I remember this being described in Bruce Schneier's book. When I first read it, I was terrified. Now, seeing them in action, I'm closer to dejected. Most methods of avoiding them aren't easy or practical enough to be used by the layman, hell, most laymen don't even know what stingrays are. These are incredibly tough to protect against on a mass scale.
Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
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Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#32Wi-Fi Calling while in Airplane mode would not be subject to Stingray interception, and would protect IMEI data from airborne bulk capture. Authorities can still set up open SSIDs to capture limited information about phones, but the "fly an airplane over" capture model doesn't work well with Wi-Fi.
You may be underestimating people's lack of care about what open access point people connect to. The traffic itself may be encrypted, but DNS queries, phone hardware addresses, and background traffic might not be.
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#33> stingrays can force phones to downgrade to 2G, a less secure protocol, and tell the phone to use either no encryption or use a weak encryption that can be cracked. Can android, iOS, or an open phone os prevent 2g communication?
On my phone (Galaxy Note 10), there's a toggle to allow 2G or not in the mobile network settings. No debug code needed or anything like that.
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#34Pro-tip: If you want fairly good OPSEC when going to a protest, get a burner Android phone, put it on airplane mode with WIFI only. Then purchase a couple of Comcast / Xfiniti logins off the web, and use those to connect to "xfiniti-wifi" hotspots. Most cities have them, the speeds are fairly decent too.
We're truly living in the panopticon
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#35TL;DR it's a radio in your pocket that constantly announces its identity. I'm quite interested in the fact that people don't realize this. Is it a generational split between people who can remember when we did not all have radios in our pockets and those who can't, or ??? The fact that an always-on radio you carry everywhere can be used to track you seems like the #1 most obvious thing about the technology.
You can't expect end users with little-to-no technical know-how to have the same common knowledge that you do.
This seems like a common tv and movie plot point though. If you don’t want to be found you have to destroy or lose your phone.
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#36Pro-tip: If you want fairly good OPSEC when going to a protest, get a burner Android phone, put it on airplane mode with WIFI only. Then purchase a couple of Comcast / Xfiniti logins off the web, and use those to connect to "xfiniti-wifi" hotspots. Most cities have them, the speeds are fairly decent too. We're truly living in the panopticon
Through the pandemic, Xfinity is offering anyone free guest access, so for at least the next few months, you don't need to even buy logins. https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-extends...
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't expect end users with little-to-no technical know-how to have the same common knowledge that you do.
I watched a doco last night where researchers put a sounding beacon inside a shark. Inside it! They said something like "these sharks are used to cuts and scrapes and heal quickly." It's no wonder people don't immediately associate their phone with a locating beacon.
Maybe I'm not translating correctly "sounding beacon", but I would assume that what you see was just an (I don't know the exact term) "electronic tag". This is standard procedure in ecology, veterinary and animal husbandry. We did it sometimes. Is a rice grain size object, and does not left any noticeable scar in fishes.
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The median IQ is 100, meaning half of all people have IQs below 100. Many of them did not grow up in an environment that pushes lifelong learning. Lots of people do what they've been trained to do and nothing more, which is good! Our society needs people like that. But expecting people like that to think for themselves is a sure way to become needlessly frustrated. edit: switched average to median.
The measure that describes what you state would be the median , which is defined as the point at which there are as many values above as below. Averages will skew with large outliers on either side. E.g. if Bezos and I are alone in a room together, the average person in that room has $95B dollars. (Granted, in an n=2 situation, the median isn't meaningful either)
You're right, this has been fixed. Thanks!
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#39Hey. Someone who briefly worked on the Stingray team here. I left the company that develops the stingray (who’s name is mentioned in the article but I shall not say it) because I didn’t feel comfortable with the ethics of how it could potentially be easily abused without legal permission and/or repercussion. I fear these technologies will become more commonly used against Americans by low level law enforcement withou…
I'm also glad you did that, we need more more people like you.
Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't expect end users with little-to-no technical know-how to have the same common knowledge that you do.
Well, why not? How can we improve general technological literacy? I don't want people to memorize the protocols, but I do want them to have the foundation of knowledge that would allow them to conclude that if the phone company can connect calls to your mobile handset, then they can also figure out roughly where it is. I'd also like for people to have the basic knowledge required to understand that GPS does not track…
Every professional, expert, specialist, or technician feels this way about the stuff they know. "Why don't people know [basic thing about their work]? What a bunch of uneducated morons." The answer is because if they knew all the basic stuff about all those fields to be what those experts judge to be informed consumers, and took the time to apply that knowledge, they wouldn't have any time left to 1) actually buy products and services, or 2) learn what they need to know about their own field. Also because being an uninformed consumer works out more-or-less OK much of the time, largely because regulation prevents the worst sorts of abuses.
In the specific case of tracking/spying I'd imagine lots of people (not most, but many) have considered the possibility, then dismissed it without looking into it any further because it seems like something that would obviously already be illegal, and assuming things that seem like they ought to already be illegal are already illegal often gets one to the correct conclusion—just not this time. Those sorts probably assume that if a law enforcement agency gets a warrant or something then they might start tracking locations using cell phones, but not that the cell phone company is already doing that 100% of the time to everyone, since, again, it really seems like something that'd be illegal. I think a lot of the "information economy" falls in this blind spot—that credit card companies would be selling your purchase history or google/your-ISP would be recording every single website you visit also seem, intuitively, like things that'd be very illegal, for example.