[liberationtech] Changing MAC addresses on mobile devices

[shelley at misanthropia.info]

"The user's guide for one of Aruba's recent software products states:
"The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and
associated devices." That software includes "a location engine that
calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds
by default... The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each
MAC address.""

I don't enable wifi or bluetooth at all unless I'm near a trusted
network/meshnet or device.  It's small consolation, though.  This, added
to the Trapwire system (which, according to the leaked Stratfor emails,
went live in Seattle at the end of 2011 if I recall correctly), the ORCA
transit pass which tracks and stores the history of every trip you ever
take (and which I refuse to use), the license plate cameras on cop
cruisers and at the ferry terminals, red light cameras and gunshot
directional detecting devices, port cameras, toll transponders and the
cameras on just about every corner (and on every bus and light rail
car.)  The drones are grounded for now (as far as we know), but we're
about to get a new mayor who may decide to put them to use.

It's a fucking panopticon.  I guess they installed these damn things
while everyone was high on their legal weed and getting free munchies
from the pigs at Hempfest?

What the fuck, Seattle.  C'mon.


On Wed, Nov 6, 2013, at 06:31 PM, Dan Staples wrote:
> Even more reason for randomizing your phone's MAC address:
> 
> http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/you-are-a-rogue-device/Content?oid=18143845
> 
> You Are a Rogue Device -- A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has
> Been Installed Throughout Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What
> It Is, and Officials Don’t Want to Talk About It.
> 
> by Matt Fikse-Verkerk and Brendan Kiley
> 
> If you're walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You'll see off-white
> boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to
> utility poles. If you're walking around downtown while looking at a
> smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or
> three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: "4th&Seneca,"
> "4th&Union," "4th&University," and so on. That is how you can see the
> Seattle Police Department's new wireless mesh network, bought from a
> California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include
> the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining
> interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.
> 
> The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?
> 
> How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone,
> laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its "media
> access control address"—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous
> to a device's thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a
> database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given
> time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/30/2013 06:17 PM, Timur Mehrvarz wrote:
> > On 27.10.2013 21:46, Julian Oliver wrote:
> >> ..on Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 03:15:12PM +0100, Timur Mehrvarz wrote:
> >>> On 24.10.2013 20:48, coderman wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> this is not really the kernel itself, but rather the wifi chipset - a
> >>>> new kernel on the devices you're having trouble with won't fix this
> >>>> ioctl.
> >>>>
> >>>> unfortunately this problem is getting worse, not better.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Hmm, I see. In this case it would be really good to have a
> >>> positive/negative list in regard to Wifi chipsets.
> >>
> >> Would be good to see a build of 'macchanger' for Android. 
> > 
> > coderman and I have created a wiki page, listing ten devices at the
> > moment. Of those, five allow the Wifi MAC address to be changed. The
> > other five do not.
> > 
> > Please feel free to add more devices:
> > 
> > http://www.openwiki.com/ow.asp?Changing+MAC+addresses+on+mobile+devices
> > 
> 
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