151–160 of 163 posts
I have a femtocell in my home, because my small neighborhood sits in a dead zone. Not a repeater, a full femtocell. To the casual security conscious user, that is probably going to look like a 'stingray', since you will be walking down the street with a gradually dropping RSSI, when all at once, boom, you walk into a five bar signal and life is good. It covers about a 300 ft radius with the most blessedly beautiful s…
If we had a crowd-sourced database of cell towers (picture & coordinates) wouldn't it then be straightforward to know (and report) when your phone wasn't connecting to a legitimate tower? I for one want to make sure the criminals aren't intercepting my signal with home-made stingrays; the police have other lawful ways to get what they need.
No, because the cell carriers have "tower in a box" kits that they make available to various people. These are real towers, but they move often. If you go to a large event (something like burning man, though I don't know if they do for that specific event) there is a good chance the carrier has scattered a few of these around the venue because the fixed location towers (often miles away) would be overwhelmed and nobo…
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The ACLU was mostly mute on these issues during the prior administration, when these abuses became routine.
Just a couple of links to disprove this troll: https://www.aclu.org/cases/florida-stingray-foia (2014) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-florida-v-city-sarasota-stin... (2014) https://www.aclu.org/cases/foia-request-justice-department-p... (2014) ... and tons more, at https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles?topi...
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Or the reverse. Since airports are one of the very few places where you can positively identify a certain person was there at a certain time, you can combine a passenger list with a device list to get some soft matches to previously unlinked devices. Combine that linked metadata with other dragnet metadata, and you're going to learn a lot.
That should mean they can also correlate who picks up or drops off whom... so even if you aren't traveling, you're in their database linked to someone who is.
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That's super interesting. Those are international departure airports. I wonder if what they're doing is sniffing for phone numbers of interest showing up in the international terminal indicating a 'person of interest' is trying to leave or arrive. I assume people trying to leave or enter the country without permission might have false ID and a false name on their ticket but they probably don't think about changing th…
Probably used for things like terrorist watch lists, national security ventures, etc... highly doubtful it's used for domestic law enforcement purposes. The US wants to know when foreign nationals of interest attempt to enter/exit the country.
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The ACLU was mostly mute on these issues during the prior administration, when these abuses became routine.
Just a couple of links to disprove this troll: https://www.aclu.org/cases/florida-stingray-foia (2014) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-florida-v-city-sarasota-stin... (2014) https://www.aclu.org/cases/foia-request-justice-department-p... (2014) ... and tons more, at https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles?topi...
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I don’t buy that. I’m sure the way that they select the sites in the first place is probably proprietary, but once you start broadcasting radio frequencies, it’s trivial to pinpoint the location of the towers, so there’s absolutely nothing stopping anyone, particularly a competitor, from mapping them out quite easily.
Costs $$$ to have techs drive around the land with that kind of gear...
I have a femtocell in my home, because my small neighborhood sits in a dead zone. Not a repeater, a full femtocell. To the casual security conscious user, that is probably going to look like a 'stingray', since you will be walking down the street with a gradually dropping RSSI, when all at once, boom, you walk into a five bar signal and life is good. It covers about a 300 ft radius with the most blessedly beautiful s…
Can you use this device to enumerate imei of passers-by?
I was involved in the chip architecture for the silicon that is used in the box as well as the software engineer involved in the secure boot path for the cellular modems. It is one large chip with all the modems and application processors in one chunk of silicon. No unencrypted data, air link or Ethernet back haul, ever leaves the die.
From that, I am familiar with the physical design that the manufacturer implemented. (We did a lot of support work to get the manufacturer up and running)
They even go so far as to have a physical 'self destruct' button within the box. If you try to physically open it, it will never boot again.
The service provider states in the documentation (when you get the box) that if you tamper with the device such that the self-defeat gets activated, you have to pay full retail for the now dead box (they provided the femtocell for free if you live in a dead zone).
I laughed when I opened the retail box and that was the first thing in the document stack. Basically a large font "you have been warned"
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The argument is that you use those products and give them that information voluntarily, however under-handed the tactics are to get you to volunteer that info. Law enforcement surveillance isn't voluntary.
If police use the lack of information from those avenues as a justification for a warrant to conduct surveillance then that argument is moot.
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Third party doctrine has little to with this case, I agree it is a problem, but that is not what I was talking about in my post The Thrid Pary doctrine allows the Government to end run the 4th amendment if you discloused info to a 3rd party. In this instance, the government is claiming they do not have to talk about the technology at all, even to the point of proving it actually does what they claim. In criminal Trai…
True, but I was talking about the actual issue primarily being that Stingrays are mostly micro targeted, often with warrants due to costs, etc, while the vast majority of cell providers have warrantless, sometimes even subpoena-less web portals for LEAs to conduct spying operations on the public, or how the vast majority of the cell tower companies (separate from the major providers) themselves have the most useful i…
We need to redefine data ownership in this country, not just to curb police abuse, but to curb the abuse of corporations as well
That extends well beyond the 3rd party doctrine