Poachers Hack Environmentalists’ GPS Signals to Hunt Endangered Animals | Hacker News Reader

Poachers Hack Environmentalists’ GPS Signals to Hunt Endangered Animals

heatst.com

The article claims the most well known incident is when eight grey wolves introduced to Yellowstone were tracked down and shot through of their GPS transmitters:

> "Cooke said the worst known case of GPS interception by poachers was when eight grey wolves in Yellowstone national park were hunted down."

This claim of the use of GPS trackers to hunt wolves in Yellowstone, stated as the worst known case, appears to be fabricated.

The research journal article does not make the same claim cited in the linked article. (Which fails to link to or cite the article it is sourcing; it is "Troubling Issues at the Frontier of Animal Tracking" for those interested.) The journal article mentions instead "speculation in the media suggests that hunters may target tagged wolves from Yellowstone to interfere with research.... websites operated by some wolf-persecution groups provide strategies for figuring out tag codes." Speculation, not evidence or proof.

Efforts to reintroduce wolves into the Yellowstone area have been ongoing for decades and have been so successful that there are now legally sanctioned wolf hunts in order to help control the population. Of the wolves killed in the vicinity, some have had VHF radio collars which can be picked up in the near vicinity with radio trackers, and one, 832F, had a more modern GPS collar. Of the 11 wolves that were being tracked with either radio or GPS collars in Yellowstone, 4 were shot by hunters, all legally, in permitted hunts. This is not poaching. Poaching is illegal. Nor is there proof that any of these legal hunters used the collars to find the wolves. Suggestions they did so far have just been wild speculation by media, wolf enthusiasts, and journal authors who refer to legal hunters as "wolf-persecution groups", a tell of their viewpoint bias.

This kind of reply is what I love about HN. So many stories come out biased or simply factually inaccurate. I wish newspapers like the NYT and WSJ had a prominent chat feature to promote fact-checking.

> I wish newspapers like the NYT and WSJ had a prominent chat feature to promote fact-checking.

We both know what really happens when news website get comment sections and chats. Toxic communities appears out of thin air.

Every once in a while I'll check the comments on a politico story just to see if there's anything interesting someone has added. Hasn't been anything yet. It's name-calling from the get-go.

I often wonder how much of that is triggered by paid employees. Be it the competition or state actors.

Seems like a good opportunity to deploy some honeypots.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Side note, anyone available to go on a poacher hunt?

I bring the SDR, you bring the rifle? :)

I'm game. Let's go protect the wildlife. Though the best course of action would be finding ways to temper demand for poached animals. Easier said than done I know.

How about legalizing fraud in these narrow contexts, e.g., passing off fake ivory for the real thing is no longer illegal?

I doubt you'd get busted for passing off fake ivory even without such a change, probably not many people want to out themselves as an ivory buyer to authorities and media.

Education might also help rhinos from losing their tusks. Too many believe that the tusks help verility of all things. Without sounding ethnocentric these cultural beliefs are harmful and incongruent or unbecoming of an educated society

>I'm game

Could be a problem if you're trying to hunt poachers.

Don't go poacher hunting yourself, arm and pay some locals to do it - help the community and all that, discourage the kind of desperation that leads to poaching in the first place.

doxx the poachers

Looks more than an interception of the signal to find the animal. You could attract people to your honeypot place with a fake signal but to visit a place is not a proof of any crime. You can locate the emisor but not the receptor of the radio signal.

It might be illegal to roam around various forests/preserves, particularly with a large caliber rifle and an ivory saw. It might also provide reasonable suspicion for searching the suspect's property to find further evidence of poaching. This is all speculation, of course.

It's also not illegal to videotape the people coming to your premises, for identification.

Not, but local people could be allowed to harvest firewood in the area for example. There are also a problem with the radius. People do not need to walk until your exact point to see that there is not a rhino in the area. They will typically use a spyglass.

Maybe you would need to put a fake sleeping rhino model or so to have a real proof.

Is a terrific idea in any case, I will love to see that acomplished, but there are some interesting technical obstacles to solve first.

The first time I heard of HeatStreet was as a claimed source by the Trump administration that Obama had wiretapped him. Is HeatStreet a credible source? Given its association with Breitbart in the wiretapping allegations and others comments that parts of the story are fabricated I have to wonder.

Does anybody know if the devices are spread-spectrum radios, or are they trackable with a simple HT or scanner?

Encrypting the data would do very little if basic direction finding was sufficient.

So with a satellite-based system, the signals only go straight to the satellite huh? They don't radiate out in all directions like all other EM radiation?

Yeah, that is odd. I assume what they're getting at is that this is encrypted packet data, instead of whatever the RF system used.

Radio freq's aren't private.

FCC licensing.

Anyone w/ a Radio scanner or RTSDR can just camp out in the woods and identify the old fashioned way.

GPS signals don't work that way.

If the beacon data happened to be encrypted, then breaking that encryption might be a violation of the law. Although you could just use directional finding to locate the source of the beacon. That's assuming these animal collars transmit data at some interval without any input. A more secure system would be to have a call and response system using a secret key. Each collar would have a unique ID number, a unique private key, and a GPS receiver. The tracker system would contain a list of collar public keys and a GPS receiver as well. To find any specific collar, the tracker would use the public key to encrypt the ID number and a time stamp from the GPS data. Any collars in the vicinity would see the transmission, try to decrypt it, then compare the ID number with their own. If it's junk data, ignore the transmission. If the ID matches, the time stamp is compared with the collar's own GPS data to check if was anytime within the last few seconds (or however long it takes to lock onto a GPS signal). The collar would then reply with the ID number and GPS location data encrypted using the tracker's public key. The tracker receives the data, decrypts it, and displays the location on a map. Thus, the time stamping would prevent any replay attacks by only allowing the collars to respond when the real tracker is requesting its location. Controlling how often a collar is allowed to respond would prevent a replay attacker from getting any responses once the collar receives a legit request from the tracker. The only way to really attack this system would be to setup a directional finding system to pinpoint the location of the collar but this would only work during the times the tracker happens to be looking for an animal you are trying to poach. Another option is to steal the tracker device and beat a park ranger until they give up the password to it.

Paging EFF? Civil liberties for endangered animals maybe /s

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