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US Marshals Service Refuses To Release Already-Published Stingray Info
v3rgEz (125380) writes The U.S. Marshals Service is known to be one of the most avid users of StingRays, and documents confirm that the agency has spent more than $9 million on equipment and training since 2009. But while it appears the USMS is not under any nondisclosure agreement with the device manufacturer, the agency has withheld a wide range of basic information under an exemption meant to protect law enforcement techniques — despite the fact that that same information is available via a federal accounting website.
about Stingray is you don't talk about Stingray...
Let's see how fast they can shut down that accounting website . . . .
Each agency has a set of rules and procedures for releasing information. Just because one group allow the release doesn't mean a different one - with a different mission - has the same rules.
Think of it as a set of NDAs. Your CFO may have given proprietary information to investors, but that doesn't mean you can talk about it at the cocktail party after work. Not even to said investors.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
WE DONT trust them, thats why we didnt push hard for regulation in the 90s. The latest FCC actions were DECADES in the making. SO to the uninformed like you it might seem like we are championing the FCC, when in reality we are fucking giddy to see our enemy take such a hard strike against them. No informed person thinks this was the best choice, it was the only choice the ISPs left us with.
Good-bye
The FCC is an independent agency and does not answer to the President. Put it this way, Obama can't fire Wheeler without just cause. He does not work "at the pleasure of the President".
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public. Is that really so goddamn hard to understand?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It doesn't. It just acts as a fake base station; if you happen to connect to one you'll have no service. They don't use these things to intercept your traffic, they can do that Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile's switch, without having to follow you all over town. These devices are used for two purposes:
1. To localize idle cell phones with greater precision than the macro cellular network can.
2. To determine which cell phones are being carried in a specific area.
#2 sounds Orwellian but it has legitimate purposes during criminal investigations, i.e., trying to figure out the IEMIs of burner phones being carried by suspects you have under surveilliance. Once you have the IEMIs you can wiretap them with lawful interception technology built into the phone company's switch.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
File a FOIA request for what the head of the FBI had to eat yesterday. He replies that the FOIA request is denied, because National Security. You look and find he had lunch with the president, and that day's menu is on whitehouse.gov. So you know what he had for lunch, but he's denying other related things for National Security, when it's provably not true because you know some of it from other sources that don't think it's National Security sensitive information. Sounds like lies to get out of FOIA requests. I think that's the point.
Learn to love Alaska
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public
Obligatory car analogy: Toyotas mostly get people around just fine. They had a problem with uncontrolled acceleration. It happened a few times with bad consequences. They were shady and tried to hide it but finally came clean. So people still drive Toyotas and the acceleration problems are fixed.
Now ... imagine that there were at least three stories a day about people being killed by malfunctioning Toyotas and then we found out that Toyota was using its onboard electronics to record everything everybody who rides in them is saying, to be used against them in the future, and remotely detonating a few of them every few days. Most people still get from point A to point B, but still a bunch of people are getting killed because they own a Toyota.
We'd stop driving Toyotas and their resale value would fall to almost zero. It's good that we have Honda and Nissan and Tesla (et. al) to choose from, because we could quickly and relatively easily make that choice.
Now, what do you do when Toyota is the only car manufacturer and they're constantly running people into brick walls at high speed, and the frequency is increasing rapidly? Why should they even bother fixing the problems?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
With enough people using SnoopSnitch ( https://play.google.com/store/... ), which detects Stingray cell phone trackers, and a collection site on Facebook or any other social media site (Reddit sounds like a good candidate), the locations of these things could be mapped and published in jig time.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's one way it can be used. "StingRay and similar Harris products can be used to intercept GSM communications content transmitted over-the-air between a target cellular device and a legitimate service provider cell site."
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Your an idiot for holding one person responsible for another's post.
Glass houses my friend, glass houses.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And to do that, they act as a man in the middle, also known as a repeater.
