Escobar and Cellular Ph0n3z

I found it very interesting to read in the paper this morning about how
EXACTLY the Columbian authorities were able to LOCATE Pablo Escobar. The 
article stated that Pablo was concerned about his wife and child's safety
and called them on a CELLULAR phone to check up on them. The Columbian
Police did not know where either of them were located. It stated that the
U.S. government (DEA in print, but was it the NSA?) gave or let the
Columbian police borrow equipment that did the following:

1) The equipment scanned all the cellular phone frequencies used in that area.
2) Already having a voice print/sample of Pablo's voice, the equipment
   continuously compared cellular conversations with those they had of Pablo,
   in near real time.
3) Once a match was made, the equipment would triangulate? or otherwise 
   locate the origin of the call within two minutes. It did not say how 
   good the accuracy of the location was (ie within 1 mile or 1/10 of a mile
   or 10 feet, etc.) however. Apparently it was CLOSE ENOUGH.

This is sophisticated, no question about it. I imagine the equipment/circuits
are available to do all this to the general U.S. public, but still, I think
the NSA probably provided the equipment as it was probably all integrated
together and fairly idiot-proof to use. Maybe one big box, with a few of
these big boxes being dispersed about the country-side.

The report stated that Escobar was worth a few Billion dollars and that he
was a smart man. Why didn't he use encryption? This would have thwarted the
police. Of course you may say, how many encrypted cellular conversations take
place in that part of Columbia, and the answer would probably be close to 
zero if not zero. So just modify the equipment to recognize encrypted/scrambled
speech or whatever and locate the source. Fine, but if Escobar has so much 
money and so many allies, why not buy many encrypted cellular set-ups and 
distribute them to his people (paying them of course) to move throughout the
region constantly and make cellular encrypted phone calls at random?

Now, tying this in with the 'ol Clipper-chip debate, if Escobar who is worth
billions of dollars, is smart, and is considered one of the biggest drug
kingpins in history does not use encryption, how many lower-level criminals,
who don't have the financial resources nor the intelligence will?

Lex

lex@mindvox.phantom.com (Lex Luthor) wrote:

> The report stated that Escobar was worth a few Billion dollars
> and that he was a smart man. Why didn't he use encryption?
> This would have thwarted the police. Of course you may say,
> how many encrypted cellular conversations take place in that
> part of Columbia, and the answer would probably be close to
> zero if not zero. So just modify the equipment to recognize
> encrypted/scrambled speech or whatever and locate the source.
> Fine, but if Escobar has so much money and so many allies,
> why not buy many encrypted cellular set-ups and distribute
> them to his people (paying them of course) to move
> throughout the region constantly and make cellular encrypted
> phone calls at random?
> 
> Now, tying this in with the 'ol Clipper-chip debate, if
> Escobar who is worth billions of dollars, is smart, and is
> considered one of the biggest drug kingpins in history does
> not use encryption, how many lower-level criminals, who
> don't have the financial resources nor the intelligence will?

Good questions.  The answers are varied.  But, basically, it comes down
to this: Just because the technology is availiable, it doesn't mean
Escobar was aware of it.  There just isn't enough recognition among the
general public of what technology is availiable.  Certainly, there were
a lot of things he could have done to defend himself better.  I don't
think lack of inteligence was Escobar's nemisis, but simply that he did
not have good technical advisors availiable to him, and wasn't aware of
the technology.  There is a lot more necessary than to just say "he
should have used encryption".

First of all, you can't make an encrypted cellular call so easily. 
There do not yet exist many widely availiable systems which can compress
digitized sound in real time to fit within the bandwidth limitations of
cellular telephone technology or most wireline telephone channels. 
We've been over this in our discussions of building secure telephones;
it's not easy, and radio noise caused by cellular makes it even more
difficult.  Even if Escobar had such technology availiable to him, the
person he was calling would also have to have the same encryption
hardware.  I suspect that given the situation, this might not be
possible.  But - if Escobar had high-tech computerized/digital
encryption technology, why would he be using cellular at all?  A
high-speed radio modem would have worked well for encryping all his
communications.  Still, the fact that while all of us cyberwizards here
can talk about what would be possible, building a encrypted
communications network takes a lot of work.  Escobar probably would have
needed to enploy a team of cyrptographers and computer/radio experts -
and they're not easy to find in rural Colombia.

Matthew J Ghio says:
> First of all, you can't make an encrypted cellular call so easily. 
> There do not yet exist many widely availiable systems which can compress
> digitized sound in real time to fit within the bandwidth limitations of
> cellular telephone technology or most wireline telephone channels. 

Untrue. There are many systems I can buy off the shelf from companies
like Cylink or Crypto AG. True, some of the systems are not widely
available outside the U.S. or Europe, but when you are smuggling
Cocaine by the planeload taking a few phones back with you on the
return trip seems perfectly feasable.

> We've been over this in our discussions of building secure telephones;
> it's not easy, and radio noise caused by cellular makes it even more
> difficult.

Its not easy because people have been lazy, not because it isn't
perfectly available. "Radio noise" on cellular isn't nearly so bad as
you make it out.

Perry