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The Feds' Ramsey Electronics Raid Blow by Blow
The Raid
On the morning of November 10th, radio equipment manufacturer Ramsey Electronics was raided by the United States Customs Service by officers with a search warrant. In addition to building radio testing equipment, Ramsey Electronics is also a well-known vendor of electronic hobby kits used by organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. Like an action movie drug-bust, agents moved in at 10 a.m. to search and seize over $30,000 worth of Ramsey Electronics inventory. Company President John Ramsey offered this play-by-play of that morning's events:
They had already been here almost an hour when I walked in. I [had been] at the bank. When I came back in, I saw my controller, Ed VanVoorhis and his face was white as a ghost. There were these two guys wearing suits standing on each side of him. He told me that these guys were from the government and they were here with a search warrant. Then the agents took over; they pretty much bullied me down the hallway and into my office. I went to go sit at my desk, and they said 'No. you sit over here,' pointing to a couch in my office. The two of them proceeded to rattle off a lot of mumble jumble like Title 18 USC Section 2512 and other numbers, flashing badges and being surrealistically intimidating. I'm looking at my accountant. I have never seem him like this. The [agents] are verbally batting me back and forth, and I'm like, 'Hey, what's going on?' They proceeded to tell me that they were executing a search warrant to find goods that were in violation of section 2512, and they shove this four or five page search warrant in my face.
They said that they were here to find stuff that violated section 2512 and I said, 'Like our wireless FM mic kits?' The one [agent] gave me his card, and I noticed that he was from Buffalo, an hour and a half away. I said, 'you two guys came all the way here from Buffalo?' and he said, 'No. There's seven of us.' Then he said, 'If you don't cooperate with us, we'll shut you down. We'll lock the doors, send all the employees home, we'll go through all of your inventory, records, customer lists and computers. We'll go through your computers bit-by-bit. We have experts that do that, and we don't care if it takes months.' I was escorted out to the production and shipping areas, which they had pretty much commandeered. All the doors had 8 1/2 x 11 pieces of paper taped on them with a large handwritten letter on them - like A, B and C. There was a fellow wearing a photographers vest snapping pictures everywhere; we later counted 5 empty film cans in the trash!
About five hours after they arrived, they staged all of the official US government boxes near the back loading dock. They took a huge van and backed it up to my loading dock, and proceeded to load it with my goods. I walked over to the boxes to verify what they were taking; obviously, they would want me to confirm their counts and amounts. I was stunned! They wouldn't let me see what was in the boxes! I have no idea what they took. I went over to look in them, and they told me to get away. They told me they'd give me an inventory sheet. I said, 'That's my stuff and I should be able to check it.' Special Agent Craig Healy turned to me and said 'You can trust us.'"
After they had finished loading the van, they presented me with the inventory sheet, a simple handwritten sheet with no names, titles or signatures. There's nothing indicating who it was from on it. I looked at one of the sheets quickly and noticed the very first part number wasn't one of ours and the second item number listed was for a kit that had no function or bearing on their search warrant. They agreed to fish those two items out of the van and sure enough, neither item was correct. One of them said words to the effect of, 'gee, we must have picked up the wrong box from your shelf.' They corrected their mistakes, asked for a recommendation for a good local restaurant and were on their way...
After they left, employees told me that they surrounded the building, watching all the entrances while they entered along with a New York state trooper for back-up. This show of force, while maybe necessary for raiding an underground drug lab, was hardly necessary. Our building is located in a typical suburban office park and our showroom is open to all.
What's incredible is that two of the agents were here a week earlier, pretending to be customers! This 'recon' obviously would have shown them that no force would be needed, let alone seven agents on a three hour travel time round trip. What's especially aggravating was that during the earlier visit they tried to lead one of my technical people into saying something they wanted to hear. Questions were posed like 'if we placed one of these little kits across the street in that building - for instance - could we hear it over here?' Our technician assured them that although the units work great for model rockets, toy cars and such, they really weren't suited for transmitting out of a building. Steel construction, reinforcing rod and the like limits range. They then asked if they could boost the power to do the job. Our fellow once again reiterated that the kits were hobby stuff and that what they wanted couldn't be found here. After the raid, my technician told me that they were here last week, playing 'customer' and how they had left unsatisfied.
So, where do we sit now? I have a Federal Small Business Innovation Grant underway that uses our little FM-5 wireless mike to transmit muscle sensor data to a nearby computer system. The doctors who are partners in the grant specified the FM-5 due to its small size; present technology uses a six pound transmitter that straps to the back of a child. Tough to do on a forty pound kid. The research is on walking disorders on crippled kids. Now what? Shall we violate their interpretation of the law and work with the doctors and the SBIR people? How about all the schools, scout troops and hobbyists who use our kits? We're not talking big money here. The kits amount to a small portion of our business, but what will these folks do now?
