US Pushing Local Police To Keep Quiet On Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology

schwit1 (797399) writes with this story from the Associated Press, as carried by Yahoo News: The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.

Comments

"Obama has said he welcomes a debate "

[bigpat]

EFF put together this great debate between Joe Biden 2006 and Barrack Obama 2013

Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android

[Bob9113]

Spidey is a stingray detector app developed by the ACLU and MIT. This page is a page to get notified when it goes live. The source code is on GitHub. It works by comparing the towers you can see at any given moment against what you've seen before and data from the OpenCellID Project.

Who watches the watchers? I do.

Re:Spidey: Stingray Detector App for Android

[dark_requiem]

This is interesting. I was just discussing this with my friend last night, and proposed this exact solution. However, it's still a reactive solution. It will detect that you may be the victim of a stingray attack, but it won't stop your phone from connecting in the first place. But there is another potential solution, I just don't have enough experience developing android roms to say how it would have to be implemented. The idea is this: maintain a database of all know cell towers (your link to OpenCellID would do nicely, they offer their DB for download). Using a rooted or fully custom ROM, such as cyanogenmod, have the phone compare any new tower to the database prior to connecting. If it doesn't exist in the database, red flag it and don't connect.

The question is, can this be done on the OS level, or does it have to happen on the driver level? If it can be done at the OS level, easy peasy, just modify the code to establish tower connections to include this check. If it has to happen on a driver level, it gets trickier. Most phones use proprietary binary drivers for their cell radios, so they couldn't be readily modified. However, it may be possible to load an intermediate driver, which in turn loads the proprietary driver. If it could be determined which driver calls involved connecting to a new tower, you could just pass through everything else, and only pass through calls to the tower connect function if they passed your database lookup. Trickier, but doable. Because really, you want to avoid connecting to these things at all. Nice though it is to see you're being attacked, it's better to stop the attack before it starts.

Re:Hollywood co-operates with NSA

[mythosaz]

Hollywood uses phone tracking when it's convenient to the plot, and discards it when it's not. The biggest procedural crime drama on TV (NCIS) had phones being instantly trackable as recently as this season, with people specifically removing their batteries for exactly that reason. That same show ignores that ability when it makes the storyline more interesting without it.

No secret conspiracy to show it one way or the other.

Take off your tinfoil hat and go out side, dolt.

Re:Oh my ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In case you needed any more proof that Obama has had the power to close Gitmo all along, he just traded five detainees for Bergdahl. (the "illegal" portion of his actions was that he didn't inform Congress far enough in advance as required by law)

I think you'll find that a huge number of people will continue to vote for the terrible Republicans, just as a huge number of people will vote for Democrats even when they act little better than the Republicans. And even if Obama hadn't just openly stated that he can release detainees without anyone else's consent, he has always had a massive amount of influence on policy through the bully pulpit. He's not getting crappy results because we have lots of useless and obstructionist Republicans and some useless Democrats, he's getting crappy results because he really doesn't care about the moral positions he previously advocated. To suggest that things are largely the Republicans' fault simply isn't rational, after the willful continuation of virtually all the existing War on Terror policies, and the weakest possible healthcare reform that could still be argued to be a "victory."

I don't want to believe that Obama and the Democrats are useless, since it makes improvement solely through the electoral system (as opposed to through large scale strikes or serious economic problems) seem far off and unlikely, but it's certainly not helping to make excuses for politicians' bad behavior.

Re:Oh my ...

[fustakrakich]

They are both idiots.

Wrong! They are con men, who hit the jackpot. The voters are the only idiots here, and they are just as corrupt as those people they reelect. The corruption of the politician is a reflection.

Re:Stingrays

[Thruen]

It's already in the hands of the public, really. Someone used one as part of a demonstration at Defcon in 2010. What I imagine they don't want is to show the public how capable they are of collecting all the information they want without anyone else needing to know, like any business providing any sort of transparency report.

Re:Oh my ...

[I'm New Around Here]

If President Obama had wanted to close Gitmo, he would have shamed the Democrats in Congress into doing it.

He doesn't care that Gitmo is open. If anything, he loves it being open, because it gives him another cudgel to bash the Republicans with. And people like you eat it up.

Also, if the Republicans had this great lockstep mentality you mention, the term RINO wouldn't exist.