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DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Seriously now, the first sentence even says it right and that's all you added. The title should read "... WithOUT Explicit Warrants"
CAPTCHA: wiretaps
Shouldn't that headline say "without" rather than "with"?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I have never heard of this device before, and doing a quick search online, I was unable to find details about it. Who manufacturers it? What are the restrictions for purchasing it?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Wouldn't it be nice if the user had some visibility and control over what tower their own phone connects to. A sort of "hosts file" white-list except not for IP addresses.
now they are using Stingrays with cell phone towers attached to them?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Search warrants stipulate what the authorities are looking for and where they can look; not the tools they can use to get the job done. Do wiretap warrants stipulate the kind of recording devices that can be used? I doubt it very much.
There is still the point at to whether the order covers the police. I might be argued that the authorities were working as an agent for Verison to gather the information.
2 - Wall Street Journal article "'Stingray' Phone Tracker Fuels Constitutional Clash"
3 - another WSJ article about "Judge Questions Tools That Grab Cellphone Data on Innocent People"
Essentially, the "Stingray" sends out a signal pretending to be a cell-phone tower. Your cellphone thinks it's found a great super-strong tower nearby, detaches from the real cell-phone towers and bonds to the Stingray and attempts to communicate through it. Now, the DOJ (or whomever) has performed a Man in the Middle (a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack MITM ) attack on your cell phone's communication with it's cellular service company. It impersonates a cellular tower.
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Here's an interesting point from the WSJ article:
... The best known stingray maker is Florida-based defense contractor Harris Corp. A spokesman for Harris declined to comment.
... Harris holds trademarks registered between 2002 and 2008 on several devices, including the StingRay, StingRay II, AmberJack, KingFish, TriggerFish and LoggerHead. Similar devices are available from other manufacturers. According to a Harris document, its devices are sold only to law-enforcement and government agencies.
I'm assuming "our office has been working closely with the magistrate judges in an effort to address their collective concerns" as a PC way of saying "a bunch of judges are PISSED!". That's good to know. I know that the two judges I know personally would be pissed if DOJ tried something like this with them, but it's good to know these judges are as well, and action is being taken.
anything or any new way they can exploit technology to spy on people is being used, to spy on the general public without probable cause, and at the cost of the taxpayers' money. we only find out about these things when the "good guys" get in trouble for breaking the law
All freedom-loving net users should coordinate in ways to return the favor to assholes doing stuff like this. Install cameras in your local police chief's bedroom, attach a GPS tracker to every squad car in town and put up a website to display their locations, and route the entire government's emails through a proxy that posts them to the web for total transparency.
That's just practicing equality, afterall
US agencies more corrupt and out of control than previously thought!
I for one am shocked! Shocked I tell you!
If you have ever visited boulder county jail you should "cdma fieldtest" and map tower to see if they hacked your PST like they did mine
And nobody will be held responsible for these violations and there will be no repercussions, so guess what. This shit will continue to happen, over and over and over again, in one manner or another.
Until perpetrators of this shit start regularly taking it up the ass (from their new "roommate"s) this will continue to happen.
The emails are dated "2011".........impossible. Bush left office in January 2009. Please backdate the emails to 2007.
Thank you
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I knew I was right! And Slashdot editors, I demand my karma point back! Or I'll..., I'll..., .... I'll start mad spamposting like that APK guy, I swear I will! (He hasn't posted lately, what, did he finally fall asleep or something?)
Ok, I really wouldn't do that. ;^)
Unless the judges are prepared to punish the attorneys in question with actual jail time, their pleasure is irrelevant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My, my, my........
"Harris Corp. President and CEO William M. Brown was appointed to President Barack Obama's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee on Tuesday, Florida Today reports."
http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/morning_call/2012/11/harris-corp-ceo-appointed-to-obama.html
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Presumably, I would hope regulators at the FCC would like to have a word with the prosecutors as well.
Then again, I have this crazy belief that law enforcement officers who drive their cruisers 25+ over the speed limit with their lights off should be thrown in jail, like any other criminal.
Smartphones are relatively powerful these days. So why aren't there any good realtime voice encryption apps? And if there are, why aren't more people using them?
A voice encryption app would make the kind of privacy invasion described in the original article a lot more difficult.
Search warrants stipulate what the authorities are looking for and where they can look;
In this case the "what they are looking for" is information about the suspect's phone and the "where" is in Verizon's records. They instead peeked at other people's communications, by eavesdropping in the neighborhood. So they didn't stick to either the WHAT or the WHERE.
Additionally, they didn't get a search warrant as they should have, but rather a lower order telling Verizon to be cooperative insofar as technical assistance. They didn't even get an supeona for Verizon to turn over records, only an order to provide tech support.
It may be that they a request for a search warrant would have been granted, but that's for the judge to decide. The Texas judge mentioned clearly would not have signed a warrant without first adding specific limitations to reduce or eliminate having other people's phones intercepted. That seems to be the case fairly often - a judge will restrict a warrant to a very specific place, time etc., or ask for further evidence, rather than completely denying or approving the request as first presented.
