6-13-2014 National:
The map below tracks what we know, based on press reports and publicly available documents, about the use of stingray tracking devices by state and local police departments. Following the map is a list of the federal law enforcement agencies known to use the technology throughout the United States. But because many agencies continue to shroud their purchase and use of stingrays in secrecy, this map dramatically underrepresents the actual use of stingrays by law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Stingrays, also known as "cell site simulators" or "IMSI catchers," are invasive cell phone surveillance devices that mimic cell phone towers and send out signals to trick cell phones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect's cell phone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. ..Continued.. by ACLU
Showing posts with label Detection - Stingray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Detection - Stingray. Show all posts
June 13, 2014
Stingray Tracking Devices: Who's Got Them?
June 5, 2014
How Florida cops went door to door with fake cell device to find one man
See also : USA Today Explanation of Stingrays6-5-2014 Florida:
Best picture yet of how police use "stingrays."
In the early morning hours of September 13, 2008, a woman notified the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD) that she had been raped and that her purse, containing her mobile phone, had been stolen. Within 24 hours, the Florida capital’s police had contacted Verizon and obtained real-time ping information, which gave the police a “general area” where they might find the phone and thus, hopefully, the perpetrator of the crime. But that general area still covered plenty of ground—where exactly was the phone?
To answer that question, the cops deployed a secretive device called a stingray, which operates as a fake cell phone tower used to track targeted phones. Though law enforcement typically fights attempts to learn how stingrays work or how often they are used, a court victory by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just unsealed Tallahassee police testimony of exactly how the 2008 cell phone hunt happened.
This newly released transcript (PDF) provides what is likely the first-ever verbatim account of how stingrays are used in actual police operations. And it shows that stingrays are so accurate, they can pinpoint the very room in which a phone is located.
"Every door and every window"
After learning the phone's general location, Tallahassee cops deployed a vehicle-mounted stingray and cruised the streets. Verizon had already provided them with the phone's unique IMSI identifier, which told the stingray exactly which handset to track. (“Stingray” is a trademarked product manufactured by Florida-based Harris Corporation, though it has since come to be used as a generic term, like Xerox or Kleenex.)
Such searches are controversial in part because stingrays necessarily capture data about all other compatible phones nearby. Christopher Corbitt noted that the gear evaluates "all the handsets in the area" as it searches for its target. When in use, stingrays force a connected phone to transmit at full power—depleting a handset’s battery faster than normal.
"We emulate a cellphone tower,” Tallahassee investigator Corbitt told a court during his testimony about the incident. “So just as the phone was registered with the real Verizon tower, we emulate a tower; we force that handset to register with us. We identify that we have the correct handset and then we’re able to, by just merely direction-finding on the signal emanating from the handset—we’re able to determine a location.”
The vehicle-based tracking eventually pointed to a particular apartment complex called Berkshire Manor, but police still had no idea which apartment might house the phone (and, hopefully, the woman's attacker). Corbitt deployed a team of officers with a handheld stingray to scour the complex.
“Using portable equipment, we were able to actually basically stand at every door and every window in that complex and determine, with relative certainty you know, the particular area of the apartment that that handset was emanating from,” Corbitt told the court.
Such searches are common; Corbitt said he had personally used the equipment “200 or more times” and that it worked with “100 percent” accuracy.
Eventually, Corbitt and his colleagues detected the phone inside apartment 251, the residence of a woman who was also hosting her boyfriend, the suspect James Thomas. Officers knocked on the door; when it opened, one inserted his foot in the opening to keep it from being closed again. Police then conducted a "protective sweep" of the apartment and waited while a search warrant was obtained.
Police did find the victim’s phone, purse, underwear, and ID card at the apartment, but was their "protective sweep" justified in the name of "exigent circumstances?" For investigators, the move had seemed necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence. At trial, the judge agreed and denied Thomas' motion to suppress the search evidence; Thomas was eventually convicted. Late last year, however, a state appellate court overturned that conviction on the grounds that the search had been improper (though without commenting specifically on the use of a stingray). It ordered a new trial.
“Testimony that a cell phone could be flushed down the toilet does not meet the test [of exigent circumstances],” the District Court of Appeal for Florida, First District, found, in a two to one decision.
“Really aggressive and invasive”
In an interview with Ars, ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler said that having this level of detail about a stingray was highly unusual.
“I think it provides a vivid illustration of how invasive this technology is and how the courts regulate its use. It’s one thing to have a generic description of how it’s used; it’s another thing to read a first-hand account of how people are walking up to people’s doors and windows sending powerful signals to cells inside. This transcript illustrates both the fact that bystanders' phones were being tracked and that the police operating the device knew that’s what the device was doing.”
The Tallahassee Police Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
However, TPD Chief Michael DeLeo told the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper in March 2014 that he had ordered a full review of all incidents involving stingrays.
“My first concern as the new chief is what are we doing right now, are we doing it properly, do we need to change how we are doing it,” the paper quoted him as saying.
