Stingrays and Dirtboxes: how cops can secretly track your phone
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
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 without good reason and without responsible usage.
I hope more people will follow your example and question their work. Not only at Harris Corporation, but in every part of what is called surveillance capitalism.
Is there really a shortage of people willing and able to do this kind of work for these companies and government agencies? I'm asking because I truly don't know.
And if not, could we think of some other ways people in these positions could exert some influence for change, even if it's only after they leave those jobs?
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'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 outside of them.
"The effect of corporate reputation on staffing costs"?
A quick googling implies "yes"?
https://www.igniyte.co.uk/blog/how-a-bad-corporate-reputatio....
Perhaps you missed
>[...], we need more more people like you
That person will be their second choice after all.
The other option is scorched earth similar to the recent news articles where there were blog posts publicly shaming the company. Wondering what kind of in between options are available. Anonymous posts are a start at least to get the inquisitive types to look in that direction and/or add some weight to previous anonymous posts.
Edit: just read further down the list, and see others have essentially asked the same thing
- 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.
Morality is a matter of opinion, and, I believe, pretty much independent of legality.
That means a law can be both immoral and legal, depending on your perspective.
Policing technology is a constantly evolving marketplace and technologies that strike some as immoral frequently are tested in court where their legality is determined.
Many folks weighing in see the act of developing Stingray technology as an immoral act, and it seems that thereby, those who engage in such development are immoral people.
In my opinion, labeling others as immoral for engaging in something you don't approve of is a double edged sword and the more you wield it, the more jeopardy you put yourself in. Anyone who works for a mainstream technology company can have that same finger pointed at them for some facet of their employer's actions.
People who believe that this technology should not be deployed would find it just, if not moral, to pursue a political change rather than shaming those who see a valid purpose for what they are developing.
This makes absolutely no sense. If it is a matter of fact, it should be independently provable not require courts to decide.
Legality is supposed to be the public's opinion of the morality of an action, but in reality it is the ruling class' opinion of how the action impacts them.
An employee knowingly assisting their company commit immoral acts should try to stop them, though a concern about you or your families well-being is a legitimate reason to just try and walk away. Don't delude yourself into thinking tools will be used legally so it is acceptable.
Does that mean that all legal acts are also moral?
It makes plenty of sense once you realize that it's a fact that if a court decides something is illegal, the government may use its monopoly of force to enforce it. Don't confuse scientific fact with legal fact. Also don't confuse legal fact with a court's opinion as to whether the law was actually violated.
"A low level enforcement employee used unauthorized tools to locate our suspect. He has been reprimanded. However, once we surveilled the suspect we had the evidence to prove he was guilty unrelated to any prior cause. Case closed."
Mistakes were made but lies were never told.
We're truly living in the panopticon
If you want to access the home router networks, you still need to pay for an account.
> To reduce this privacy risk, iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 include a feature that periodically changes the MAC address your device uses with each Wi-Fi network. This randomized MAC address is your device's private Wi-Fi address for that network—until the next time it joins with a different address.
iOS 14 is in beta, but has been pretty solid for me. https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
[Starting] In Android 10, MAC randomization is enabled by default for client mode, SoftAp, and Wi-Fi Direct.
https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-mac-ran...
Imagine being denied your Second Amendment rights because you went to a perfectly legal political protest the previous year and you're now on a list that you can't get off of.
Following examples of different behaviour from the past 20 years:
The US can kidnap you, Ship you off to Guantanamo, Torture you, Assasinate you with a drone based missile
I read an interview with CBP folks where they consider the Portland protestors "enemy combatants" which is the same designation as "civilian killed by drone strike" in the middle east
From a low level, more likely perspective, they might leak your information to white supremacist groups, and then choose not to press charges when they do something bad to you? This is assuming you're black, mind you.
How do you know the feds don't own it?
Google does track your wifi and have amassed a huuuuuge library of SSID name, freq, mac addresses and this is what they use alongside IP geo location for google maps and other services.
It's good and also bad. And if you restrict these things, you "look" like a bot so you have increased friction to accessing information!
The looking like a bot, makes sense I get that and ddos prevention but it goes in a circle, doesn't it?
iPhone is not the answer either, but an iphone w/ no google apps doesn't mean you're free from the ecosystem.
This doesn't really exist. It's not like a Linux distro, each specific device requires a specific device-tree, a separate image. postmarketOS and others are trying to change this.
I don't have a use for such a thing, but if I did, I think I would get an Apple iPod touch which has no cellular capabilities at all ...
0: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gr...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/nsa-can-reportedly-trac...
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.
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 powering it on, it takes ~35-40 seconds for a phone to get to the lock screen. Out of curiosity I tested several more handsets with similar results. I can only explain that difference by phone not being completely powered off when the battery is inserted unless it does not have any juice at all.
My current phone has an old battery and can go directly from 40% to 70% charge in one refresh cycle (10-30 secs?) after plugging in to my ikea charger.
