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Paul Merrell

For sale: Systems that can secretly track where cellphone users go around the globe - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html

surveillance-state Verint cellphone-tracking SS7 IMSI surveillance-proliferation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer, according to company marketing documents and experts in surveillance technology.
  • The world’s most powerful intelligence services, such as the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ, long have used cellphone data to track targets around the globe. But experts say these new systems allow less technically advanced governments to track people in any nation — including the United States — with relative ease and precision.
  • It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive trade information, said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide. “Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, a London-based activist group that warns about the abuse of surveillance technology. “This is a huge problem.”
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  • Yet marketing documents obtained by The Washington Post show that companies are offering powerful systems that are designed to evade detection while plotting movements of surveillance targets on computerized maps. The documents claim system success rates of more than 70 percent. A 24-page marketing brochure for SkyLock, a cellular tracking system sold by Verint, a maker of analytics systems based in Melville, N.Y., carries the subtitle “Locate. Track. Manipulate.” The document, dated January 2013 and labeled “Commercially Confidential,” says the system offers government agencies “a cost-effective, new approach to obtaining global location information concerning known targets.”
  • tracking systems that access carrier location databases are unusual in their ability to allow virtually any government to track people across borders, with any type of cellular phone, across a wide range of carriers — without the carriers even knowing. These systems also can be used in tandem with other technologies that, when the general location of a person is already known, can intercept calls and Internet traffic, activate microphones, and access contact lists, photos and other documents. Companies that make and sell surveillance technology seek to limit public information about their systems’ capabilities and client lists, typically marketing their technology directly to law enforcement and intelligence services through international conferences that are closed to journalists and other members of the public.
  • Security experts say hackers, sophisticated criminal gangs and nations under sanctions also could use this tracking technology, which operates in a legal gray area. It is illegal in many countries to track people without their consent or a court order, but there is no clear international legal standard for secretly tracking people in other countries, nor is there a global entity with the authority to police potential abuses.
  • (Privacy International has collected several marketing brochures on cellular surveillance systems, including one that refers briefly to SkyLock, and posted them on its Web site. The 24-page SkyLock brochure and other material was independently provided to The Post by people concerned that such systems are being abused.)
  • Verint, which also has substantial operations in Israel, declined to comment for this story. It says in the marketing brochure that it does not use SkyLock against U.S. or Israeli phones, which could violate national laws. But several similar systems, marketed in recent years by companies based in Switzerland, Ukraine and elsewhere, likely are free of such limitations.
  • The tracking technology takes advantage of the lax security of SS7, a global network that cellular carriers use to communicate with one another when directing calls, texts and Internet data. The system was built decades ago, when only a few large carriers controlled the bulk of global phone traffic. Now thousands of companies use SS7 to provide services to billions of phones and other mobile devices, security experts say. All of these companies have access to the network and can send queries to other companies on the SS7 system, making the entire network more vulnerable to exploitation. Any one of these companies could share its access with others, including makers of surveillance systems.
  • Companies that market SS7 tracking systems recommend using them in tandem with “IMSI catchers,” increasingly common surveillance devices that use cellular signals collected directly from the air to intercept calls and Internet traffic, send fake texts, install spyware on a phone, and determine precise locations. IMSI catchers — also known by one popular trade name, StingRay — can home in on somebody a mile or two away but are useless if a target’s general location is not known. SS7 tracking systems solve that problem by locating the general area of a target so that IMSI catchers can be deployed effectively. (The term “IMSI” refers to a unique identifying code on a cellular phone.)
  • Verint can install SkyLock on the networks of cellular carriers if they are cooperative — something that telecommunications experts say is common in countries where carriers have close relationships with their national governments. Verint also has its own “worldwide SS7 hubs” that “are spread in various locations around the world,” says the brochure. It does not list prices for the services, though it says that Verint charges more for the ability to track targets in many far-flung countries, as opposed to only a few nearby ones. Among the most appealing features of the system, the brochure says, is its ability to sidestep the cellular operators that sometimes protect their users’ personal information by refusing government requests or insisting on formal court orders before releasing information.
  • Another company, Defentek, markets a similar system called Infiltrator Global Real-Time Tracking System on its Web site, claiming to “locate and track any phone number in the world.” The site adds: “It is a strategic solution that infiltrates and is undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.”
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14
     
