Canadian special services monitor travelers using Wi-Fi hotspots at airports and cafes

CBC News broadcasted a secret presentation by Canadian special services, which suggests that in 2012, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, CSEC Canada, in close cooperation with the NSA, tested Wi-Fi users' electronic devices access, located in public places of Canada and the United States, such as airports, libraries, hotels and cafes.

Judging by the received documents, the arriving person passing through the airport terminal got into the Wi-Fi zone, if at that moment wireless communication was enabled on its devices, the system registered them, assigning a unique ID and starting to track metadata and further movements around the city.



Through open access points located at bus stops, in cafes, hotels and other public places, the movement of the device was tracked and its “Geo Profile” was compiled.
')




At that time, the system worked in a test mode, for working off technologies and analyzing the possibilities and all the data collected were impersonal (supposedly). Over 2 weeks, more than 300,000 unique devices were registered and, accordingly, the same geo-profiles of their users were compiled.



Earlier, the head of CSEC, John Foster, said that the government does not spy on its own citizens, as well as on anyone else in the country. “Protecting the privacy of Canadians is our main principle,” Foster said. The management of airports in Vancouver and Toronto stated that they have never provided information gathered from Wi-Fi networks, neither CSEC, nor any other Canadian special service.

PS

Around the same time, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that for 95% of smartphone users and other electronic devices it was possible to generate a unique GPS imprint, which is characteristic only for it. Moreover, in their work, scientists used to determine the coordinates of devices using cellular base stations, which give even less accuracy than public WiFI access points.

This is the result of tracking a mobile user during the day:



Part A shows its route and locations for making calls. At each call, information about the nearest base station is recorded in the operator’s network. Based on this data, a Voronoi diagram is generated. By changing the scale, you can map the movement of the user.

The researchers found that the vast majority of users have a unique movement pattern consisting of space-time points by which they can be identified with a high degree of accuracy. The coincidence of only four such points (p = 4) already gives a very high accuracy of identification of the person:



It may seem that the “track” turns out to be too rough and clustered, but as it turned out, the patterns of movement of people are so different that even this data is enough to identify a person confidently.