An initial inquiry of the cases from 2013, he noted, showed that warrants were obtained in 90 percent of the cases; the remainder involved emergency cases.
“What I’m seeing right now is the same process that is applied to any other search by the police department is being followed,” he said.
Still, the main issue that the ACLU has with this technology, as is the case with similar new digital surveillance tools, is that they might function more like "general warrants" than specific searches.
“That is a major concern that we have with this technology,” Wessler added. “We’ve tried to advance two general legal arguments about why the Fourth Amendment has something to say about stingrays: there’s an unsettled question as to whether use of these devices is like a general warrant, in that it could never be used. If there's no way to use a stingray without sweeping up hundreds or thousands of other phones, than maybe it’s not a reasonable search. At the very least, police need to go to a judge to demonstrate probable cause and get a warrant, and the judge needs to provide privacy guidelines.”
Legal experts not involved in the ACLU’s efforts were equally surprised as to the newly revealed information.
“The information that’s most interesting to me is the specific details of how the stingray was used in this case specifically (via two stingray devices, one mounted on a car and one handheld device) and the frequency by which Tallahassee police have used the device,” Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars by e-mail.
“I’ve heard about stingrays attached to drones but seeing them on a typical police car (combined with being used 200 times) suggests the device is far more frequently used and deployed than we’ve known before. The other thing that’s interesting is that the way these devices are configured and physically used shows how invasive they are. They force the phone to use more battery, capture all the information in the area around it and then require police to go from door to door to capture signals. These aren’t simple innocuous devices but really aggressive and invasive ones.” ..Source..w/significant other materials.. by Cyrus Farivar
March 22, 2014
Police phone-tracking contracts often kept secret
Click HERE for a GREAT USA Today Interactive explanation of how stingrays work. See Also: New Hi-Tech Police Surveillance: The “StingRay” Cell Phone Spying Device Note: See "catcher catcher" comment for detecting when stingrays are being used.3-22-2014 National:
Police say Stingray, a suitcase-sized device that pretends it's a cell tower, is useful for catching criminals, but that's about all they'll say.
For example, they won't disclose details about contracts with the device's manufacturer, Harris Corp., insisting they are protecting both police tactics and commercial secrets. The secrecy — at times imposed by non-disclosure agreements signed by police — is pitting obligations under private contracts against government transparency laws. Even in states with strong open records laws, including Florida and Arizona, little is known about police use of Stingray and any rules governing it.
A Stingray device tricks all cellphones in an area into electronically identifying themselves and transmitting data to police rather than the nearest phone company's tower. Because documents about Stingrays are regularly censored, it's not immediately clear what information the devices could capture, such as the contents of phone conversations and text messages, what they routinely do capture based on how they're configured or how often they might be used.
In one of the rare court cases involving the device (From case: "They did not address what the government would do with the cell phone numbers and other information concerning seemingly innocent cell phone users whose information was recorded by the equipment."), the FBI acknowledged in 2011 that so-called cell site simulator technology affects innocent users in the area where it's operated, not just a suspect police are seeking.
Earlier this month, journalist Beau Hodai and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the Tucson Police Department, alleging in court documents that police didn't comply with the state's public-records law because they did not fully disclose Stingray-related records and allowed Harris Corp. to dictate what information could be made public.
Revelations about surveillance programs run by the federal National Security Agency have driven a sustained debate since last summer on the balance between privacy and government intrusion. Classified NSA documents, leaked to news organizations, showed the NSA was collecting telephone records, emails and video chats of millions of Americans who were not suspected of crimes.
That debate has extended to state and local governments. News organizations in Palm Springs, Calif.; Tallahassee, Fla.; Sacramento, Calif., and Pittsburgh are among those that have been denied records about Stingrays or Stingray-like devices, including details of contracts that Harris has with government agencies.
In a response to a records request from the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper about Florida's use of cell-tracking technology, the state's top police agency provided a four-page, heavily censored document signed by a police investigator. The newspaper reported that the document referred to guidelines concerning the purchase of items and sought the department's agreement to the "provisions/content of the Non-Disclosure Agreement."
The Desert Sun of Palm Springs made a similar request to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which said it had to maintain secrecy even though the newspaper found information online about cell site simulators.
And in Sacramento, the local sheriff's office told a TV station it would "be inappropriate for us to comment about any agency that may be using the technology" in light of a Harris non-disclosure agreement.
Many of the requests were part of an effort to investigate the devices by Gannett Co. Inc., which publishes USA Today and owns other newspapers and television stations around the country.
"I don't see how public agencies can make up an agreement with a private company that breaks state law," said David Cuillier, the director of the University of Arizona's journalism school and a national expert on public-records laws. "We can't have the commercial sector running our governments for us. These public agencies need to be forthright and transparent."
A representative for Melbourne, Fla.,-based Harris Corp. declined to comment or elaborate on how the company's agreements comport with open records laws. Court documents in Hodai's case show Harris' agreement required the Tucson city government not to "discuss, publish, release or disclose any information" about its products without the company's written consent.