    The Verint company has very close ties to the Iraeli government. Its former parent company Comverse, was heavily subsidized by Israel and the bulk of its manufacturing and code development was done in Israel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comverse_Technology "In December 2001, a Fox News report raised the concern that wiretapping equipment provided by Comverse Infosys to the U.S. government for electronic eavesdropping may have been vulnerable, as these systems allegedly had a back door through which the wiretaps could be intercepted by unauthorized parties.[55] Fox News reporter Carl Cameron said there was no reason to believe the Israeli government was implicated, but that "a classified top-secret investigation is underway".[55] A March 2002 story by Le Monde recapped the Fox report and concluded: "Comverse is suspected of having introduced into its systems of the 'catch gates' in order to 'intercept, record and store' these wire-taps. This hardware would render the 'listener' himself 'listened to'."[56] Fox News did not pursue the allegations, and in the years since, there have been no legal or commercial actions of any type taken against Comverse by the FBI or any other branch of the US Government related to data access and security issues. While no real evidence has been presented against Comverse or Verint, the allegations have become a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists.[57] By 2005, the company had $959 million in sales and employed over 5,000 people, of whom about half were located in Israel.[16]" Verint is also the company that got the Dept. of Homeland Security contract to provide and install an electronic and video surveillance system across the entire U.S. border with Mexico.  One need not be much of a conspiracy theorist to have concerns about Verint's likely interactions and data sharing with the NSA and its Israeli equivalent, Unit 8200. 
Paul Merrell

US v. Davis, 754 F. 3d 1205 - Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit 2014 - Google Scholar - 0 views

scholar.google.com/scholar_case

surveillance state litigation 11th-Cir. cell-site-location-data civil liberties 4th Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • 754 F.3d 1205 (2014) UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Quartavious DAVIS, Defendant-Appellant. No. 12-12928. United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit. June 11, 2014.
  • The prosecution also offered records obtained from cell phone service providers evidencing that Davis and his co-defendants had placed and received cell phone calls in close proximity to the locations of each of the charged robberies around the 1210*1210 time that the robberies were committed, except for the Mayor's Jewelry store robbery. Davis preserved his objection to the cell phone location evidence and his claim that the government's obtaining such evidence without a warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment.
  • The evidence obtained under the order and presented against Davis in the district court consisted of so-called "cell site location information." That location information 1211*1211 includes a record of calls made by the providers' customer, in this case Davis, and reveals which cell tower carried the call to or from the customer. The cell tower in use will normally be the cell tower closest to the customer. The cell site location information will also reflect the direction of the user from the tower. It is therefore possible to extrapolate the location of the cell phone user at the time and date reflected in the call record.
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  • Davis's Fourth Amendment argument raises issues of first impression in this circuit, and not definitively decided elsewhere in the country. The evidence at issue consists of records obtained from cell phone service providers pursuant to the Stored Communications Act ("SCA"), 18 U.S.C. §§ 2703(c) and (d). Under that Act, the government can obtain from providers of electronic communication service records of subscriber services when the government has obtained either a warrant, § 2703(c)(A), or, as occurred in this case, a court order under subsection (d), see § 2703(c)(B). The order under subsection (d) does not require the government to show probable cause.
  • As we suggested above, the question whether cell site location information is protected by the Fourth Amendment guarantees against warrantless searches has never been determined by this court or the Supreme Court. Two circuits have considered the question, but not in the context of the use of the evidence in a criminal proceeding. Also, one of those opinions issued before the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Jones, ___ U.S. ___, 132 S.Ct. 945, 181 L.Ed.2d 911 (2012), the most relevant Supreme Court precedent.
  • In short, we hold that cell site location information is within the subscriber's reasonable expectation of privacy. The obtaining of that data without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 14
     
