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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

#151

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

godelski wrote: post #50
boring_twenties wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android, enter \ #\ #4636#\ #\ in the dialer. Then select "LTE only." (This will prevent 3G as well as 2G) edit: You gotta be kidding me with this formatting. Replace backslashes with asterisks.

That's because it is for MarkDown. So you can do things like this . But you can do * this * and it is fine. The difference is spacing.

HN doesn't use Markdown unfortunately.

I really, really hate that so many platforms use proprietary markup languages. I think the Google products have several slightly different ones, HN uses something completely proprietary (https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc), and even markdown has variants that can be pretty annoying to deal with.

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

#152

Post by lostlogin »

ghaff wrote: post #122
sbierwagen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It would certainly seem as if far and away the easiest and best opsec is to not have your phone on you or at least not turned on. Have people really become so dependent on their phones that the thought of being somewhere without one doesn't even come up as an option? I'd certainly at least turn my phone or a burner phone off before depending on not being compromised.

The presence of cameras is important and the footage they have taken has made significant waves.

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

#153

Post by floatingatoll »

falcolas wrote: post #101
floatingatoll wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your summary of the context is broader than that of the article. The context of the article is "cops interacting with your cellular radio" in order to capture IMSIs and perform other interactions, using Stingrays and Dirtboxes.

Not carrying devices with radios is sufficient to prevent you from being tracked by them. I concede that if you carry a radio-less device and hardwire it to a network, then as in Battlestar Galactica, you have now removed some of the safety that the absence of a radio provided.

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

#154

Post by ghaff »

lostlogin wrote: post #152
ghaff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would certainly seem as if far and away the easiest and best opsec is to not have your phone on you or at least not turned on. Have people really become so dependent on their phones that the thought of being somewhere without one doesn't even come up as an option? I'd certainly at least turn my phone or a burner phone off before depending on not being compromised.

The presence of cameras is important and the footage they have taken has made significant waves.

Use a camera?

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

#155

Post by jijji »

vanusa wrote: post #103

So - what countermeasures do people recommend? Is there anything one can carry around that acts like "phone" but is somehow less trackable?

you could try to prevent the phone from attaching to the fake cell tower, and only attach to a whitelisted cell tower... that method isnt that easy to do with most phones

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

#156

Post by myself248 »

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?

Sadly, the only baseband I'm aware of with open firmware is, itself, a 2g chip: https://www.freecalypso.org/

Nothing newer gives you any sort of control, as far as I know. Would love to learn more.

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

#157

Post by anigbrowl »

helios_invictus wrote: post #72
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

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

How things should be and how things actually are don't always line up.

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

#158

Post by xwdv »

MacSystem wrote: post #39
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…

I'm also glad you did that, we need more more people like you.

Did you miss the part where he is replaced by someone with little to no ethics or morals and will implement whatever is asked without second thought?

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

#159

Post by bigiain »

hammock wrote: post #149
notyourday wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can physically disconnect the battery, your phone may not actually be fully off. For example, on my Android phone should I drain the battery into oblivion ( let the phone die ) and let it sit for about a week in that state, takes about 90 seconds to become fully functional to the lock screen from the moment it is plugged into a charger. On the other hand if I do hard power off of a phone followed by poweri…

It's called warm boot vs. cold boot (or soft boot vs hard boot)

Yeah. The big question is "Just how much of the device is 'warm' while waiting for a warm boot?" I _suspect_ many people here could make reasonable guesses about the warm/cold states of the OS rebooting, but I'm sure far fewer people have the required knowledge/experience to even reason credibly about the state of the cellular radios (and probably the GPS receiver) when a phone is "warm".

(I could, I suppose, sit a spare handset next to an SDR rx, and watch it for cellular transmissions as the phone sits in "presumed warm" state. But a negative result there would not convince me it isn't still in some sort of "active receive" state where it could be remotely woken up by sending it somesorty of Wake On LAN equivalent in the cellular radio world...)

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

#160

Post by bigiain »

jacquesm wrote: post #20
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?

No, usually they need some kind of warrant for that.

I wish I had any confidence that "need a warrant" didn't just mean "Do it without a warrant, and never admit you did it. Parallel reconstruct a different chain of evidence if it pans out." - and then later from court transcripts we read "The defendant got pulled over in a traffic stop for a broken tail light, and the officer discovered {{badthing}}"...
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