Feds got warrants to use fake cell towers to hunt down Don Lemon's producer
wired.com
wired.com
I definitely think abused loopholes should be reigned in and or eliminated.
In an authoritarian regime like Trump's anyone who is deemed The Other ... gays, liberals, RINOs, ex-cabinet members, are Others and will be hunted by authoritarian a-holes.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This isn't just a GrapheneOS feature so you don't need a new ROM for it. Upstream Android provides this feature. Being enrolled in Google Advanced Protection program even forces it on. It is also available in iOS via Lockdown Mode. Just a great feature and I'm glad its broadly available.
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
Only on SA and even there it is optional: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.36A.pdf
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/03/19/ex-pa...
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
Modern Stingrays / IMSI catchers support all standards up to 5G. They easily exploit 4G networks and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) deployments. The only effective active defenses include (a) using a device locked strictly to 5G Standalone (SA) mode with SUCI (Subscription Concealed Identifier) enabled, preventing fallback to 4G/3G/2G where identity spoofing is trivial, (b) keeping the device in airplane mode most of the time, only going online briefly from unpredictable, shifting locations, and (c) using custom cellular baseband firmware that can reject anomalies (like a tower suddenly appearing too close or lacking neighbor cell lists), though this requires custom building your own solution as ready-made consumer solutions are hard to find. The last one can be achieved with Rayhunter, of course, but it would require some patching to Rayhunter and always carrying a mobile phone connected to the Rayhunter-supported Wi-Fi hotspot device.
Finally, intelligence mercenaries (and therefore LE agencies that contract them) use warrantless network-side exploits like SS7/Diameter attacks to remotely query the core telecom routing system and harvest the location of the tower target's phone is currently using¹ ². This doesn't even require sending legal DD requests to telcos to get target's cell tower.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370809133_Attacks_t...
[2] https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/surveillance-s...
What if Starlink refuses?
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
So who is going down for perjury?
But it occurred to me the other day - pardons aren't some ineffable thing, but rely on the discretionary power of the executive (plus some dubious ability to bind future executives). But if we actually get the rule of law back at some point (ie no more sparkling autocracy aka "unitary executive theory"), then Congress should be able to make a law declaring that all those prosecutions need to be pursued. And it wouldn't be an ex-post-facto law because the illegal actions had already been illegal when they were performed, rather the only legal effect would be declaring that the executive (or ideally an independent agency) must perform the prosecution.
(edit: pardon power is mentioned in the Constitution - "[the President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment". But that would seem to apply to only some of the crimes. And one would hope that if we were at the point where there was a political mandate to take these traitors to task, an impeachment and conviction could be quite swift - there needs to be impeachments and criminal convictions for most of the Supreme Council as well)
Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
A law was passed under President Clinton that made it illegal for protesters to interrupt religious services or impede access to an abortion clinic.
> The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a United States law that was signed by President Bill Clinton in May 1994, which prohibits the following three things: the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion, the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship...
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Access_to_Clinic_E...
We've seen anti-abortion protesters found guilty and sentenced to prison under the same law in the past.
> Six pro-life activists convicted of federal FACE Act charges, face over a decade in prison
https://ewtn.co.uk/article-six-pro-life-activists-convicted-...
What if it is a mob of religious worshipers that are participating in the mob?
I guess we're raiding the homes of Congress members we simply disagree with, so Constitutional rights don't carry as much weight anymore.
A church really isnt any different, their business is worship and offering a peaceful place for contemplation, reflaction and prayer. If you disrupt that they can and should ask you to leave and should you refuse that becomes the crime of tresspass.
If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
> If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
I’m asking questions to better understand.
In fact there's history of black churches, synagogues, mosques and Sikh temples have been attacked, bombed, disrupted, and otherwise interfered with. You don't have the right to disrupt a girl's baseball team practice on a campus either. The Klan can't march through your living room.
This isn't hard to understand.
So you know, cherrypick these things at your peril.
The right to protest doesn’t give you or anyone the right to do so on private property and to also interrupt with religious practices.
Documenting yourself doing the above doesn’t allow you to get away with it.
In the trespass charges, local government could have handled it without costing you as much. It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars using dragnet surveillance, violating the rights of others caught in their net. I believe the Feds are only wasting money on this because of who was involved, not the crime at hand.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Interfering with religious worship is a federal offense, so I don’t think it could just be handled by the local government.
> Interfering with religious worship is a federal offense
Pretty sure it's a misdemeanor offense in some states, but is not a federal offense. Open to reading the federal statute if you can cite one.
Thank you for being so civil, these discussions tend to get very heated very quickly.
You are right that it is a misdemeanor unless there was an aggravating factor but I don’t think that has been alleged. But it does seem to be a federal offense nonetheless if someone does violate the code below.
18 U.S.C. § 247
>intentionally obstructs, by force or threat of force, including by threat of force against religious real property, any person in the enjoyment of that person’s free exercise of religious beliefs, or attempts to do so
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/247
Don Lemon does seem to be charged with Conspiracy Against Rights (18 U.S.C. § 241) and FACE Act Violation (18 U.S.C. § 248). Given that 247 deals with interstate commerce which wouldn’t make sense like you said.
This coincidentally makes it much easier for private parties to get away with illegal discrimination
But of course to actually make any positive progress for civil liberties, it is necessary for the grassroots to hold their own politicians accountable rather than merely cheering when it is their team's at bat. Meaning it is currently the responsibility of the grassroots right to be calling out these flagrant abuses of power. They were easily easily recognizing when it was being done to them, but now they mostly seem silent. Which is the same condemnation as your comment makes, but applied to the tribe who can actually act act the moment.
Depends on what you meant by "it" here, the prosecutors' have already conceded that at least some of their claims in the affidavit were false, so I would agree that it's hardly settled. (I haven't watched the video nor would recognize Richardson).
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
"a cell-site simulators"?
There, I fixed it for you. Now you can freely read and engage with the content of the article.