We need some geeks with USRP to sloppily intercept few members of appropriation committee phones "Enemy of the State" style.
That will get the ball rolling on those DOJ scumbags.
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otherwise it would not be possible to create something like skype. Basically take the audio portion of skype, add in public-key encryption, and you're done.
Now you may not be able to get access to the audio feed *while making a regular voice call*, but that's a different story.
There was creep for 200 years, with the size government increasing a few percent most years. Then the size of federal government DOUBLED from 1995 to 2001. It's increased another 50% in the last few years. That unsustainable growth in the nanny state is new in the since the mid nineties.
(The doubling of government size is evident in the federal budget, which approximately doubled in constant dollars.)
This is just the dirty act of government of the week. Dare to suggest our wonderful benign government illegally intercepting cell communications is doing any of the other things they do for a corrupt or improper reason and you are instantly branded a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
Dare to suggest we can't trust these guys to overreach in financial regulation or that they can't be trusted if we disarm the population or not to infringe on free speech if anonymity isn't preserved, or with latest constitution shredding government empowering anti"terror" rag and you are a nutter and conspiracy theorist.
After all so many people can't keep a secret! Even though most of it is no secret and requires only a few people knowing anything and the rest doing their part in ignorance or acting in self interest.
How many married people would favor dissolving state recognition of marriage across the board and treating them no differently than an unmarried couple living together? For the left it ends unequal state treatment of gay couples, for the right it settles that issue without infringing on their sacred view of marriage. Yet the answer is very very few would support it. Why? Married couples wouldn't want to lose their tax breaks and spouses wouldn't want to give up their "security" in the form of a stranglehold over the property of their partner and the potential alimony.
You can expect the same percentage of self interest based action out of government agents and representatives. Most are corrupt, greedy, and self interested because most people are.
It's not quite what you think, the DOJ lawyers told them to be CONSISTENT and FORTHRIGHT in order to generate a set of pen register approvals that explicitly mentioned the Stingrays, to build a body of approvals they could use in any future argument!
"As some of you may be aware, our office has been working closely with the magistrate judges in an effort to address their collective concerns regarding whether a pen register is sufficient to authorize the use of law enforcement's WIT technology (a box that simulates a cell tower and can be placed inside a van to help pinpoint an individual's location with some specificity) to locate an individual. It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using WIT technology in the field although the pen register application does not make that explicit."
"While we continue work on a long term fix for this problem, it is important that we are consistent and forthright in our pen register requests to the magistrates "
So when bob the magistrates says, "hang on this needs pen registers", the DOJ can say, "well fred, john, and clive the magistrate accepted it so you should too". Even if fred, john and clive only accepted it as an interim measure while the problem was being discussed!
Once law enforcement overreaches, its very difficult to stop it. As UK knows only too well, Cameron stopped a lot of police-state reforms, even reversed some after the police chiefs started campaigning against him on TV.
else or quit giving out the god damn paper, you fucking moronic idiots that, fuck it just put a gun in your mouth and pull the fucking trigger, save us all from your shit.
So the DOJ is acting in a criminal way. Shouldn't they go to jail?
They "break the law" in order to follow their agenda and 'get the bad guys'. Only -- who really are the bad guys? A few hackers out there who annoy banks? More likely, mobsters who routinely extort these companies for their own databases and get paid off without the public knowing.
But who protects us from a DOJ that knows everything, but doesn't arrest bankers and Wall Street crooks -- and meanwhile, they arrest people protesting this massive corruption for loitering in parks or on trumped up charges?
Who protects us from an NSA that knows everything, and inevitably sells the data on Americans to private companies, who then sell this data to whatever foreign government or company that wants it?
So many of these agencies demand less public oversight and more access to private data -- what exactly, is this army of security obsessed people really providing? Their future energy is going to be spent merely going after anyone who threatens their own power -- the original purpose of why they were "cutting corners for justice" will be long forgotten.
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Given that the FCC busted Google for illegally intercepting materials when they were doing their wanderings, does this mean that the FCC will now bust the FBI - or more realistically, state law enforcement agencies? And is this a hint as to why Google got off so lightly when they were busted - only $7m? Or am I just a foolish optimist....
The "where" isn't in Verizon's records. Towers don't normally triangulate the location of users. However, with an appropriate court order, the instantaneous signal strength data from multiple towers can be used to locate the user. This gets you (at best) accuracy to within a few hundred feet (in dense urban areas) to a few thousand feet (in rural areas), which is still probably not precise enough to be all that useful. You pretty much need a tower fairly close to triangulate more accurately, hence these tools. However, if you need any real accuracy, you really need GPS.
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Verizon wireless shall provide to agents of the FBI data and information ...
The order doesn't authorize the FBI to do anything, certainly not to violate 18 USC 2511. The order they got told Verizon to turn over the information that Verizon had. I agree, the tool they used is a useful tool. Yes, it's better than tower triangulation. They should have asked for a warrant authorizing them to use it. They didn't, though. What they asked for was "an order directing Verizon to assist the FBI by providing information, facilities, and technical assistance".
Is DOJ using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_on_wheels
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