Is cellphone location tracking the U.S.'s secret weapon in Iraq?

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/index.html

Secret killing program is key in Iraq, Woodward says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large
part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists,
according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.

The program -- which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan
Project that developed the atomic bomb -- must remain secret for now or it
would "get people killed," Woodward said Monday on CNN's Larry King Live.

"It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war,
as we often have," Woodward said.

In "The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008," Woodward
disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the
military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other
insurgent leaders.

...

Exclusive: Widespread cell phone location snooping by NSA?

 <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10030134-46.html>
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10030134-46.html

A recent article in the London Review of Books
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/soar01_.html>  revealed that a number of
private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government
spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time
location information. These companies include ThorpeGlen
<http://www.thorpeglen.com/> , VASTech <http://vastech.co.za/> , Kommlabs
<http://www.kommlabs.com/> , and Aqsacom <http://www.aqsacomna.com/us/>
--all of which sell "passive probing" data-mining services to governments
around the world.

ThorpeGlen, a U.K.-based firm, offers intelligence analysts a graphical
interface to the company's mobile-phone location and call-record data-mining
software. Want to determine a suspect's "community
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/09/rogue-fbi-lette.html> of
interest"? Easy. Want to learn if a single person is swapping SIM cards or
throwing away phones (yet still hanging out in the same physical location)?
No problem.

In a Web demo
<http://www.thorpeglen.com/doclib/ISS_Webinar_13_MAY_08_vb_secure.pdf>
(PDF) (mirrored
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~csoghoian/ISS_Webinar_13_MAY_08_vb_secure.pdf
> here) to potential customers back in May, ThorpeGlen's vice president of
global sales showed off the company's tools by mining a dataset of a single
week's worth of call data from 50 million users in Indonesia, which it has
crunched in order to try and discover small anti-social groups that only
call each other. 

...

 

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