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Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

theintercept.com

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Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#101

Post by falcolas »

floatingatoll wrote: post #80
falcolas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not trying to offer a comprehensive solution for avoiding government monitoring. I’m just offering a solution for avoiding cellular Stingrays while retaining cellular service. For a more comprehensive solution, you would need to at minimum not carry any electronic devices (signal detection), wear a mask and IR-blocking glasses (face detection), and wear shoe inserts (gait detection) — and even then, they can stil…

The context of this article is "Cops tracking your phone", of which the parent comment does not prevent in any meaningful fashion. The rest of the remedies presented here are also mostly unrelated to phone tracking.

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#102

Post by tspike »

op03 wrote: post #92
jeffbee wrote: post #2

TL;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.

Do the math. The odds of someone targeting you (just for kicks) aren't that high. But don't tell Glenn Greenwald that cause then he has to go find something else to scare you with, to capture your attention in our current useless "state of fear" preserving info tsunami ecosystem. But anyway lets do the math... The US has 200 cops per million. Lets say 1% of that million are born douchebags and there is another 1% who…

Your comment comes off pretty condescending and dismissive, which clouds a valid point. It's not likely you will be individually targeted by law enforcement.

The scarier proposition to me is bulk collection and latent analysis.

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#104

Post by gruez »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #34

Pro-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

If you have gapps installed (every stock ROM unless you're in china), you should probably assume google is tracking your location through wifi networks. As such, you should probably install lineageos for additional security.

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#105

Post by xkcd-sucks »

arsome wrote: post #8

Do they even need to bother with a Stingray, can't they basically just pull up whatever provider's law enforcement portal and click a few buttons?

Anecdotally from listening to police scanners, whenever there's an areawide BOLO notice or anything exciting involving a known party, they always say where the last "cellphone ping" was. E.g. "Look out for a Black male driving a white Nissan, last cell ping was on the north side of Lowell 15 minutes ago." Not sure if a warrant is required, but it happens pretty quickly

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#106

Post by dang »

ColanR wrote: post #55
jdefr89 wrote: post #19

Hey. 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…

To whomever flagged the sibling comment by throwaway_drt2: they were not being crude, they were referring to the cell site simulator called the Dirtbox. [1] Don't be so trigger-happy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbox_%28cell_phone%29

No one flagged that comment. It was affected by a software filter. Users vouched for it, which unkilled it.

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#107

Post by jessaustin »

shakna wrote: post #15
seniorsassycat wrote: post #14

> 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?

It happens within the OS for the baseband processor, not within the OS of the actual phone. Unsurprisingly, the details of how the baseband processor work are a highly guarded secret, and trying to reverse engineer anything around it will end up with a heft lawsuit thrown at you.

Presumably the creators of these devices have done at least some of that reverse engineering?

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#108

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

sbierwagen wrote: post #100
ExThermoGuy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phone is never really off.

Heads up: your account has been autobanned, maybe because you're commenting too many times as a new user, or for some other reason.

How can you tell?

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#109

Post by dang »

mellow2020 wrote: post #83
jccc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it enough that a few people like this simply turn their backs and walk away to different work? I would think their vacancies would be quickly and easily filled. Is there really a shortage of people willing and able to do this kind of work for these companies and government agencies? I'm asking because I truly don't know. And if not, could we think of some other ways people in these positions could exert some influ…

You can't change rape by being a good rapist. All that serves IMO is to normalize being an accomplice and doing evil things with good intentions. > People have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, inde…

Would you please stop posting generic ideological comments to HN? It looks like you've been doing it repeatedly. It's against the site guidelines because it leads to repetitive threads which are tedious at best and nasty at worst. This site is supposed to be for curious conversation and those things are not compatible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone

#110

Post by jpollock »

jccc wrote: post #63
kome wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for walking away. I hope more people will follow your example and question their work. Not only at Harris Corporation, but in every part of what is called surveillance capitalism.

Is it enough that a few people like this simply turn their backs and walk away to different work? I would think their vacancies would be quickly and easily filled. Is there really a shortage of people willing and able to do this kind of work for these companies and government agencies? I'm asking because I truly don't know. And if not, could we think of some other ways people in these positions could exert some influ…

Yes it has an effect. In a tight labour market, any restriction on the number of people who are willing to do your work will increase your costs.

Eventually, you might start to ask "why" and change some things to bring the costs back in line.

For example, I know lots of people (including me), who refused interviews with Uber post harassment revelations.

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