(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...)
The easier way is to compromise the phone and have it pretend to be off.
Could the non-removable battery "feature" of newer phones be a result of governments requiring the manufacturers to do this?
I guess journalists' disinterest in invasive surveillance is because reporting on it is harder, than reprinting the same 7 headlines as every other news org.
It's been a bit better since Edward Snowden dragged news orgs away from authoritarian-friendly journalism and into the surveillance age. However, journalists still seem to do about the bare minimum, while their reporting gives LEO/Gov endless benefit of the doubt.
No one is going to know unless the people who worked there reach out.
https://komonews.com/archive/fbi-behind-mysterious-spy-aircr...
https://bgr.com/2015/06/03/fbi-dirtbox-stingray-spy-plane-pr...
Can android, iOS, or an open phone os prevent 2g communication?
Is there an example of that? I can't imagine how reverse engineering anything would get a hefty lawsuit thrown at you. Maybe if you were to publish the results with your name under it, but just the act of reverse engineering?
Luckily, most of our computers aren't easily remotely connectable, but phone modems are another story.
edit: You gotta be kidding me with this formatting. Replace backslashes with asterisks.
∗#∗#4636#∗#∗
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/1468/do-you-know...
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.
Some android installs can turn off 2g here: Settings -> Mobile Networks -> Network Mode
However - 2G & 3g networks appear to be going away. https://1ot.mobi/resources/blog/a-complete-overview-of-2g-3g...
AT&T killed 2g in 2017 https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-kills-2g-cutting-off-original...
T-Mobile is in the process of turning off 2g https://www.alarmgrid.com/blog/t-mobile-and-rogers-2g-networ...
Nothing newer gives you any sort of control, as far as I know. Would love to learn more.
An active mode IMSI capture device (eg, a Stingray) can:
Extracting stored data such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity ("IMSI") numbers and Electronic Serial Number ("ESN")
Writing cellular protocol metadata to internal storage
Forcing an increase in signal transmission power
Forcing an abundance of radio signals to be transmitted
Forcing a downgrade to an older and less secure communications protocol if the older protocol is allowed by the target device, by making the Stingray pretend to be unable to communicate on an up-to-date protocol
Interception of communications data or metadata
Using received signal strength indicators to direction find the cellular device[9] Conducting a denial of service attack
Oop, near forgot the reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_and_further_educatio...
Radio jamming for either general denial of service purposes or to aid in active mode protocol rollback attacks
I think perhaps you meant the opposite? You have about 30min to edit your comment...
According to several other comments of theirs, discomfort drove them out. So I didn’t believe I was incorrect. It’s been awhile since I commented, so I hadn’t even noticed any downvotes.
Picture here: https://imgur.com/a/P1nPSD2
Turns out that "Stingray" is also the name of a system for air-blown optic fiber installation.
Personally I would have avoided the reuse of that particular name for anything in telecommunications because it has somewhat dark connotations already!
Authorities can still set up open SSIDs to capture limited information about phones, but the "fly an airplane over" capture model doesn't work well with Wi-Fi.
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 still seize you and overcome those obstacles at will.
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.
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.
Also, I found this SIM card which seems to be doing IMEI randomization:
https://omertadigital.com/blogs/news/encrypted-sim-cards-wha...
One of members of numerous 6G working groups is Huawei. If you remember, they recently proposed to replace the whole IP protocol with one where every packet must be cryptosigned by ISP.
This SIM feels like a complete BS. IMSI is managed by the phone, not SIM.
Inside it! They said something like "these sharks are used to cuts and scrapes and heal quickly."
It's no wonder people don't immediately associate their phone with a locating beacon.
From what they were saying, it emitted a ping every ten minutes, wasn’t entirely clear if it was acoustic or radio. Shark didn’t seem to mind.
I’m not sure we “need” to improve the general understanding. I mean how many ppl know how to change their own car tires or oil? If anything you just keep creating niches for ppl to make livings in.
In my experience, what follows it are less rights, less ability, greater compliance & increased malleability (eg: susceptibility to "election meddling").
edit: switched average to median.
Averages will skew with large outliers on either side. E.g. if Bezos and I are alone in a room together, the average person in that room has $95B dollars. (Granted, in an n=2 situation, the median isn't meaningful either)
Fund schools.
Provide mandatory technical and privacy education.
> I'd also like for people to have the basic knowledge required to
Fund schools.
Hire tech capable teachers that care. Funding only works if it's toward this specific end.
I know teachers who make < $30k/year and have to pay out-of-pocket for supplies. Good luck attracting tech talent with that salary.
So, again: fund schools.
Funding incapable teachers can't advance your goal. As long as the plan is "Fund schools." and nothing at all follows the period "." then students will have properly funded incapable teachers.
Source: Father to 5, who've attended 25 years of well funded and less funded schools. That's well over 100 teachers I've met with & learned about. Zero teachers understood technology on a level that would enable them to teach the nuances of technology safety. Many (if not most) would have been handicapped by the misunderstandings they held about tech.