The agreement also required the city to contact Harris when it receives public-records requests about a "protected product," like a Stingray, so that the company can "challenge any such request in court." The police department declined to comment on Hodai's lawsuit.
He had sought Harris contracts and police emails about how the technology is used. Email records show a Harris contract manager advised a Tucson police sergeant on what records couldn't be released to the public; the manager relied on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, which governs records of the executive branch of the federal government.
Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said there's often a distinction in public-records laws to protect bona fide trade secrets — such as circuit board diagrams — as opposed to broader information like agency policies governing a Stingray's use or purchase agreements. He said police in Florida have declined to tell judges about the use of Stingrays because of non-disclosure agreements.
A December 2013 investigation by USA Today found roughly 1 in 4 law enforcement agencies it surveyed had performed tower dumps, and slightly fewer owned a Stingray. But the report also said 36 additional agencies refused to provide details on their use, with most denying the newspaper's public-records requests. ..Source.. by Jack Gillum
December 8, 2013
USA Today's Interactive: How police scoop up cellphone data
Law Enforcement Using Methods from NSA Playbook
Local police are increasingly able to scoop up large amounts of cellphone data using new technologies, including cell tower dumps and secret mobile devices known as Stingrays. Here's a closer look at how police do it. ..Click for USA Today's Interactive Site .. by USA Today
Indiana State Police tracking cellphones — but won’t say how or why
12-8-2013 Indiana:
This year, the Indiana State Police paid $373,995 for a device that law enforcement personnel have described as a powerful tool in the fight against crime and terrorism.
It could allow investigators in a surveillance vehicle to park in a crowded area and track the movements of anyone nearby with a cellphone and capture the numbers of people’s incoming and outgoing calls and text messages.
All of which concerns civil liberties and open-government groups.
They worry that the technology could be used to violate innocent Hoosiers’ constitutionally protected rights to privacy if proper checks and balances aren’t in place.
But officials at Indiana’s largest police agency aren’t saying what they do with the technology; they’re mum on whose data they’ve collected so far; and they’re not talking about what steps they take to safeguard the data.
Citing concerns that releasing any information would endanger public safety by hindering the agency’s ability to fight crime and combat terrorism, they won’t even say whether they ask a judge for a search warrant before they turn the equipment on.
On a national level, police officials at other agencies say that such secrecy is essential to thwart terror attacks and fight crime. Some said the devices are used in extraordinary circumstances, and only to hunt for a single phone at a time, not to collect data from thousands of callers.
But a joint investigation of the Indianapolis Star and USA Today found instances in which police in some cities across the U.S. used cellphone snooping techniques in less urgent and more questionable ways.
In one case, a South Carolina sheriff obtained cellphone data from an unknown number of people — just to investigate a rash of car burglaries that included the theft of guns from the sheriff’s SUV.
In another instance, Miami police told the city council they intended to collect cellphone data to track protesters at a world trade event.
Civil liberties groups say that giving police the authority to secretly collect bulk cellphone data has unprecedented potential for abuse. Searching cellphone data, they say, ought to require a warrant as is required to search a home or a car.
When presented with The Star’s and USA Today’s findings, Gerry Lanosga of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government said police should be required to provide at least some information about how the technology is being used. Are, he asked, Indiana police agencies using the devices for routine investigations? Or, of more concern to him, might it be used to monitor political activities, such as a tea party rally or a racially sensitive cultural event, such as Indianapolis’ Black Expo? If a suspect walks into a crowded mall, he wonders, are police grabbing — and keeping — data from innocent shoppers? ..Continued.. by Ryan Sabalow, Indianapolis Star
April 14, 2013
Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight
A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.
Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.
Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.
Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.
The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location.
In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location. ...continued... by Kim Zetter
October 22, 2012
In Court: Uncovering Stingrays, A Troubling New Location Tracking Device
10-22-2012 National:
The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief in what will be the first case in the country to address the constitutional implications of a so-called “stingray,” a little known device that can be used to track a suspect’s location and engage in other types of surveillance. We argue that if the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology like this, it must explain the technology to the courts so they can perform their judicial oversight function as required by the Constitution.
The case is highly significant for two reasons. First, it shows that the government is using new types of technology—not just GPS and cell site location records—to track location. Second, it shows that the government is going to great lengths to keep its surveillance practices secret. The government is hiding information about new surveillance technology not only from the public, but even from the courts. By keeping courts in the dark about new technologies, the government is essentially seeking to write its own search warrants. That’s not how the Constitution works.
We filed an amicus brief in the case of Daniel Rigmaiden, who is being criminally prosecuted in federal court in Arizona for allegedly filing fraudulent tax returns. Last fall, the Wall Street Journal reported on the government’s use of the stingray device in Rigmaiden’s case. Stingray is the name of a particular product sold by the Harris Corporation. The more generic term for the device is “IMSI catcher,” in reference to the unique identifier, or International Mobile Subscriber Identity, of wireless devices.
Several aspects about stingrays are important to understand from a privacy perspective. ...continued... by Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU
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