Cellphone Spy Tools Have Flooded Local Police Departments

I have no idea how this works. Can someone explain the site simulators? When the site simulators intercept the traffic, they can see all the data. If it's encrypted, can they still read it or decrypt it somehow?

“Criminals tend to try and make tracking their data more difficult, so this kind of mass collection of telephony data will more easily find our political activists, our civil society leaders, and just regular people,” he says. “If the courts—if the public—knew how powerful these tools were, they would move to restrict their use.”

The mass surveillance system is about control, not security, and I think time and time again that is being proven. On the constitutional post-warrant data anlysis tools I have these issues:

1) This is local law enforcement wising up and playing a similar game to the big three letters.

2) I have concerns about the privacy protections for those associated with suspects, and see ripe abuse potential for guilt by association or even "using data from a warrant to get the data on the person you really want but can't get the warrant" type of situations.

3) I have concerns with the level of data sharing between the LEA's, and the post shared protections of said data.

4) I have concerns with private companies providing these services because private companies often have sub-par data security practices, and often have strange third-party data selling loopholes so they often end up "scrubbing" data and selling it, but most of us know it's not that hard these days to "unscrub" that kind of data.

All of this is assuming we are just talking about constitutional methods too. What I find even more insidious and dangerous is the unconstitutional tools like imsicatchers and others being used for parallel construction.

Bottom line is this: the LEA's and LEO's need to remember that they swear an oath:

"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;"

The problem as I see it, is that I tracked down the law that punishes congress for a few specific violations of oath of office (5 U.S. Code § 7311), but I have yet to find any law for punishing people in the executive branch for violation of oath of office. If anyone knows of such, please let me know. IANAL, so perhaps 5 U.S. Code § 7311 could apply to the executive and I just misunderstand it.

I don't think this is malice. This is more likely an artifact of a history where encryption was not initially part of the protocol, and seamless fall back had to be supported.

It is absolutely by design. The GSM standard recommends that, if encryption is disabled, the user be notified. This feature is called the "chiphering indicator". However, practically none of the available handsets do so.