    11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (Southeastern U.S.) holds that section 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act, which purports to allow the obtaining of a search warrant without a showing of probable cause, violates the 4th Amendment warrant requirement as applied to cell tower "site location information." That should also apply to "fake" cell towers, like the Stingray device (IMSI catcher) used to obtain the same type of information. Likely doubly so because such devices trespass on a radio connection assigned by the FCC between the legitimate cell tower and the user's telephone.
Paul Merrell

Fresno Police Roll Out Dystopian 'Threat Ranking' System - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...212684

surveillance state Fresno citizen-threat-ranking Intrado Beware trade-secrets

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.” Though the intricate surveillance apparatus described above seems straight from a dystopic novel, it is actually the Washington Post’s recent description of the the visual data collection system employed by a local California police department. The police department in Fresno, California, has taken extreme measures to combat high rates of crime in the city. As the Post reports, Fresno’s Real Time Crime Center, buried deep in the police station’s headquarters, has developed as a response to what many police call increasing threats. The system, according to police officials, can “provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases” — a feature they say is increasingly important in the wake of events like the November terror attack in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting last month.
  • “Our officers are expected to know the unknown and see the unseen,” Fresno Chief of Police Jerry Dyer said. “They are making split-second decisions based on limited facts. The more you can provide in terms of intelligence and video, the more safely you can respond to calls.” Programs similar to the Real Time Crime Center have launched in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the course of the last decade. Nationwide, the use of Stingrays, data fusion centers, and aerial drone surveillance have broadened the access local police have to private information. In another example, the FBI is continually developing a comprehensive biometric database that local police access every day. “This is something that’s been building since September 11,” says Jennifer Lynch, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Like the problem of police militarization, Lynch traces the trend back to the Pentagon: “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”
  • While many of these programs may fail to shock Americans, one new software program takes police scrutiny of private citizens to a new level. Beware, a software tool produced by tech firm Intrado, not only surveils the data of the citizens of Fresno, the first city to test it — it calculates threat levels based on what it discovers. The software scours arrest records, property records, Deep Web searches, commercial databases, and social media postings. By this method, it was able to designate a man with a firearm and gang convictions involved in a real-time domestic violence dispute as the highest of three threat levels: a bright red ranking. Fresno police say the intelligence from Beware aided them, as the man eventually surrendered and officers found he was armed with a gun. Beware scours billions of data points to develop rankings for citizens, and though few recoil at the thought of catching criminals and miscreants, the program provides particular cause for concern because of both its invasiveness and its fallibility.
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  • These shortcomings have sparked concern among Fresno’s city council members, who discussed the issue at a meeting in November. At that meeting, one council member cited an incident where a girl who posted on social media about a card game called “Rage” was consequently given an elevated threat ranking — all because “rage” could be a triggering keyword for Beware. At that same meeting, libertarian-leaning Republican councilman Clinton J. Olivier asked Chief Dyer to use the technology to calculate his threat level. In real-time, Olivier was given a green, or non-threatening ranking, but his home received a yellow, or medium, threat ranking. It was likely due to the record of his home’s prior occupant. “Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier told Dyer. “That may not be fair to me.” He added later, “[Beware] has failed right here with a council member as the example.” “It’s a very unrefined, gross technique,” Fresno civil rights attorney, Rob Nabarro, has said of Beware’s color-coded levels. “A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen,” he noted, echoing Olivier’s worries.
  • Further, though Fresno police use Beware, they are left in the dark about how it determines rankings. Intrado designates the method a “trade secret,” and as such, will not share it with the officers who use it. This element of the software’s implementation has concerned civil rights advocates like Nabarro. He believes the secrecy surrounding the technology may result in unfair, unchecked threat rankings. Nabarro cautioned that between the software’s secrecy and room for error, Beware could accidentally rank a citizen as dangerous based on, for example, posts on social media criticizing police. This potential carries with it the ability for citizens to be punished not for actual crimes, but for exercising basic constitutional rights. Further, it compromises the rights of individuals who have been previously convicted of crimes, potentially using past behavior to assume guilt in unrelated future incidents. Chief Dyer insists concerns are exaggerated and that a particular score does not guarantee a particular police response. Police maintain the tools are necessary to fight crime. Nevertheless, following the heated November meeting, Dyer suggested he would work to turn off the color-coded threat ranking due to citizens’ concerns. “It’s a balancing act,” he admitted.
  • It remains to be seen if Fresno police and residents will move forward with the technology or shut it down over privacy concerns. City officials in Oakland, California, for example, recently scaled back plans to establish a Real Time Crime Center after outraged citizens protested. At the very least, as Northern California ACLU attorney Matt Cagle said, “[W]henever these surveillance technologies are on the table, there needs to be a meaningful debate. There needs to be safeguards and oversight.”
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 16
     
