An alarming feature of Android was recently brought to my attention when I had to place a call to 911 (for those outside of the North American Numbering Plan area this is the number for emergency services) after witnessing a driver barrel through two red lights and nearly strike a pedestrian. After pulling over to write down as much of the license plate as I could remember I phoned 911 and waited several minutes to get an operator. I read back the partial plate and described what I had witnessed, they confirmed my phone number and asked for my name which I happily gave in the event I was needed as a witness. I ended the call and attempted to make a Facebook post about the experience and found I had no data connection, could not place a call and could not get any SMS or MMS messages to send. Peculiar.

At this point I thought perhaps my phone was being odd and locked the screen with the intention of unlocking it, toggling airplane mode on and off, and attempting to use data or send SMS/MMS messages again and this is when I noticed two messages on my lock screen that I had never seen before.

“Emergency Callback Mode. No data connection for 1:17 minute”

and

“Call blocking disabled for 48 hours. Disabled because an emergency call was made”

Odd. I still could not use my phone for calls or data so I waited for the timer to expire, as soon as it did my ability to call, send SMS/MMS and use data was restored and I fired off messages to a few friends asking if they'd ever seen such, the answer was no. One of these friends is on the same carrier as I, Project Fi which is an MVNO run by Google that uses three different cellular networks (Spring, T-Mobile and US Cellular) for coverage. This friend had needed to call 911 himself a couple weeks before and had not seen this message so I dismissed it as odd.

Two days later I was going through my screenshot album and saw the un-cropped original of the above image and something fired in my brain. This is bad, this is very bad. I began to look into this and finally found that at least as recently as May 13th, 2016 this has been a feature of the Android operating system, I suspect my friend with the same phone on the same carrier as I did does not have this update as he rooted his phone in December and has not updated it since.

Further research shows this to not be an Android only feature. A user-reported case of this occurring on their Blackberry in May of 2008, a major carrier had this documented on their site in their E911 FAQ, an FCC document from 1996 mentions selective routing of calls and callback capability and the data blocking appears to be explained away as a way to ensure Assisted GPS can function to provide your location to the emergency call center. Reports seem to vary on if you can or cannot make phone calls during this window, I personally could not get calls to go through despite having reception and being in the exact physical location I had talked to the emergency operator at in crystal-clear quality.

There are a lot of things wrong with this feature. In the event of an emergency, once you have terminated your call with emergency services, your phone is effectively a brick for 5 minutes. I can think of many scenarios off the top of my head where this could be an inconvenience:

Your wife has delivered your child at home and you wish to celebrate by sharing the news by firing off a social media post or a few text messages to folks and tell them she is headed to the hospital and you'll be following shortly. But oh, you can't for 5 minutes
You were in an automobile accident and for one reason or another an ambulance has been requested, the ambulance has arrived and the injured party is being taken care of and you now want to fire up your insurance provider's application to immediately start a case, upload photos and get a tow truck headed your way as your car can not leave under its own power, oh but you have to wait 5 minutes.
An active shooter is in the area, you and several others have notified emergency services and first responders are on the scene. You do not want to stay on the line as your friend/coworker/colleague/child is also in the building and you want to make sure they are safe and to tell them to stay calm, your texts won't go through nor will your calls.
Your office is on fire and you can hear the fire engines coming 'eeeeeeooooo eeeeeeooooo ahhhhht ahhhht ahhht eeeeeeooooo' and as a manager it is your responsibility to make sure all of your employees are safe, you look around and Steve is nowhere to be found you end the call and call Steve's cell, you can't reach him or your phone simply will not dial out as in my case. You try texting Steve, bah it won't go through! Steve's car is behind you in the car park and you tell the firefighters you can not find him and he might be in the building. In they rush, a firefighter is injured searching for Steve when come to find out he clocked out early because his wife came and got him for lunch.

These are all nuisances. After thinking up a few of these scenarios I then grew concerned. Wait, this is a software feature in your phone that detects when you have called the emergency services number. Now cellular telephones in the United States can receive emergency alerts from the government via something called Wireless Emergency Alerts which were formerly called Commercial Mobile Alert System and Personal Localized Alerting Network. The Federal Communications Commission came up with this in response to the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act passed by Congress in 2006. This system allows federal agencies to aggregate and send alerts from the President of the United States, the National Weather Service, and emergency operation centers via cell broadcast using a technology similar to that of SMS messaging. So your phone has the ability to receive pushed messages from the government, in my case Android effectively removed my ability to communicate with anyone other than the emergency services call center after having called 911. Interesting.

Now, I am not a programmer nor have I inspected the code that allows the phone to effectively disable itself for 5 minutes following a call to 911. However a fair question to ask is 'could the government, or a sufficiently skilled and motivated hacker, remotely activate this feature without a call being made. Given the fact that the government already has a way to send messages to your phone en masse during emergencies it is quite plausible that they could send a packet of data to your phone that uses this built-in feature to disable your ability to use your telephone. This possibility is terrifying.

