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No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting To Being Tracked By Police (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment. The trial had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray -- the first time any court in the nation had done so. Last April, a Baltimore police detective testified that the department has used Stingrays 4,300 times since 2007, usually without notifying judges or defendants. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking nearby phones into connecting and revealing users' locations. Stingrays sweep up data on every phone nearby -- collecting information on dozens or potentially hundreds of people. The ruling has the potential to set a strong precedent about warrantless location tracking.
More like broadcasting my position does not give carte blanche for the police to do what amounts to a warrantless wiretap of everyone in the vicinity. IMO
Just like having a landline attached to the phone company's network doesn't grant them permission. That wire is up there on the pole, where pretty much anyone who's willing to climb up there can get to it. Just because it's easy to do doesn't make it okay. As the court has ruled on many occasions.
All those "It's the Constitution Dummy" Republicans seem to be missing in action for anything that's not about gun control or confirming court nominations.
IMSI-catchers, like the infamous Harris Stingray, operate in two different modes, passive and active.
In passive mode it just listens to the cellular frequencies and records the IMSI of any device in range. This is similar to WiFi war driving and listening passively for SSIDs. While there are some preventative measures you can take, at some point you just have to broadcast the ID in the clear for things to work. Not a lot can be done to securely protect against this.
However, in active mode the IMSI-catcher spoofs credentials and claims to be a valid cell tower, tricking the cell phone to actually connect to it. This allows everything from text messages, to DTMF tones to the contents of a voice call to be captured.
Here is where there is room for end-user security improvements. One step would be to whitelist the known towers in your area, refusing to let your phone connect to any tower not on your list -- such as claimed NEW towers.
Net stumbler applications like Wigle include lists of cellular networks in their scans and databases. A crowd-sourced or crowd-validated list of known, real towers could serve as an initial load or verification.
The trick is getting your phone to connect only to the whitelisted towers. I believe that function lies in the baseband processor and access to that is normally locked down tight.
This could be a nice addition to something like Silent Circle's Blackphone.
If nothing else, it should be possible to have your phone alert you when it connects to a non-whitelisted cell tower. After all, Android has the ability to display what tower you're connected to. Apps like Network Signal Info Pro certainly give enough details.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Court rules that broadcasting your position is not broadcasting your position. Remember, judges are people who couldn't make a living as lawyers.
Court rules that broadcasting your position to your phone company is not equivalent to broadcasting your position to the police.
The police should not be legally allowed to operate Stingrays, since everything they collect from a Stringray is also available through a subpoena to the phone company, with more controls to ensure that they are only monitoring those who they are legally allowed to monitor.
One could argue that using any public service or utility could give consent to some authoritarian add-on. Instead of letting the police continuously nibble at our rights, we need some solid laws that block any further attempts. If they gather data without a warrant then they have broken laws with mandatory minimum sentencing.