HotSpotMe – Turn Your Wireless Router or Mobile Phone Into Profit

/in /by

Jun 28, 2019

Cell phone technology has advanced quickly over the past twenty years. The units themselves have changed from bulky chunks of plastic in the early 90’s to slimmer flip-style phones in the late 90’s. Then, from heavy and basic smartphones in the early 00’s to where we are today with super light and slim iOS or Android devices.

It’s not just the design and style that’s gone through major changes, though. We’ve also seen the technology inside smartphones alter from being able to handle just one task (making/receiving calls) to handling dozens (calls, text messages, games/apps, calendars, etc). In fact, nowadays our cell phones are so intelligent that we can even use them to make additional money from anywhere the phone has a signal! All of this has been made possible because of businesses and individuals who have followed technology trends and created unprecedented new applications which give us the ability to do so. One company in particular is HotSpotMe, Inc. They’ve put together one of the hottest mobile apps that everyone out there should be using!

Are you familiar with the companies Uber and Lyft? Surely by now you’ve watched a commercial for one of these companies, seen a vehicle driving around town with those words in the window, or had a friend/relative actually use them. Uber and Lyft are successful companies that took the idea of creating a smartphone application that could be used anytime someone needed a ride. It’s somewhat similar to a taxi service, only much faster and cheaper because drivers could use their own cars and the companies have less overhead by not having to hire dispatchers or pay for car replacements and repairs. By using the latest technology, these companies have been able to undercut traditional taxi services and give more people a chance to make money in their spare time.

The innovative HotSpotMe application is similar, but for WiFi internet access.

Think about when you’re staying the night at your favorite hotel. How much do they charge you for internet access? Prices usually range from a staggering $20 to $30 USD per night! Now, think about how much you pay for internet access at home each month. Prices for that can range anywhere from $25 to a staggering $80 USD per month! No doubt internet access is not cheap. But, it’s something people need to have and most are willing to pay those prices so they can be connected at all times.

HotSpotMe gives you the ability to use your wireless router or mobile phone connection as a hotspot instead! By downloading and installing the app on your Android smartphone, you’ll be able to setup your own WiFi hotspot and sell internet access to other people for a significantly lower price. Just like Uber and Lyft charge less because of smaller overhead, HotSpotMe saves on overhead by not having to maintain satellites or large data centers full of servers. By using your internet connection, the company has less overhead to manage and maintain. That means they can charge the customer less and pay you (the provider) more. Simply setup a password-protected Hotspot that other users (who are within range) will pay you for access to.

HotSpotMe has taken the process of earning extra income to a new level by offering a service that was already available (such as internet access locally, in an RV park, at a hotel, etc) and using the latest technology to undercut the costs those other companies encounter, and therefore offer the same service to customers for a significantly lower cost while paying their contracted employees (providers like you) fantastic extra income!

See the entire article from appolicious.com HERE.

Call Detail Records help solve a homicide when a drug deal went wrong

/in /by

On January 25, 2016, Michael Phillips was shot and killed in his home in Jonesboro, Georgia.  Matthew Simonds, a detective with the Clayton County Police Department, was assigned the case.  He and his team responded to the scene. There they found Mr. Phillip’s deceased from multiple gunshot injuries.

Multiple interviews took place the days following the homicide where Detective Simonds and his team learned this was the result of a drug deal gone bad.

Witnesses told the detective that a man by the name of “Capone” introduced Mr. Phillips to two other men who wanted to purchase marijuana. They also told investigators that Mr. Phillips was suspicious of the arrangement and called off the deal. However, Capone was seen talking to Mr. Phillips later and reassured him that he vouched for the men’s credibility.

The next day Capone and the same two men arrived at Mr. Phillips house. Witnesses, who were also there, told Detective Simonds that Mr. Phillips, “Capone,” and the two men went into the house supposedly to continue the drug deal from the night prior. They said a short time later they heard several gunshots from within Mr. Phillips home.

