Cellphone data spying: It's not just the NSA

[pumpingiron22]

Cellphone data spying: It's not just the NSA
LAW ENFORCEMENT USING METHODS FROM NSA PLAYBOOK

Local police are increasingly able to scoop up large amounts of cellphone data using new technologies, including cell tower dumps and secret mobile devices known as Stingrays. Here's a closer look at how police do it.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/08/cellphone-data-spying-nsa-police/3902809/

USA TODAY research
John Kelly, Kevin A. Kepple, Jerry Mosemak, Janet Loehrke and Jeff Dionise, USA TODAY

 

[vivame]

VICTORY: Judge Releases Information about Police Use of Stingray Cell Phone Trackers
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-...y-judge-releases-information-about-police-use
[...]
Late yesterday, the judge ordered unsealing of the entire transcript. The portion that the government had sought to keep secret is here. It confirms key information about the invasiveness of stingray technology, including that:

• Stingrays “emulate a cellphone tower” and “force” cell phones to register their location and identifying information with the stingray instead of with real cell towers in the area.
• Stingrays can track cell phones whenever the phones are turned on, not just when they are making or receiving calls.
• Stingrays force cell phones in range to transmit information back “at full signal, consuming battery faster.” Is your phone losing battery power particularly quickly today? Maybe the cops are using a stingray nearby.
• When in use, stingrays are “evaluating all the [cell phone] handsets in the area” in order to search for the suspect’s phone. That means that large numbers of innocent bystanders’ location and phone information is captured.
• In this case, police used two versions of the stingray — one mounted on a police vehicle, and the other carried by hand. Police drove through the area using the vehicle-based device until they found the apartment complex in which the target phone was located, and then they walked around with the handheld device and stood “at every door and every window in that complex” until they figured out which apartment the phone was located in. In other words, police were lurking outside people’s windows and sending powerful electronic signals into their private homes in order to collect information from within.
• The Tallahassee detective testifying in the hearing estimated that, between spring of 2007 and August of 2010, the Tallahassee Police had used stingrays approximately “200 or more times.”

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