    Claiming trade secrecy for the software's selection criteria for threat ranking actually constitutes policy policy, the trade secrecy claim would probably not survive judical review. It's at least arguably an unconstitutional delegation of a government function (ranking citizens as threats) to a private company. Police departments in Florida were sued to produce records of how a related surveillance device, the Stingray IMSI device that intercepts cell phone calls by mimicking a cell-phone tower, and only averted court-ordered disclosure of its trade secret workings by the FBI swooping in just before decision to remove all the software documentation from local police possession, custody, and control.    There is a long chain of case law holding that information that is legitimately trade secret and proprietary loses that protection if adopted by local or federal government as law. With a software program that classifies citizens as threats for governmental purposes if they meet the program's selection criteria, the software is performing a strictly governmental function that is in reality law. 
Paul Merrell

The US government doesn't want you to know the cops are tracking you | Trevor Timm | Co... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ng-calls-stingray-surveillance

surveillance state local-law-enforcement location-data stingrays

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • All across America, from Florida to Colorado and back again, the country's increasingly militarized local police forces are using a secretive technology to vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – including from people inside their own homes – almost always without a warrant. This week, numerous investigations by major news agencies revealed the US government is now taking unbelievable measures to make sure you never find out about it. But a landmark court ruling for privacy could soon force the cops to stop, even as the Obama administration fights to keep its latest tool for mass surveillance a secret.So-called International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers – more often called their popular brand name, "Stingray" – have long been the talk of the civil liberties crowd, for the indiscriminate and invasive way these roving devices conduct surveillance. Essentially, Stingrays act as fake cellphone towers (usually mounted in a mobile police truck) that police can point toward any given area and force every phone in the area to connect to it. So even if you're not making a call, police can find out who you've been calling, and for how long, as well as your precise location. As Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU explained on Thursday, "In one Florida case, a police officer explained in court that he 'quite literally stood in front of every door and window' with his stingray to track the phones inside a large apartment complex."
  • Yet these mass surveillance devices have largely stayed out of the public eye, thanks to the federal government and local police refusing to disclose they're using them in the first place – sometimes, shockingly, even to judges. As the Associated Press reported this week, the Obama administration has been telling local cops to keep information on Stingrays secret from members of the news media, even when it seems like local public records laws would mandate their disclosure. The AP noted: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.
  • Some of the government's tactics to hide Stingray from journalists and the public have been downright disturbing. After the ACLU had filed a records request for information on Stingrays, the local police force initially told them that, yes, they had the documents and to come on down to the station to look at them. But just before an ACLU rep was due to arrive, US Marshals seized the records and hid them away at another location, in what Wessler describes as "a blatant violation of state open-records laws".The federal government has used various other tactics around the country to prevent disclosure of similar information.USA Today also published a significant nationwide investigation about the Stingray problem, as well as what are known as "cellphone tower dumps". When police agencies don't have Stingrays at their disposal, they can go to cell phone providers to get the cellphone location information of everyone who has connected to a specific cell tower (which inevitably includes thousands of innocent people). The paper's John Kelly reported that one Colorado case shows cellphone tower dumps got police "'cellular telephone numbers, including the date, time and duration of any calls,' as well as numbers and location data for all phones that connected to the towers searched, whether calls were being made or not."
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  • It's scary enough to think that the NSA is collecting so much information, but this mass location and metadata tracking at the local level all may be about to change. This week, the ACLU won a historic victory in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (serving Florida, Alabama and Georgia), which ruled that police need to get a warrant from a judge before extracting from your cellphone the location data obtained by way of a cell tower. This ruling will apply whether cops are going after one person, the whole tower and, one can assume, Stingrays. (The case was also argued by the aforementioned Wessler, who clearly is this month’s civil liberties Most Valuable Player.)This case has huge implications, and not just for the Stingrays secretly being used in Florida. It virtually guarantees the US supreme court will soon have to tackle the larger cellphone location question in some form – and whether police across the country have to finally start getting a warrant to find out where your precise location for days or weeks at a time. But as Stanford law professor Jennifer Granick wrote on Friday, it could also have an impact on NSA spying, which relies on the theory that indiscriminately collecting metadata is fair game until a court says otherwise.