That said, this still doesn't explain how they're registering themselves on the local network. THAT is probably one of the things that's "national security" -- especially as this appears to be that "golden key" that they want for other kinds of encrypted data.
And of course, THAT means that anyone who is operating outside the law can use the exact same techniques to intercept cellular data.
I long for a police force whose sole task is to protect the clear meaning of the Constitution, with the authority and balls to arrest any federal employee or contractor.
(Not really. I have not idea that it would work out well. But a girl can fantasize...)
Becoming? This is a police state.
The government classifies tomes of information to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing. They use secret tools to gather secret evidence which they attempt to present in secret, sealed and off the record. And in the event that an "activist judge" calls them on it, they withdraw the evidence so as not to have it revealed, and re-file charges a month later to go shopping for a different judge. Last week we found out they lock people up in secret detention facilities (in America!) without booking them, with no access to a lawyer, such that no one but the police even knows where these people disappear to for days or weeks on end. Police are shooting and killing people weekly if not daily, acting as judge jury and executioner, and face zero consequences.
The police state isn't coming, it's here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
It's not that we want the FCC regulating network neutrality, but more like we were pushed into that corner.
In an ideal world, the market would work out any network neutrality issues and the government wouldn't need to get involved. For example, if ISP A degraded Netflix traffic in an effort to promote their video offerings and get Netflix to pay them, then ISPs B, C, and D would stand ready to pick up the customers who fled due to bad Netflix connections.
We're not in an ideal world, however, and the market is broken beyond repair (at least near-term repair). Right now, I have a choice of one ISP: Time Warner Cable. Most Americans have only one ISP or, if they are lucky, two to choose from. (Side note: Wireless doesn't count because the data charges make streaming videos an expensive proposition. You can't argue that an alternative to buying a small, somewhat affordable car is buying a $1 million tricked out limousine.) This means that an ISP can do what it wants knowing that its customers have nowhere to flee. If customers can't vote with their wallets, there is nothing reigning in the company from doing whatever it wants to do.
Even with this situation, we could have avoided government regulation, but the ISPs got greedy. They started complaining about Netflix getting a "free ride" (they pay for their own bandwidth fees the same as anyone) and tried charging Netflix to not be slowed down ("that's a nice web service you've got there... It'd be a shame if something HAPPENED to it..."). Needless to say, there was a frustrated outcry.
EVEN then, the FCC tried to enact some weak regulations that would have effectively let the ISPs do whatever they wanted. Verizon sued to get those regulations overturned and succeeded. The courts said the FCC would need to use Title II. Which they just did.
The ISPs backed us into this corner with their own actions. We didn't want to be here but they didn't give us any other choice.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is like saying those silly ancient greeks and their democracy....No one could possibly draw inspiration from a 2000 year old system of governance...
Good-bye
I have worked with classified documents for decades. If something is classified, you cannot release it until it is declassified.
Even if it was already leaked, and the person asking for the information is waving a copy of it in your face. If you do, you lose your job in the least, and serve some time in prison at the worst.
Works the other way around. Several newspapers are blocked in government systems because if an unclassified machine (any with internet access will be unclassified) browses one of the news articles that contained a leaked document that machine is now contaminated with a classified document and has to be wiped. Because that machine is not cleared to hold that document- no matter where it came in to the machine from.
"You trust the FCC, so why don't you trust the angency i troll for? No fair!
Actually, I would say we can't trust law enforcement these days ... because when law enforcement cites a corporate NDA to not be able to tell us how they're using software which is designed to violate your constitutional rights ... law enforcement is fucking lying to you.
Law enforcement is consistently trying to hide what they do, consistently saying the law means what they say it means, and consistently ignoring the constitutionality of what they do, and colluding to commit perjury by hiding the truth about how they found certain information.
When law enforcement stops caring about the law ... it's time to stop treating them with trust or respect.
Pretty much all law enforcement these days feels it operates in a special magic bubble.