Just funding schools doesn't mean teachers will be paid
To be fair, people have trouble concluding they can be tracked or found when they sign in to a service and are asked repeatedly if said service can have access to their location, then use said service to check in or announce their location publicly.
In the specific case of tracking/spying I'd imagine lots of people (not most, but many) have considered the possibility, then dismissed it without looking into it any further because it seems like something that would obviously already be illegal, and assuming things that seem like they ought to already be illegal are already illegal often gets one to the correct conclusion—just not this time. Those sorts probably assume that if a law enforcement agency gets a warrant or something then they might start tracking locations using cell phones, but not that the cell phone company is already doing that 100% of the time to everyone, since, again, it really seems like something that'd be illegal. I think a lot of the "information economy" falls in this blind spot—that credit card companies would be selling your purchase history or google/your-ISP would be recording every single website you visit also seem, intuitively, like things that'd be very illegal, for example.
I suppose similar reasoning is how we arrive at our judgements on most questions of legality, personally, when deciding how to behave and what to worry about others doing day-to-day. Like, I definitely can't show you the statute that says driving the wrong way on the highway is illegal, rather than just a very bad idea, and I'm not sure I've even ever been told specifically that that is illegal let alone done the research to makes sure it's illegal—but nonetheless, I'm pretty sure it is. So, I would guess some people surprised that their cell phones spy on them in certain ways are more surprised that they are being used that way and not that they could be used that way.
[EDIT] to stretch the analogy further, if I were surprised to learn that some delivery company had found a way to reduce delivery times by driving the wrong way on the highway, the fact that vehicles are technically capable of driving the wrong way on the highway wouldn't be the part that I found surprising.
In 1990, if you walked to the store without telling anyone where you were going, you were basically a ghost as far as anyone else was concerned. In 2020, even if you leave all of your digital electronics at home, you will probably be detected by someone else's electronics.
Earlier Harris equip did that by forcing 2g mode but 2g is being turned off: https://1ot.mobi/resources/blog/a-complete-overview-of-2g-3g...
I'm less familiar with the capabilities of current IMEI catchers tho.
Even if the carriers switch off all their 2G towers (which happened here in .au years back), I wonder how many handsets will still happily connect to a Stingray-type device that offers it a 2G connection?
The odds of someone targeting you (just for kicks) aren't that high.
But don't tell Glenn Greenwald that cause then he has to go find something else to scare you with, to capture your attention in our current useless "state of fear" preserving info tsunami ecosystem.
But anyway lets do the math...
The US has 200 cops per million. Lets say 1% of that million are born douchebags and there is another 1% who have turned douchebagy for whatever reason.
So you have 200 cops to deal with 20000 bad guys per million. So in general they have enough going on keeping them occupied.
Now even if you assume they don't spend any time doing their job and all of them spend all their time fixating on you and no one else, the chances of them picking on you out of the million other options are still pretty low.
What makes it even lower is if you apply the 2% douchebag rule to the cops themselves, you get probably 2 bad apples in that 200.
But to indulge you lets apply it also to anyone who has access to the same privacy violating tech - bank managers, google engineers, telco engineers, the military, rich ppl etc. Keep adding whatever category you feel like and applying the 2% rule. You wont raise the odds too badly.
The scarier proposition to me is bulk collection and latent analysis.
On the other hand, if you are known to criticise police actions, it's likely that they will be targetting you. The BLM leaders probably haven't connected to a real cellphone tower in years
It seems that police use cell phones for internal communications pretty extensively -- Even when there are encrypted radio systems or channels.
My guess is that UX of encrypted radio is generally terrible, and that it's a nightmare to distribute keys to all multiple agencies that might be operating in an area. So departments configure encrypted radio for internal use, but when there's large scale activity they need to fall back to cellphones for guaranteed un-eavesdroppable comms
The disruption to service would also be very expensive to businesses which would be encourage flight.
"And we lost this multi-million dollar contract sale because the cell service to reach us anywhere went down for three days, a worse case for the company than even if rioters burnt down the whole office. Why are we located in this shithole again?"
What problem are you trying to solve, exactly?
Not everyone values free speech and rights to association
If you're American, I wonder what your thoughts are about the Boston Tea Party.
Is there anything one can carry around that acts like "phone" but is somehow less trackable?
And if so, where would one get such lists?
I imagine that's why the various governments want to bad Huawei -- with Huawei in the base infrastructure, more communications will use E2E encryption and the government mitm attacks will stop working
That way the stingray offers no advantage over the protesters; law enforcement and protesters get the next chapter at exactly the same time, and no single protestor or group of protestors may be targeted to disrupt the decision-making process.
That pushes law enforcement either back to pre-protest prevention measures (which won't work for a spontaneous protest like BLM), or to disrupt internet connectivity altogether (which, for the Ghandi-level protest has its own economic implications).