Stingrays and Interceptors and Fake Towers Oh My

[Kittamaru]

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/1...ps-and-providers-use-to-track-your-every-move

Over the past 12-18 months, there’s been an increased level of scrutiny applied to the various ways local, state, and federal law enforcement officials track and monitor the lives of ordinary citizens. One tool that’s come under increasing fire is the so-called stingray — a fake cell phone tower that law enforcement officials deploy to track a suspect, often without a warrant or any other formal approval.

A stingray is a false cell phone tower that can force phones in a geographical area to connect to it. Once these devices connect, the stingray can be used to either hone in on the target’s location or, with some models, actually eavesdrop on conversations, text messages, and web browser activity. It’s not clear how much the police cooperate with the cell phone carriers on this — in at least some cases, the police have gone to carriers with requests for information, while in others they seem to have taken a brute-force approach, dumping the data of every single user on a given tower and then sorting it to find the parties they’re interested in tracking. Stingrays can be used to force the phone to give up its user details, making it fairly easy for the police to match devices and account holders.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-told-cops-to-deceive-courts-about-stingray/

Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.

At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

A series of five emails (.pdf) written in April, 2009, were obtained today by the American Civil Liberties Union showing police officials discussing the deception. The organization has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with police departments throughout Florida seeking information about their use of stingrays.

“Concealing the use of stingrays deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance and keeps the public in the dark about invasive monitoring by local police,” the ACLU writes in a blog post about the emails. “And local and federal law enforcement should certainly not be colluding to hide basic and accurate information about their practices from the public and the courts.”

The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to a call for comment.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cryptophone-firewall-identifies-rogue-cell-towers/?mbid=social_twitter

Rogue cell phone towers can track your phone and intercept your calls, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re as ubiquitous as GPS trackers. But at least now there’s a way to spot them.

A firewall developed by the German firm GSMK for its secure CryptoPhone lets people know when a rogue cell tower is connecting to their phone. It’s the first system available that can do this, though it’s currently only available for enterprise customers using Android phones.

GSMK’s CryptoPhone 500, a high-end phone that costs more than $3,000 and combines a Samsung Galaxy S3 handset with the CryptoPhone operating system, offers strong end-to-end encryption along with a specially hardened Android operating system that offers more security than other Android phones and the patented baseband firewall that can alert customers when a rogue tower has connected to their phone or turned off the mobile network’s standard encryption.

*headdesk*

This is... quite terrifying to be honest... especially considering:

My state police apparently has them... great...

*sighs* Ugh... seems like the invasion of privacy continues

 

[sculptor]

It seems that police and prosecutors lying in court is actually quite common.
Just wondering:
If you or I lie in court can we be prosecuted for perjury?
How often have you read about police and/or prosecutors being charged with perjury?

.....................
That being mentioned:
When I was at site R 35 odd years ago, the NSA came to set up a surveillance operation in search of spys and "unamerican" activity.
They began to record telephone calls, then listen to the recordings. Soon many more of these agents arrived. They had taken over one whole wing of one floor of one of the buildings. Their wing was a hub of activity, rows and rows of recorders all clicking and whirring busily away, and the walls lined with agents hunched over desks listening intently to the ever accumulating amounts of data. More agents arrived, then more, and they could not keep up with the collected data. Finally, they just gave up, turned off the machines, and went away. After they left, their wing was almost spooky. Dimly lit row upon row of silent machines, dozens and dozens of unoccupied desks, all seeming eerily quiet. (A great place to ponder the idiocy of man and breath the air of anonymous freedom).

Now they have a new approach and a new technology, which would seem to work best only if they had targeted individuals for surveillance.
How many (wo)men does it take to surveil one (wo)man?

 

[Kittamaru]

See, that's just it - they are trying to do "blanket coverage"... figuring if they capture everything that goes in/out of American airwaves, they will find the targets before they have time to act.

The problem is, that is SO much raw data that it's humanly impossible to filter through... so they use computers and software to do so, looking for keywords and such.

Except, the "bad guys" know this, so they simply don't use such key words... making the filters pointless...

*shrugs*

 

[sculptor]

And, then, there are those of us who would include the phrase "allahu akbar" just to tug their chains and waste their time.

May we all live long and happily in freedom. in shā' allāh

 

[Stryder]

Except, the "bad guys" know this, so they simply don't use such key words... making the filters pointless...

Or use carrier pigeons, dead drops, messages in bottles, trips the library, cloth signs saying "X marry me" at football games, bumper stickers on neighbors cars.

There are literally thousands of ways to convey a hidden message to someone if of course they know what they are looking for and a majority of them aren't electronically sent or seem so benign they would get overlooked. (How many times do you think international tabloids have purposely scripted articles that are conveying messages to operatives or assailants?)

 

[Kittamaru]

exactly... in the end, covert operations favor the covert, not the ones seeking them... especially in today's super-digital world. Hell, just look at how simple it is to hide a text message in a .jpg document!