I have personally received mail from many who say that they are now graduate engineers as a direct result of one of our little kits sparking their interest in electronics. I guess the mobsters, terrorists and kidnappers don't feel the need to write, huh?
The Aftermath - and the Feds
The raid on Ramsey Electronics has caused quite a stir online, in Ramsey's own discussion forum as well as the submission queue here at Slashdot. People have gotten into intense discussions about freedom of information, freedom of speech, and the importance of using modern electronics in the field of education. At first glance, the raid may look like a cavalcade of constitutional rights issues, but Joel Violanti, the attorney prosecuting this case for the United States Customs Service, disagrees. Here's his take on the Ramsey raid:
Slashdot:
What happened, Joel?
Violanti:
On November 10th, there were approximately 13 search warrants issued in New York City and Rochester, New York and Austin, Texas against companies believed to be in the business of selling electronic surreptitious intercept devices, in violation of federal law. Ramsey Electronics was one of those companies.
Slashdot:
Apparently, Ramsey's been selling this equipment for a very long time. Why did the raid occur last year?
Violanti:
If something's illegal, it's illegal.
Slashdot:
Is there any reason that Ramsey Electronics wasn't raided earlier?
Violanti:
Sometimes you can only act upon things when you're informed of them. There's a task force in New York City that's been investigating this for a few years now. They've been shutting down companies or preventing companies from selling these things, and they've been taking several criminal pleas because of this. These people have been pleading guilty in Federal court. San Francisco now has a task force. Other cities are joining in, trying to stop the manufacture and distribution of this equipment.
Slashdot:
Where does it stop? It seems like I could build something like this on my own, and then be just as guilty.
Violanti:
The statute prohibits people from manufacturing and distributing these devices, knowing they've been shipped through the mail.
Slashdot:
Where does the government draw the line at surreptitious use, as opposed to educational use?
Violanti:
I don't know how to answer that. Use is use. If you place a device in a clock, and you put that clock on the wall, and you monitor someone's conversation that you're not a part of, I think that surreptitious use speaks for itself. Clock, smoke detector, or picture frame, you're taking that device out of its primary use in order to secretly intercept someone else's conversation. We're not necessarily looking for kits or components. We're looking for items like clocks, smoke detectors and picture frames.
Mr. Violanti made it clear that the US Customs Service was not in any way attempting to 'crack down' on the hobbyist or educational use of electronic devices. The emphasis remains on specific items that fall under the category of surreptitious use. The specific items the feds were apparently looking for in the Ramsey raid were things like microphones and video cameras mounted inside smoke detectors or alarm clocks, effectively masquerading as something they weren't.
Despite Mr. Violanti's reasuurances, the Ramsey Electronics raid still leaves questions for innocent geeks who like to tinker with assorted electronic parts. What if, for instance, you build an alarm clock that will sense motion when it goes off, and will keep going off if it doesn't sense you getting out of bed and stops when you do? What if you rig your smoke detector with a video or audio system so that rescue workers can make sure your family gets out of your house safely in the event of a fire?
There are many uses for 'surveillance technology' other than listening in on boring conversations.
But even if you made these devices with the most innocent purposes in mind, and sold them through the U.S. Mail to people as innocent as yourself, it looks like the Federal Government would feel justified in taking them away from you just in case one of your customers decided to use one of your gadgets to break the law in some way.
It's a scary thought, isn't it?
In dutch we have an expression for these kinds of things: Amerikaanse toestanden.
This translates approximately to 'American situations' with strong negative connotations. Needless to say it's never used in a positive sense.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I'm an amateur radio operator and Ramsey makes kits for that hobby. As far as I know, Ramsey is a hobbyist-oriented radio electronics company. Most of the employees are probably radio amateurs who are just happy to be making a living tinkering with transceivers.
I'm not familiar with the product in question, but my guess is that it complies with all FCC regulations and is intended for use as a small, short range transmitter. I can think of thousands of legitimate uses, from baby monitors to short range telemetry.
I wonder if their device has been showing up in cases of bugging like that State Department conference room incident in the news a few weeks ago.
Low power VHF/UHF radio is a tricky thing. If the transmitter and the receiver are in the right place and the weather is just so such a device might be heard from miles away. At the same time, a receiver 50 feet away might be totally unable to hear the signal from the transmitter.
As I said, I'd like to know more. I really doubt Rmasey made this thing with the intent (or even the inkling) that it would be used for illegal purposes. The DA (or was it a Federal Attorney?) could probably have contacted the company and told them about misuse of the product and I'd be willing to bet they would have discontinued or made modifications to the design to address those concerns.
I would only go after a company like this if I could find that they were owned or operated by persons directly engaged in the illegal uses of the devices (like finding out the KGB was a shareholder or somesuch).