A man quickly exited the house carrying a handgun and a duffel bag.  He ran to a car, a white Chrysler 300, got in and sped away from the scene. Capone and a woman who was with him also fled the scene in a separate vehicle. Witnesses ran into the house and found Mr. Phillips lying on the floor with a gunshot wound. He appeared to be dead.

Detectives used digital forensic tools on Mr. Phillips cellphone. They found text messages between him and Capone. They learned that Capone was brokering a drug deal between Mr. Phillips and the suspects. A search warrant issued to the phone carrier for records and subscriber information revealed more information.

The Call Detail Records (CDRs) were imported into CellHawk and revealed all the patterns in communications with everyone involved in the brokering of the drug deal. Detectives were quickly able to identify “Capone” as Tony Hardin, the passenger of the Chrysler as Tywan Porter, and the driver/gunman as Zalon Brown. Other records check revealed Mr. Brown owned a white Chrysler 300.

The CDRs not only showed the communications between the people involved but also could put them near the scene of the homicide at the time it occurred AND in the area the previous night.

Detectives requested arrest warrants for all three men for their participation in Michael Phillips murder.

During the trial, Detective Simonds showed the jury how CellHawk mapped out the CDRs for each suspect.  The Prosecutor presented the CellHawk reports as demonstrative aids during the trial.  The jury ultimately found Zalon Brown guilty of murder, and he received a life sentence.

“CellHawk was an invaluable aid, both for the initial investigation and for the presentation during the trial,” says Detective Simonds.  “It is, without doubt, a tool that is necessary for analyzing phone records in criminal investigations and prosecutions.”

Give up your password or go to jail: Police push legal boundaries to get into cellphones

/in /by

June 7, 2019. By Jon Schuppe.

William Montanez is used to getting stopped by the police in Tampa, Florida, for small-time traffic and marijuana violations; it’s happened more than a dozen times. When they pulled him over last June, he didn’t try to hide his pot, telling officers, “Yeah, I smoke it, there’s a joint in the center console, you gonna arrest me for that?”

They did arrest him, not only for the marijuana but also for two small bottles they believed contained THC oil — a felony — and for having a firearm while committing that felony (they found a handgun in the glove box).

Then things got testy.

As they confiscated his two iPhones, a text message popped up on the locked screen of one of them: “OMG, did they find it?”

The officers demanded his passcodes, warning him they’d get warrants to search the cellphones. Montanez suspected that police were trying to fish for evidence of illegal activity. He also didn’t want them seeing more personal things, including intimate pictures of his girlfriend.

So he refused, and was locked up on the drug and firearms charges.

Five days later, after Montanez was bailed out of jail, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office tracked him down, handed him the warrants and demanded the phone passcodes. Again, Montanez refused. Prosecutors went to a judge, who ordered him locked up again for contempt of court.

“I felt like they were violating me. They can’t do that,” Montanez, 25, recalled recently. “F— y’all. I ain’t done nothing wrong. They wanted to get in the phone for what?”

He paid a steep price, spending 44 days behind bars before the THC and gun charges were dropped, the contempt order got tossed and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor pot charge. And yet he regrets nothing, because he now sees his defiance as taking a stand against the abuse of his rights.

“The world should know that what they’re doing out here is crazy,” Montanez said. The police never got into his phones.

While few would choose jail, Montanez’s decision reflects a growing resistance to law enforcement’s power to peer into Americans’ digital lives. The main portals into that activity are cellphones, which are protected from prying eyes by encryption, with passcodes the only way in.

As police now routinely seek access to people’s cellphones, privacy advocates see a dangerous erosion of Americans’ rights, with courts scrambling to keep up.

“It’s becoming harder to escape the reach of police using technology that didn’t exist before,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “And now we are in the position of trying to walk that back and stem the tide.”

While courts have determined that police need a warrant to search a cellphone, the question of whether police can force someone to share a passcode is far from settled, with no laws on the books and a confusing patchwork of differing judicial decisions. Last month, the Indiana Supreme Court heard arguments on the issue. The state supreme courts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar cases.

As this legal battle unfolds, police keep pursuing new ways of breaking into cellphones if the owners don’t cooperate — or are enlisting help from technology firms that can do it for them. This has put them at odds with cellphone makers, all of whom continually update their products to make them harder for hackers or anyone else to break into.

