FBI busted tracking student, demands GPS spy gear return

Several days ago a 20-year-old Santa Clara, Calif. student discovered a GPS tracking device hidden on his car. After his friend posted a picture of it online, speculating about its its ties to a secret FBI investigation, the feds themselves came a-knockin', according to Wired.com. They wanted their toy back.

Based on the discussion with the six FBI agents who arrived at his doorstep, Yassir Afifi believes he'd been under surveillance for three to six months. When Wired asked an FBI spokesman about the case, he did not acknowledge ownership of the device, but said that there was an "ongoing investigation."

Afifi says that he cooperated with the FBI and, according to Wired, "did nothing to merit attention from authorities." He is a U.S. citizen who attends Mission College in Santa Clara.

Afifi's father, an Islamic-American activist, died a year ago in Egypt. It is not clear what the circumstances of his death were, or if this was the reason for the FBI's investigation of Afifi.

The gadget itself — a GPS receiver identified as a police-issue-only Cobham Orion Guardian ST820 tracking system, connected to a battery pack and radio transmitter — was magnetically attached to the car. A shot of it made its way around the blogosphere on Monday, after appearing on the community news site Reddit. After Afifi spotted an antenna sticking out during an oil change, the garage owner offered to yank it out. It apparently popped off quite easily.

The question of whether or not sticking a GPS on a car is legal is actually in the middle of a hot debate right now. One federal court recently said that it was legal, while another said that tracking for an "extended period of time" would in fact require a warrant. (For more on this, here's a great piece in Time written by lawyer and tech journalist Adam Cohen.)

Legality aside, the tactic itself might have been carried out with something less than precision. Simply put, tracking devices shouldn't be so easy to find. Wired talked to an agent who said that not only is the tracking device out of date, but state-of-the-art snoops hardwire the stuff directly to the car's electrical system, avoiding the need for a battery.

What's impressive is how quickly Afifi got an identification of the gadget by crowdsourcing it on the Web. On the flipside, that kind of exposure isn't good PR for the FBI. Surely the revelation of the magnetic tracker will cause many people to check under their own cars. Like many noble efforts to keep us safe from terrorism, this one may be turning out to not be so effective. After all, those who already know they're involved in illegal activity probably check their cars every day, rain or shine.

For more details on the Afifi story, read the report at Wired.com.

SMBC comic

Google Paints Chinese Government into a Corner

courtesy of PCWorld.com

Google's carefully worded blog post today explaining why they redirected mainland Chinese traffic to the Hong Kong version of Google sounds fair and balanced. In fact, it's a humiliating slap in the face for the Chinese government. Here's why.

Because Google was used by hackers most likely working for the Chinese government to track down political activists and to steal Google's intellectual property -- and because they were forced by the government to censor the Internet -- Google decided that such evil wasn't worth the money they might make by rolling over for the authoritarian government. No more censorship.

(If you're tempted to argue equivalency with, say, German censorship of Nazi-related content or censorship of hate speech and child pornography in the West, note that in addition to consumer and social sites, the Chinese government censors the words "dictatorship," "anti-communist," "genocide," "oppression," and related web sites. The Chinese government even forced Google, whose motto is "don't be evil" to censor the word "evil." Here's a more complete list of what the Chinese government censors.)

The Chinese government told Google that censoring the Internet for the Chinese Communist Party is Chinese law. Obey the law, or leave the country.

Google's solution was to redirect traffic from the mainland Chinese site, google.cn, to the Hong Kong site, which is google.com.hk. Mainland Chinese laws don't apply in Hong Kong, so there is far less censorship on that site.

This is something of a worst-case scenario for the Chinese government. It brings huge attention to the special privileges afforded to Hong Kong residents, who have a whole range of relative political freedoms. It leaves the Chinese government with three options:

1. Block mainland access to Hong Kong, which exacerbates frustration with Hong Kong's special status and creates resentment on the mainland

2. Shut down the Hong Kong site, which creates resentment among powerful elites in Hong Kong

3. Allow Chinese citizens access to an uncensored Internet

None of these options are acceptable to the Chinese government. All put a massive spotlight on a set of facts that the Chinese government works hard to keep in the shadows. Despite spectacular economic growth, the Chinese government is in fact a backward authoritarian one-party regime, more akin to Cuba, Burma or pre-invasion Iraq than to the group of leading democracies it pretends equality with or superiority to. Google's redirect move lays that truth bare for all to see, especially inside China.

Don't be fooled by Google's fair-minded tone. This was a humiliating slap in the face of the highest order.

Chinese Spying Discovered by Google Search

The New York Times reports there is a gigantic spy system that has targeted and exploited computers in government agencies around the world. The spy system was discovered when the esteemed Dalai Lama asked Canadian firm Munk Center for International Studies to do a some anti-virus work on his computer.

Evidence proves that China is the country of origin. Whether or not it is the Chinese Government or Chinese "patriot hackers" is to be determined, but more than 1,295 computers in 103 countries were affected in some way by the spynet.

The most amusing part is that it is reported the researchers discovered the spynet using, of all things, a Google search.