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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

#131

Post by jpollock »

jccc wrote: post #121
jpollock wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand that in principle it could have an effect, and I understand how. I'm questioning whether that market for developers really is tight enough to matter, whether employers and top policy makers would even notice that some number of people withhold their skills in protest. I'm wondering if perhaps there are other more powerful ways for these developers to exert their influence, whether in these positions or o…

That would be an interesting research paper, particularly if it was able to quantify the effect of various blows to a companies reputation.

"The effect of corporate reputation on staffing costs"?

A quick googling implies "yes"?

https://www.igniyte.co.uk/blog/how-a-bad-corporate-reputatio....

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

#132

Post by tedunangst »

closeparen wrote: post #129
sbierwagen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't bring a cell phone to a protest?

Are there documented examples of people in the US facing repercussions because they were known to have been at a protest?

Arrested for "your cell phone said you were at the protest" not so much. Arrested for "you were photographed throwing a molotov wearing a limited edition etsy shirt for which you left a review using the same handle as your instagram account" yeah. HN kinda considers that to be the same thing though.

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

#133

Post by dylan604 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #98
helios_invictus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not have to be good at opsec or economically advantaged to be able to demonstrate.

Then don't bring a cell phone to a protest?

Then again, what would happen to a protestor that actually protested in a non-violent manner? Let's specify in the US as I can only guess it would be much more dangerous to protest in a country without a protected constitutional right to do so. So a US citizen brings their cell phone to a protest, non-violently marches with their signs, sings some songs, yells some, gets dispersed in a violent manner and/or gets arrested. If their cell phone gets pinged in a Stingray sweep, what happens? What's the negative repercussions?

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

#134

Post by mtgx »

Mirioron wrote: post #84
BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #31

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.

What happens when they are used in countries with fewer protections to individuals than the US?

The bar is already pretty low in the US. The FBI has trained cops to hide the use of stingrays from judges, so who really knows how many times these were illegally used to incriminate someone while telling judges they got anonymous tips or whatever.

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

#135

Post by ColanR »

dang wrote: post #106
ColanR wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes more sense, since a similar comment that replied to it was also marked [dead]. Thanks for the clarification.

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

#136

Post by ChuckMcM »

FWIW you can do much the same thing with your own SDR setup. One of the more surprising things for me was that the feature that a phone work "internationally" means that a nominally "4G" phones will still answer a GSM tower (talking on a GSM frequency) when the tower says hello. Some phones will let you turn that off.

But that said, most smartphones will tell you their WiFi MAC address if you tell them you are an access point. It is more difficult to track a MAC address back to its owner, but it is easy to see if it shows up again near you. My Cisco access point did a variant on this when MAC address filtering was on, it would send you reports of "unknown" MAC addresses which you could log and then later associate with people visiting the office.

Bottom line though seems to be to treat protests like DefCon events if you don't want to leak PII. Get a burner phone for such trips.

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

#137

Post by an_opabinia »

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…

- In your opinion, is there a difference between an innocent person being materially and demonstrably harmed ("harmed," i.e. tort) by a stingray deployment and an innocent person harmed by any other tool misused in this way by the government?

- Do you think there's a better alternative to tort that could as clearly limit the tools government uses to fight crime?

- If harmless mass surveillance replaces concretely and plainly harmful mass surveillance (e.g. stop and frisk), did we come out ahead?

I'm not a blowhard and obviously do not want to live in a surveillance state. I'm not even advocating for the status quo. It's okay if the answer to these questions are basically, "I don't know."

Or go on and argue that stingrays in isolation of a malevolent government somehow materially harm people in some concrete way. It would be awesome to hear your perspective if that's the case.

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

#138

Post by jccc »

mellow2020 wrote: post #126
dang wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Would you please stop posting generic ideological comments to HN? If you explain to me how the comment I replied to isn't just as generic, and what you mean by "ideological" that is present in my comment and not in the parent, sure. You allow a claim, coated in "wondering", an old chestnut trotted out time and time again -- and don't the clear refuting of it, by one of the greats in the field? There are no principl…

(For whatever it's worth, I was sincerely wondering because I don't know what the actual labor constraints on these companies/agencies might be. I suspected they aren't enough to make much of a difference when developers walk away in protest, and so I asked.)

(Also, I think it was clear that I was questioning strategy not morality.)

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

#139

Post by sbierwagen »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #108
sbierwagen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Turn on "showdead" in account settings. This will show comments from banned users.

I am only guessing they were autobanned. Comment history from the time of the banning doesn't show anything particular egregious that would trigger a manual ban.

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