But the hacking techniques are imperfect and expensive, and not all law enforcement agencies have them. That is why officials say compelling suspects to unlock their cellphones is essential to police work. Making the tactic more difficult, they say, would tilt justice in favor of criminals.

“It would have an extreme chilling effect on our ability to thoroughly investigate and bring many, many cases, including violent offenses,” said Hillar Moore, the district attorney in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who got the FBI’s help in breaking into a cellphone belonging to a suspect in a deadly Louisiana State University fraternity hazing ritual. “It would basically shut the door.”

Clashes over passcodes
In the part of Florida where Montanez lives, authorities are guided by a case involving an upskirt photo.

A young mother shopping at a Target store in Sarasota in July 2014 noticed a man taking a picture of her with his phone while crouching on the floor. She confronted him. He fled. Two days later, police arrested Aaron Stahl and charged him with video voyeurism.

Authorities got a search warrant for Stahl’s iPhone, but he wouldn’t give them the passcode, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. A trial judge ruled in his favor, but a state appellate court reversed the decision in December 2016, saying Stahl had to provide the code. Facing the possibility of getting convicted at trial and sentenced to prison, Stahl agreed to plead no contest in exchange for probation.

While Stahl did not provide the passcode in the end, prosecutors still rely on the precedent established by the appellate ruling to compel others to turn over their passcodes under the threat of jail.

“Up until that point you could be a pedophile or a child pornogropher and carry around the fruits of your crime in front of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges and taunt them with fact that they couldn’t get the passcode,” said Cynthia Meiners, who prosecuted Stahl at the 12th Judicial Circuit State’s Attorney’s Office. “You could say, ‘I’m a child pornographer and it’s on my phone but I’m not giving you my passcode because I would be incriminating myself.’”

But that ruling only holds in a few counties of Florida. Elsewhere in the country, skirmishes remain unresolved.

In Indiana, police officials are trying to force a woman to share her passcode as they investigate her for harassment, saying she was making it impossible for them to obtain key evidence. The woman’s lawyer says authorities haven’t said what evidence they think is in the phone, raising concerns about a limitless search.

Her appeals reached the state Supreme Court, whose ruling could influence similar cases around the country. Attorneys general in eight other states filed a brief in support of the police, warning against a ruling that “drastically alters the balance of power between investigators and criminals.”

The stakes are similar in New Jersey, where a sheriff’s deputy accused of tipping off drug dealers to police activities has refused to hand over passcodes to his iPhones. The state Supreme Court agreed in May to hear the case.

These clashes aren’t limited to the use of passcodes. Police have also tried to force people to open phones through biometrics, such as thumbprints or facial recognition. Legal experts see the Fifth Amendment argument against self-incrimination as more of a stretch in those cases. The law has generally been interpreted as protecting data that someone possesses — including the contents of their mind, such as passcodes — but not necessarily their physical traits, such as thumbprints. Still, some judges have refused to sign warrants seeking permission to force someone to unlock their phone using their face or finger…

Continue reading at NBCNews.com HERE.

He Won a Landmark Case for Privacy Rights. He’s Going to Prison Anyway

/in /by

By Cristian Farias, June 13, 2019.

Timothy Carpenter won’t be remembered for the circumstances that landed him in prison, but for the Supreme Court case that bears his name.

Carpenter v. United States, which set a new benchmark for privacy in the digital age, requires the police to obtain a warrant before obtaining cellphone location history from a phone company. Privacy advocates hailed the ruling, and saw in it the potential for broader protections for personal data in the digital age.

Yet one curiosity of the case, as with similar Fourth Amendment rulings that limit the government’s reach into our private lives, is that it won’t be of any help to Mr. Carpenter. This week, a federal appeals court decided that Mr. Carpenter’s big victory at the Supreme Court won’t spare him from going to prison for the rest of his life.

Make no mistake: Mr. Carpenter was convicted of a series of federal offenses, including robbery and gun-related charges. But prosecutors secured the 116-year prison sentence against him with the help of cell-site location information that the Supreme Court later said was unlawfully obtained.