Law enforcement should have the power to search and sieze. They can only do so with a warrant, which means they had to convince a judge that this was a good idea. I'd like to know how the judge arrived at his or her decision to grant this warrant.
An aside: I find some of the Slashdot response interesting. We're a bit schizophrenic. We are bananas about privacy issues and here is the state taking aciton against a company that makes a device that is used to illegally violate privacy and we, er, go bananas!
How can we get more information?
I hear a knock at my door. I look through the peep hole, and there is a guy dressed like someone from the movie "Men in Black." How he got in the building, I don't know, it's a University dorm, and there's card access to the doors, and breakfast hasn't even opened yet (aka no awake students), so I don't think a student let him in. I asked who it was, and all he did was flash his badge at the peep hole and say something like "Federal Agent, Open Up" (I was still mostly asleep, and I'm not entirely sure what time it was, but it was still dark out).
Ok, so the feds, er, just one fed is standing outside my door, I guess I should open it. Just a warning: when opening the door to a fed, stand back, they come in like a bullet with out being invited in.
Basically, what he wanted was to let me know that my port scanning of their servers in California wasn't going to be permitted (I've never port scanned anyone but people I know). At school, we have dedicated IP addresses, and apparently there had been a lot of activity from my IP address checking out the ports on their computers. Only thing I can think of is that someone spoofed my IP and was portscanning them. I pleaded ignorance to him, but he wouldn't have any of it. He threatened me with obtaining a search warrant and siezing my electronic equipment.
Well, what do you do when you're staring at a guy who's probably packing heat, and knows how to use it, and who's in your face. You melt, that's what. I probably only got in about ten words for the fifteen minutes or so that he was there (oh, and a whole bunch of first syllables to words before being cut off by him).
About a week later, the school revoked my IP address, telling me that the government had requested it!!! According to the school, they knew about the episode in my room, and that I had been warned about scanning, and that the scans had actually continued after the guy in my room.
Finally:
While my IP was revoked (the school placed a filter on the routers, so noone on campus could use my IP address, not even spoof it, the routers simply wouldn't forward it, the portscans continued. There was no way for me to have perpetrated the scans. The government was back in contact with my school, warning that there would soon be legal action against the school if they didn't stop me, but the school responded that there was no way it could have been me, and suggested the possibility of a IP spoofing. The feds apparently concurred, my school appologized to me for the hassle, returned my IP, and I never heard from the feds again.
Scarry, huh? True story.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Sorry; you're wrong. It is legal - and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court - for law enforcement to seize property which has been used in the commission of a crime, regardless of the involvement of the property owner. This has been used most frequently in connection with drug laws. So you're driving down the street with a friend, you're pulled over for speeding, and a joint falls out of your friends pocket. Your car can be seized; you lose it and are not compensated. You host a party, a guy crashes the party and sells crack to a couple of party-goers. He's busted by a plain-clothes cop who also crashed the party. Law enforcement authorities can seize the house - you lose it with no compensation.
The Supreme Court ruled that this is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against property-owners, and is therefore not subject to a whole boatload of civil-rights protections. I know of one case where a 70-year-old woman lost her home because her son was making crystal meth in the basement. "How could she not know about it?" you ask. She had no sense of smell, she couldn't use stairs, she was half deaf, and half blind. Her son moved in (as far as she knew) to take care of her. A more cognizant question might be "How COULD she know about it?" This was a neighbor of my grandfather, and I have no idea how the story ended - she lost the house and we never heard from her (or her son) again.
Look at their fsck'ing catalog -- cameras built to look like smoke detectors and wall clocks. Bugs built to hide inside a handset and power themselves from the phone line. "FM Mics" which can be "hidden behind a stamp". These people didn't even pretend that a lot of this gear had legitimate uses!
What shocks me the most is that Slashdotters are supporting the very people who would help employers spy on employees. How much sense does it make to rail against Big Brother and then leap to the defense of his supplier?
Ramsey might have made legal products with legitimate uses, but they also made illegal products to be used for violating people's basic human right to privacy. The feds might have acted like the goon squad (remember, we only have the owner's account), but that's still no excuse for what this company did!
Ask yourself: do you want your employer hiding a camera next to your workstation? Do you want your roommate bugging your phone to see what you say about them? Di you want the competition bugging your water cooler to see what your company is up to?
Do you value your privacy? Ramsey Electronics doesn't.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
After the fall of the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, U.S. military officials were terrified that there would be guerilla warfare in the occupied territories. For the most part there wasn't -- people went home, went back to work, went about the task of trying to make a living in a world that had turned upside down for them.