Imagine if you will, an event takes place that causes civil unrest. A militaristic police action, marshall law, little green men landing in the middle of a sporting event, a peaceful protest, take your pick. Via the Wireless Emergency Alerts a geographical location can be targeted to send alerts relevant to that area. Something happens they want to put a lid on, instead of needing to disable cell networks of multiple carriers and/or jam cellular frequencies a few keystrokes mass message everyone in the area, it tells their phones to disable for the 5 minutes, or 60 minutes, or days. You have photos and video of the event but try as you might you cannot send them to YouTube or Facebook Live, you cannot email them or MMS them to your friends, you try and call the local media to tell them of what is going on but you cannot call out.

While I can see why this feature may have been thought up so that emergency services can contact you immediately following a call for any number of reasons, this Orwellian restriction the software places on your phone gives this author the chills. In a world were revolts and coups are something that are regularly in the news, with one coup just a few weeks old, this 'feature' on my phone does not sit well with me. Whether or not the government has the ability to remotely trigger this 'feature' is unclear, but take note in the event of an emergency your phone might be temporarily crippled when you reach out for help.

FYI Folks. Niantic Inc made Pokemon Go. Niantic Inc is a company that was formed by Keyhole Inc founder John Hanke. Keyhole Inc was a company that received investment capital from In-Q-Tel (that also invested in Facebook), which is THE VENTURE CAPITAL FIRM OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. So, when you're playing your stupid Pokemon Go game, know you are helping the CIA domestically spy on American citizens. (Ok ok, calm down, Niantic has no overt ties to the CIA directly, however, John Hanke has received CIA - technically general US intelligence agency - funds for Keyhole Inc, a previous company and this is a 100% plausible use of the technology).

So keep that in mind when you are out walking the dog, hitting up a park, setting out lures, etc. in your attempts to catch make-believe creatures in your augmented reality app. Congrats, you are now a free contractor for the CIA, helping them to violate the part of their 1947 charter that prevents them from spying domestically on American citizens.

Now, you ask, "Why does this even matter?" which is a valid question. Let's take a look

Within a week, they have millions of users, carrying their phones around with GPS on and data being sent back to the servers.
The app uses augmented reality, deploying virtual pokemon at locations your phone's camera is actively viewing
In my neighborhood, all of the 'gyms' and 'stops' are the town's town hall, churches, and veterans groups like the VFW.

Here we see a loyal Pokemon Go CIA drone hard at work.

So you have a company with direct ties to the CIA having millions of users walking around with GPS and cameras that are frequenting government, religious, and veteran buildings pointing their camera at said locations. Say they have satellite coverage of an area and are surveilling someone of interest, but they need to see what is going on better. What do they do? "We have x users in the area, deploy a new gym or stop or deploy a lure from a fictitious account now people should start congregating in the area giving us multiple vantage points without us needed to put assets on the ground. Once people start showing up deploy our assets on the ground, no one will think a thing about them pointing their phone at them as they are used to all of the Pokemon Go players in the area doing the same".

You say:

“But Ryan I would notice the data increase, I mean like omg wowz netflixes uses tons and tons of the megabytes so I know they aren’t watching me!”

Well, one, they aren't watching you, they wouldn't watch you, they'd watch what your phone is pointed at or listen to what the microphone can pick up.

Just because a camera isn't displaying on the screen, doesn't mean it isn't on. It would be trivial to have it view the camera's feed. Access to the camera also includes access to the microphones. Satellites don't have microphones, planting a 'bug' requires physical access and wiretaps are only suitable for rooms that contain a phone (microphones can be turned on to listen to a place without the phone actively making a call).

It, again, would be trivial for the app developer to turn on a transmit feature at will and turn on the camera(s) and microphone(s) if the app is running. Not saying that they are, or intend to, but literally, a line or two of code would allow for it. Then it merely transmits back to the server when active and the vast majority of users never experience a data spike.

Another line of code and oh hey send at a low resolution with the app compressing it on the fly with the ability to increase the resolution if they indeed have a feed of something of interest.

The microphone(s) could transmit audio with minimal bandwidth to overhear conversations or even environmental noise. For sound, depending on quality, you are talking 6-50kbps. At 50kbps, you are talking 160 seconds of audio per megabyte of data.

“IQT identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.”

https://www.iqt.org/

“On 29 September 1999, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was treated to something different. In many of the nation’s leading newspapers and television news programs a story line had appeared that complimented the Agency for its creativity and openness. The media was drawn to a small corporation in Washington, DC that had just unveiled its existence and the hiring of its first CEO, Gilman Louie. Mr. Louie described the Corporation, called In-Q-It, as having been formed “...to ensure that the CIA remains at the cutting edge of information technology advances and capabilities.” 1 With that statement the Agency launched a new era in how it obtains cutting edge technologies. In early January 2000, the name of the corporation was changed to In-Q-Tel.”

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/in-q-tel

Now folks, keep in mind this post is mostly tongue in cheek. However, don't dismiss it as a work of fiction; the company and investment connections are real. The technology could legitimately be used in the fashion I outlined above. Is it? Probably not. Is the CIA thinking "damn, he ruined that future idea for us!", haha, maybe? Did the specific app Pokemon Go receive CIA funding, who knows! Just be mindful of what you install on your phone and where you are pointing that phone when the camera is on. Respect the privacy of others. And stop trespassing to catch your silly imaginary cartoon characters.

Haha have fun guys! :)

The government bricked my data after calling 911

Is Pokémon Go funded by the CIA?