  • You may be asking: how, exactly, are the local cops getting their hands on such advanced military technology? Well, the feds are, in many cases, giving away the technology for free. When the US government is not loaning police agencies their own Stingrays, the Defense Department and Homeland Security are giving federal grants to cops, which allow departments to purchase the gear at the cost of $400,000 a pop from defense contractors like Harris Corporation, which makes the Stingray brand.
  • Like Stingrays, and the NSA's phone dragnet before them, the militarization of America's local cops is a phenomenon that's only now getting widespread attention. As journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a seminal book on the subject two years ago, said this week, the Obama administration could easily limit these tactics to "cases of legitimate national security" – but has clearly chosen not to.No matter how much President Obama talks about how he has "maintained a healthy skepticism toward our surveillance programs", it seems the Most Transparent Administration in American History™ remains much more interested in maintaining a healthy, top-secret surveillance state.
Paul Merrell

FBI says search warrants not needed to use "stingrays" in public places | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...se-stringrays-in-public-places

surveillance state stingrays DoJ privacy 4th Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking the position that court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators in public places. Nicknamed "stingrays," the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts. The FBI made its position known during private briefings with staff members of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In response, the two lawmakers wrote Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson, maintaining they were "concerned about whether the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have adequately considered the privacy interests" of Americans. According to the letter, which was released last week: For example, we understand that the FBI’s new policy requires FBI agents to obtain a search warrant whenever a cell-site simulator is used as part of a FBI investigation or operation, unless one of several exceptions apply, including (among others): (1) cases that pose an imminent danger to public safety, (2) cases that involve a fugitive, or (3) cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
  • The letter was prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal report in November that said the Justice Department was deploying small airplanes equipped with cell-site simulators that enabled "investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location." The bureau's position on Americans' privacy isn't surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010, when it told a federal appeals court that the authorities should be allowed to affix GPS devices on vehicles and track a suspect's every move without court authorization. The Supreme Court, however, eventually ruled that warrants are required. What's more, the administration has argued that placing a webcam with pan-and-zoom capabilities on a utility pole to spy on a suspect at his or her residence was no different from a police officer's observation from the public right-of-way. A federal judge last month disagreed with the government's position, tossing evidence gathered by the webcam that was operated from afar.
  • In their letter, Leahy and Grassley complained that little is known about how stingrays, also known as ISMI catchers, are used by law enforcement agencies. The Harris Corp., a maker of the devices from Florida, includes non-disclosure clauses with buyers. Baltimore authorities cited a non-disclosure agreement to a judge in November as their grounds for refusing to say how they tracked a suspect's mobile phone. They eventually dropped charges rather than disclose their techniques. Further, sometimes the authorities simply lie to judges about their use or undertake other underhanded methods to prevent the public from knowing that the cell-site simulators are being used.
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  • Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said some states and judges are pushing back against stingrays. "In Tacoma, judges now require police (to) specifically note they plan to use an IMSI catcher and promise not to store data collected from people who are not investigation targets," he said. "The Florida and Massachusetts state supreme courts ruled warrants were necessary for real-time cell phone tracking. Nine states—Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—passed laws specifically requiring police to use a warrant to track a cell phone in real time."
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15
     