Unlike other types of criminal cases decided by the Supreme Court, which may result in a reversed conviction or a new chance to prove one’s innocence, successful challenges to government searches and seizures routinely seek suppression of the tainted evidence. Under what’s called the exclusionary rule, any evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution cannot be used at trial.

In Mr. Carpenter’s case, that meant about 129 days’ worth of cellphone tracking data pinpointing his every move, which the government used at trial to connect him to a string of robberies in Michigan and Ohio. The Supreme Court concluded that obtaining these records without a warrant violated Mr. Carpenter’s rights under the Fourth Amendment.

That should have meant a decisive victory for Mr. Carpenter, because the evidence used against him was illicitly obtained. Not so, said the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which took the Supreme Court’s pronouncement and more or less said that it didn’t matter…

Continue reading at nytimes.com HERE.

Privacy and Civil Liberties Board Considers Three Ways for Congress to Address Controversial Surveillance Program

/in /by

Published on June 1, 2019 by Emily McPhie.

Washington, June 1, 2019 – Congress needs a plan for how to proceed when certain provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act, including the controversial call detail records program, expires in December, said speakers at a public forum held by members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on Friday.

According to Caroline Lynch, former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, Congress has three options for moving forward. First, they could simply allow Section 215 (the provision involving call detail records) to expire, effectually repealing call detail authority.

However, this would also remove all legislative changes made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act since 2001, including the specific selection term requirement. Other important provisions that would expire include the roving wiretaps provision and the “lone wolf” amendment.

The second option would be for Congress to revisit the statute and repeal just the section dealing with call detail records, preserving selection term requirements and the relevancy standard. The challenge with this approach is that it would allow for amendments on a variety of other topics. That could be divisive and controversial, especially just before an election year.

Lynch recommended the third option: Straight re-authorization. This would keep the controversial call detail record program on the books. Although likely to be met with opposition, Lynch advised this as the “most politically expedient option.”

The board was established by the Implementing Recommendation of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. Although the measure calls for a five-member board, there are three current members: Chairman Adam Klein; Edward Felten a professor at Princeton; and attorney Jane Nitze. The board is responsible to make recommendations to Congress.

 

Some panelists disagreed with a straight re-authorization

Susan Landau, a cyber security and policy professor at Tufts University, took a different approach. She said it was important to evaluate the efficacy of the call detail program before even considering its impact on privacy. The technical advances and societal changes since 2001 make the program much less helpful today, she said.

One reason for this is that the main terrorist threat has shifted from Al Qaeda to ISIS. Whereas Al Qaeda had tight central control of terrorist attacks, providing training and direction, most ISIS-related attacks within the United States are not specifically coordinated by ISIS operators, making the call records much less relevant.

Additionally, there have been changes in communication modality, with messages increasingly being encrypted. This also makes call detail records less helpful. Landau supported removal that provision.

But George Mason University National Security Institute Executive Director Jamil Jaffer disagreed with this interpretation. Both Al Qaeda and ISIS still present a “huge” terrorist threat, he said. The fact that communication methods have changed highlights the need to “broaden our authorities,” he argued, recommending that Congress reauthorize the act and increase its scope.

Although the call record program has generated both public and congressional suspicion, Jaffer argued that the actual number of queries made is “fairly small,” thus causing minimal impact on the American people.

In all of the years that the USA FREEDOM Act has been in place, there has not been an instance of intentional abuse or misuse of the program, he said, and any mistakes that were made were quickly self-caught, self-reported, and self-corrected.

But the fact that there have been no intentional abuses does not mean that the program always works smoothly. Last year, technical difficulties led to the NSA collecting information that it was not authorized to hold. In response to this, the agency deleted all of their stored call detail records.

 

Some urge the call detail records program to ‘quietly die’

According to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Julian Sanchez, this unauthorized collection of information was one reason that the program should be allowed to “quietly die.” In addition, retaining large quantities of data for no purpose presents an inherent security risk….

Continue reading at BroadbandBreakfast.com HERE.