Police Stingray Tools Can Indeed Record Calls
wired.com
wired.com
Are Cell Phone calls encrypted, does this mean the police devices have the universal decryption keys ?
If the police devices have such decryption abilities then it is probably safe to assume they have leaked and various criminals possess this as well.
Thankfully those in power have the best interests of the citizenry at heart ;) /s
Back when I had an old 2G featurephone, I inherited the exact same model from a friend (Sprint/CDMA). I used QPST to clone my ESN onto that one, to have a handy backup device.
When both were on, calling my number would ring both (I only ever checked this with them in the same cell). Picking up both I would hear audio in both until one of them "won". The ESN can't be considered any kind of secret, so the observed behavior makes it clear that there is no meaningful encryption.
We've had two generations of mobile protocols since then, but with Qualcomm et al's attitude of "lock things down harder" rather than Kerckhoff's principle and open review, I doubt security has gotten any better.
If you want meaningful mobile privacy, the only way to achieve this is with separate application/baseband processors that communicate over an auditable bus (so not a broken-by-design Qualcomm integrated chipset), with encryption done on the trusted application processor. The easiest way to realize this is using a mifi+vpn+voip. Note that this still leaves your location fully tracked, but most every use of the cell network will do that.
"... exploits a vulnerability in the 2G protocol. Phones using 2G don’t authenticate cell towers, which means that a rogue tower can pass itself off as a legitimate cell tower. But because 3G and 4G networks have fixed this vulnerability, the stingray will jam these networks to force nearby phones to downgrade to the vulnerable 2G network to communicate." [article]
Is it possible to disable 2G ?
Privacy and Civil Liberties seem less popular arguments to oppose the 'keep the public vulnerable' policy than public safety.
Speculative Fiction :
"It seems the evil-doers procured the Celebrity's schedule by eavesdropping their calls with a Stingray.
During the kidnapping they jammed the cell communications of the security team and trivially evaded pursuit by tracking the cells of the pursuit squad with the Stingray device.
You mean by spying on our citizens we have made everyone of us unsafe ?
Yes Madam President, our monopoly on the backdoors was only temporary. "
It occurs to me that the police themselves use cell communications.
Are they similarly vulnerable to tracking / intercepts ?
If so then this is a staggeringly short sighted policy.
"Jamming" also could imply willful interference (not protocol-exploiting, radio) which is very illegal.
Short sighted policy policing puts everyone at risk.
It seems quaintly cyberpunk that the last bastion of civil liberties is a checkbox in a sub > sub > settings menu.
Of course the phone menu may be a lie.
Snowden's leaks suggest that juicy exploits are kept unfixed at the behest of the surveillance state.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07563v1.pdf
"Practical attacks against privacy and availability in 4G/LTE mobile communication systems"
As long as law enforcement is doing this "without their knowledge" then they may not have to provide a backdoor to their core systems. Then the carriers can make a bold stand, say all the right things whenever they need, and express outrage at the idea that they'd share data.
Because that's what happened to Nacchio.
e.g.: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/41513/hacking/low-cost-i...
The way things currently are anyone with a cheap setup can start intercepting your calls using a MITM attack.
Related: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_further_d...
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/258209-irs-head-...
They digitized it and made it harder but I am sure with a bit of work one could listen in.
and wtf does the IRS have its own criminal law enforcement branch vs all the other ones at their disposal