But eventually, guerilla warfare DID arise. Not against federal troops -- nobody was that stupid. But, rather, against the instruments of government installed by those troops. Mayors of cities who were seen as pro-Federal were tarred and feathered and shipped out of town. Anti-Federal politicians were installed in their place in rigged "elections" that saw blacks and known pro-Federal whites turned away from polling places by armed partisans. In areas where pro-Federal politicians amassed a power structure, such as in New Orleans, armed partisans had to first defeat the local police forces in pitched battle before they could tar and feather the pro-Federal politicians. They did so with ease in most cases (amazing, how possession of large amounts of military weapons make it easy to defeat policemen armed with batons and handguns!). These "riots" are commemorated on plaques and statues all over the South.
In many of these "riots", the local postings of the federal troops were paralyzed by the fact that they were outnumbered. The partisans had gathered forces and concentrated them (this prior to the ability of forces to move rapidly via motorized convoy and airlift, of course), while the federal troops had to be spread out throughout the state in order to maintain federal control. In addition, there was the fear that if they opened fire on the "rioters" there WOULD be widespread guerilla warfare against federal troops, and they could see the casualty figures mounting if that ever happened. So an uneasy truce arose between the commanders of the federal troops and the partisans -- if the federal troops did not open fire upon the partisans, then the partisans would not open fire upon the federal troops.
Eventually, the North gave up. They withdrew the federal troops (which didn't seem to be doing much good anyhow). Armed partisans installed anti-Federal governments, the South installed a system of apartheid which lasted for almost a hundred years, and the U.S. military has ever since had a blinding fear of ever being put into that situation again (that is, the situation of enforcing a military government over large areas containing armed civilians). These lessons are still taught in the military academies today, and form a major cornerstone of military philosophy in this country.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
So you are not a slashdotter? You just posted a comment on /., got modertated up (to 5 at this point) on /., and obviously you read /.
The point is, with the number of people that read slashdot every day, you will ALWAYS find people that will support anything. Don't bash slashdot because of this. /. didn't do ANYTHING. They just posted the story.
Next time you (and those of your ilk) think in terms of "slashdotters", just remember there are thousands or very intelligent people all posting from their own unique viewpoints. When you say "slashdotters do this" or "slashdotters do that", you are making no useful statement at all.
With due respect, when was the last time you checked, 1965? The government does indeed have to compensate landowners for land taken under eminent domain laws--think of it as you selling it against your will. However, if a government suspects that property has been used as part of a criminal act or enterprise, in many cases they can simply seize it. And what passes for justification for seizure is getting more and more ludicrous all the time.
Go to your nearest state court building and look on the announcements board at some of the "lawsuits" being prosecuted. I'll give you two examples posted in front of the Fulton County State Superior Court here in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1997: State of Georgia vs. Brown 1973 Ford Torino Sedan and State of Georgia vs. $19,420. One Saturday a restaurant owner in Atlanta asked one of his employees to take his car and drive down to the bank to deposit the week's receipts. The employee put on his warmup jacket, took the cash and a firearm, got in his boss's car and started driving to the bank. He then got pulled over for an improper lane change or running a green light or some damned thing. The officer, seeing the gun in the car's center console (which in Georgia is where you're supposed to keep it if you don't have a CCW), arrested the driver on suspicion of being black and armed after 1AM and upon searching his person discovered the butt of a marijuana cigaratte in his jacket. He arrested the employee for possession of marijuana and possession of a firearm while in possession of a controlled substance. The state then decided that the car was involved in a drug felony (the gun thing) because the drug felony occurred inside the car, and that the contents of the deposit bag were tied in somehow as well, so they seized them.
Needless to say the restauranteur wanted his stuff back. But meanwhile in Ohio a man made the unfortunate decision to borrow his wife's car and seek the services of a prostitute. When the police arrested him, they seized the car. When his wife went to the state and pointed out that it wasn't his car, that it was hers, and that she did not give her husband consent to use it to solicit a prostitute, the state essentially told her that if she'd learn to suck her husband off properly, maybe he wouldn't have done this, and fuck you, lady, it's our car now. Then the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police about the wife's car, which quite frankly terrifies me, but setting my personal feelings aside, yeah, when the state of Georgia found out about the Ohio thing they told the restauranteur he could go and fuck himself as well. The really, really fantastic part of the whole thing was that without the $19,420 the owner had to choose between paying his employees and paying his creditors, and when he chose to pay his employees, his creditors went to sue him and when he filed for bankruptcy, the loss of $19,420 was disallowed because it was legally confiscated by the government. So he lost the restaurant as well, because of somebody else's half-smoked joint.
So the next time you think the fourth amendment means anything at all in America, and that you don't have to worry about having your stuff taken away because you're not some evil drug kingpin, think about the restauranteur, and wait until the government seizes your house for possession of a fucking microphone.
--
This is not my sandwich.