The National Security Agency, argues Brendan O’Connor, doesn’t have a monopoly on mass surveillance. In fact, he’s developed a cheap system of open-source spy boxes and mapping software that he says will let anyone “track everyone in a neighborhood, suburb, or city from the comfort of their sofa.”
At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.
Read more at Forbes.