    Is there any problem here that couldn't be cured by discharge and public flogging for any government official caught using information derived from a stingray?
Paul Merrell

Tacoma, Wash. police use 'Stingray' system to sweep cellphone data | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...tacoma-cell-surveillance.html

surveillance state stingrays IMSI ACLU-report

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • A Washington state police department just south of Seattle has for years been quietly using controversial surveillance equipment that can collect records of all cellphone calls, text messages and data transfers within a half-mile radius, according to local media. The Stingray surveillance system, deployed by the Tacoma Police Department since 2009, “tricks cellphones into thinking it’s a cell tower and draws in their information,” local news website The Olympian reported Wednesday. The device is reportedly capable of indiscriminate data collection, which worries civil rights advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it has identified at least 43 police departments in 18 states that use Stingray equipment. The rights group said on its website that police use of such a device may violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, and with taxpayers’ money.
  • "The result is that police gather the electronic serial numbers and other information about phones, as well as the direction and strength of each phone's signal, allowing precise location tracking,” the ACLU said. “Stingrays can also gather information about people's communications, such as which phone numbers they call. Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, Stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover's house, in a psychologist's office or at a political protest." Tacoma Police Department’s Assistant Police Chief Kathy McAlpine said that officers only use Stingray with permission from a judge, and that they do not collect data. “It is used in felony-level crimes to locate suspects wanted for crimes such as homicide, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and narcotics trafficking,” McAlpine said. The department said the device has been used nearly 200 times since June.
  • The Tacoma City Council approved buying an updated version of the equipment in March 2013 on the grounds that it would be used to find improvised explosive devices. McAlpine said they have never used the Stingray to locate such a device. Civil rights groups said they are concerned about the possibility of indiscriminate data collection, and worry that police could store the data of innocent citizens. “They are essentially searching the homes of innocent Americans to find one phone used by one person,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the ACLU in Washington, D.C. “It’s like they’re kicking down the doors of 50 homes and searching 50 homes because they don’t know where the bad guy is.” A similar controversy erupted in nearby Seattle last November, when  alternative news website The Stranger reported that a new apparatus capable of geo-locating and tracking the movement of any wireless device that passes it was quietly installed in a Seattle neighborhood.
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  • The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in June that warrantless searches of cellphone data were illegal in most cases. It is unclear how the ruling would apply to such a device that is capable of indiscriminate data collection, but police say it is not used for that purpose.
Paul Merrell

IRS confirms use of surveillance tool | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...out-use-of-phone-tracking-tech

surveillance state IRS Stingray-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The head of the IRS told lawmakers on Tuesday that his agency’s use of secretive phone-tracking technology was restricted to specific criminal cases, a day after new questions were raised about its surveillance powers.Before the Senate Finance Committee, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said that use of the StingRay devices, or “IMSI-catchers,”  is limited to the agency's criminal investigations division to track down money laundering, terrorism and financing of organized crime.ADVERTISEMENT“It’s only used in criminal investigations. It can only be used with a court order. It can only be used based on probable cause of criminal activity,” Koskinen told the Senate panel.“It is not used in civil matters at all,” he added. “It’s not used by other employees of the IRS.”The IRS’s previously unknown use of the technology was revealed on Monday by the Guardian. The newspaper reported that the agency spent more than $70,000 in 2012 to upgrade and train employees on the technology, which are also used by a dozen other federal agencies.The briefcase-sized StingRay device mimics cellphone towers in order to collect identifying data sent through waves emitted from people’s phones, including their location.  
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