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Comment by fooey | Hacker News Reader

The problem is knowing a Stingray was ever used in the first place. It's been documented that the police routinely utilize parallel construction when they discover things through illegal means in the first place.

https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-pro...

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Seems like the police casually breaking the law is the core of the issue. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The ACLU.

edit: to be clear, I think the government itself could really do with reeling it back a bit as well - but this very news is a reminder that some people are watching out for the watched.

The ACLU was mostly mute on these issues during the prior administration, when these abuses became routine.

Just a couple of links to disprove this troll:

https://www.aclu.org/cases/florida-stingray-foia (2014)

https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-florida-v-city-sarasota-stin... (2014)

https://www.aclu.org/cases/foia-request-justice-department-p... (2014)

... and tons more, at https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles?topi...

Providing information is fine, but please omit the name-calling.

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

The first two are state cases, not federal, as are many of the others. I would have thought that "the administration" would clearly refer to Federal cases.

Latin for "Who will guard the guards themselves?".

Alternatively also translated as “Who watches the watchmen?”

And even without knowing Latin the sentence is recognizable :) At least to me, when I looked at it, it looked very similar to that. Guards, watchmen, custodians. Guarding, watching, being in custody of. And I know from other languages like French words like "qui" (though I don't speak French either, only know a select few words).

The judiciary branch.

That very same judiciary branch has a secret court that rubber stamps almost all mass surveillance requests given to them.

Or when challenged they drop the charges as to not disclose the true "source".

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/prosecutors-drop...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/alleged-getaway-...

Almost all airports permanently run a Stingray like device

Care to elaborate more on this?

> For two months last year, researchers at the University of Washington paid drivers of an unidentified ridesharing service to keep custom-made sensors in the trunks of their cars, converting those vehicles into mobile cellular data collectors. They used the results to map out practically every cell tower in the cities of Seattle and Milwaukee—along with at least two anomalous transmitters they believe were likely stingrays, located at the Seattle office of the US Customs and Immigration Service, and the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

source: https://www.wired.com/2017/06/researchers-use-rideshares-sni...

> At Trudeau airport, Radio-Canada detected the catcher's presence through the use of a CryptoPhone — a cellphone look-alike that emits red alerts when a fake antenna tries to catch its signal. Several red alerts were received, throughout the afternoon and early evening, in the section of the airport for U.S. departures.

source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/trudeau-airport-spyi...

> The devices are operated out of at least five U.S. airports, "covering most of the U.S. population". It is unclear whether the U.S. Marshals Service requests court orders to use the devices.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbox_(cell_phone)

That's super interesting. Those are international departure airports. I wonder if what they're doing is sniffing for phone numbers of interest showing up in the international terminal indicating a 'person of interest' is trying to leave or arrive. I assume people trying to leave or enter the country without permission might have false ID and a false name on their ticket but they probably don't think about changing their phone number.

Once you have a number pop up on the Stingray you distribute that person's photo to all the border agents.

Or the reverse.

Since airports are one of the very few places where you can positively identify a certain person was there at a certain time, you can combine a passenger list with a device list to get some soft matches to previously unlinked devices.

Combine that linked metadata with other dragnet metadata, and you're going to learn a lot.

That should mean they can also correlate who picks up or drops off whom... so even if you aren't traveling, you're in their database linked to someone who is.

Combined with APNR and patterns over time, yes.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Probably used for things like terrorist watch lists, national security ventures, etc... highly doubtful it's used for domestic law enforcement purposes. The US wants to know when foreign nationals of interest attempt to enter/exit the country.

Very naive of you to think that.

What is the difference between a permanent stingray and a cell tower?

One actually provides cell service.

Stingrays provide cell service.

There are issues with some units that downgrade your data signal to a slower connection than you would get with a normal cell tower.. but otherwise you would never know the difference.

The person you are replying to is actually making an excellent point as most current methods of detecting stingrays are heavily reliant on the "tower" moving or changing.

The tv show The Wire was a documentary after all.

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