The rest of us say "fuck that, follow the low, or be charged under it".
General warrants, probable cause, free from unreasonable search and seizure ... these things tell me most people in law enforcement are committing treason.
So, no, we cannot fucking trust law enforcement. Because they are no longer trustworthy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Netflix agreed to pay Comcast"...? What a delightfully contrived way to paint comcast holding netflix and its customers hostage.
The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people. You can't even expect the people in the agencies under the same department (such as Treasury's IRS versus Treasury's OCC) to act the same; those in different departments are even more divergent with different cultures. The FCC is under the Commerce Department, NSA is part of the Department of Defense - they don't have anything in common until you reach all the way up to the President. And if you think that the President has any direct control over the people in any given agency, you seriously misunderstand the bureaucracy that is the US federal government (and probably other country's governments as well).
Your law enforcement agencies are different than your national intelligence agencies. So FBI and NSA have different motives and agendas, and will act different in some ways because of this. However, they both also like to keep things secret, because, well, it makes it easier to do their job if they do. So the FBI seems to avoid posting details of their ADP systems of record in the federal register, because, well, it might give something away. They also don't always provide the ability to see records that they hold and to correct those records as required under the Privacy Act, because, well... it might give something away. And the NSA will act like them in this regard, for the same reasons.
I'm not surprised that the folks at a national law enforcement or intelligence agency might overuse the excuse of "law enforcement sensitive" when redacting or refusing to disclose information. Its a strong habit, it leaves as little information to be disclosed publicly as possible, and that just makes for less trouble down the road in general. (The old line about "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" might be re-stated here as "nobody ever gets fired for redacting too much information" when you are in a law enforcement/national security agency.)
On the other hand, the FCC is under the Commerce Department, which is far away from the NSA or the Marshall's service. The FCC in general has a different mandate and point of view about what they do. They aren't so much about keepings things secret as they are about keeping things orderly and under control. Violate radio licensing and the FCC is there to reign you in. Violate the public trust (as the FCC sees it) and the FCC is there to reign you in.
Whether or not you can "trust" any particular federal agency depends on what you are trusting them to do. I think you can generally trust a law enforcement agency to do whatever they think is necessary (and usually legal) to enforce the law as they think it should be enforced. You can't trust a law enforcement agency to be any more forthcoming about their methods, tools, and data than they absolutely have to be. I think you can generally trust the FCC to enforce communications standards as they think they should be enforced, which will include trusting them to hold broadband Internet access service providers to the applicable rules under Title II of the Communications Act.
I don't think having these expectations is in any way schizophrenic.
Installing Open Connect means Comcast avoids costs in maintaining higher capacity edge routers, and can place the caching boxes wherever is efficient for their own network topology. For example, if placed in each geographic region hub, it means their own long-haul trunks are less stressed and do not need to be upgraded as soon. If you take as a given that customers will want to watch NetFlix, then the costs of hosting these cache boxes is supposed to be offset by the reduced pressure on the long-distance Comcast network connections.
While it's true that "The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people." this doesn't mean that they are trustworthy. The FCC, in particular, has done some rather vile things to support "its constituents" (i.e., the money making groups it is supposed to regulate). And the current chairman is not particularly trustworthy, being closely associated with the MPAA.
OTOH, the FCC has less direct reason to abuse the general citizenry than do the large monopoly ISPs. So while I hardly trust them, I still trust them more than, say Verizon, or AT&T.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's normal for core networks where traffic is expected to be roughly equal in both directions and generally unsolicited (by the network). Comcast is neither; they won't _let_ me send as much as I receive (to be equal, I would have to essentially get nothing but email, and send quite a bit of email out), and everything I receive other than email is by my request. It's not anyone else's fault that Comcast traffic related to me isn't symmetric, it's theirs and mine. So if they need more money to handle the traffic that is on their network because of me, they should talk to me.