to shell out for things like this.

Am I the only person who thinks they haven't though the OFF Pocket through? Any phone inside that thing will go from 100% to 0% power in a matter of hours.

Shove an RFID patch in it that causes airplane mode to turn on

If you're going to keep your phone in a Faraday cage pouch, why not simply turn it off?

This is arguably a better UX, but for $85, I agree.

Specifically mentioned in the video: "Some electronics may still be active and power-cycling may take upwards of 30 sec".

Then again, you could just do a battery pull.

Then again, there might be a cap which keeps the GPS on...

Thus it's probably safer to put your phone into a Faraday cage so one doesn't need to worry about trusting hardware manufacturers.

Unfortunately many modern smartphones precent you from removing the battery.

Because turning it off doesn't work. You can't fully turn it off without popping the battery out.

The battery itself may have a transmitter built in if someone else got a hold of it.

I recall seeing some work on fingerprinting phones that are off by the differences in passive radio signatures of their communication circuits.

Won't "Airplane Mode" prevent phone from radiating any active signal?

If you believe that airplane mode does what it says, which customers of this product do not.

I can easily verify my phone is in a pouch, but I can't easily verify if my phone is really off.

If the pouch doesn't work as intended and the phone still has a very weak connection to the tower, the phone will transmit at maximum power, which will just eat through the battery life when sending and receiving data. I can't see this becoming successful if the pouch has this issue.

Confirmed. I work next to a Faraday cage and I get almost no signal - none when I need it - and battery life sucks. At weekends I get plenty of life despite using the phone more.

Couldn't you just line a ziplock bag with a couple layers of tinfoil? Also, when you put your phone in there it cuts off its WiFi, cellular connection, and 3g/4g, which means your phone is useless while it's in there. You might as well just take the battery out when you don't want to be tracked and save yourself $400.

But if you take your phone out of the packet, your location will be "broadcasted" to the network. That is, everytime you want to make or receive a call, or do anything with your phone, the network will know your location.

Flight mode would provide the same level of protection as this and at a much cheaper price.

Unrelated to the product: Is it possible to throw the tracking off by blocking some cellular towers and only connect to one? Then they have a radius you are in, but not the exact location.

One of the most important reasons I have a cell phone is so that my wife can reach me in an emergency. Disabling that functionality makes this a non-starter for me, even though I hate the idea of my every movement being tracked.

Um, what is the use of a shield that blocks signals from going to your cellphone? What is the value of a cellphone inside such a shield? You can never take it out of the shield, and you can never use it.

The use is knowing your phone isn't sending or receiving a signal.

The value is anonymity with the option of being able to use it when you want. The true value is having a real "off" switch.

> The true value is having a real "off" switch.

Despite the conspiracy theories, your phone already has an off switch.

And?

Doesn't mean this isn't of use, or that I'm reaching for a conspiracy. But a faraday cage to prevent communication might come in handy every now and again.

I think you'd use it to connect to the grid when you want to, make your call and then go off the grid quickly again. It gives the power to you to have a untraceable one-way communication device (if you don't have landlines available ie).

An "untraceable one-way communication device"? Really?

It does no such thing. Your phone is completely traceable when on, and it's not one way, and the pouch does nothing because the phone can still record where you are and what you say when in there, and then transmit it later.

> You can never take it out of the shield

Why would you arrive at such an absurd conclusion? The pouch provides control of when you are tracked.

As someone else pointed out, there's no reason it can't track and store things for later, when it does have a connection.

People are talking about cellphones, but another use occurs to me: It could be used to hold RFID cards that one has to use.

'stealth' & fashion: new levels of hipster martyrdom.

What material are they using that creates the Faraday cage effect?

I'd wager a wire mesh.

A conductive cloth will give the Faraday cage effect.

It's not that easy.

I put a cell phone in a metal lunchbox with a metal lid and it still rang when I called it.

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