EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Cell-Tracking Spy Planes | Hacker News Reader

EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Cell-Tracking Spy Planes

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208 pointsdeclan21 comments

This silence on FOIA requests is in line with what the FBI has been instructing local law enforcement to do[1]. Here's the relevant FBI letter:

    In the event that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension receives a
    request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (5 USC 552) or an equivalent
    state or local law, the civil or criminal discovery process, or other judicial,
    legislative, or administrative process, to disclose information concerning the
    Harris Corporation [REDACTED] the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension will
    immediately notify the FBI of any such request telephonically and in writing in
    order to allow sufficient time for the FBI to seek to prevent disclosure through
    appropriate channels.

This is a written policy that FOIA requests should by default be resisted. This combined with the change from a mission of "law enforcement" to "national security"[2] signifies a huge shift in the FBI away from a rule-of-law culture to a rule-of-man culture.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/fbi-really-doesnt...

[2]: http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/fbis-main-mission-now-not....

I agree with your sentiment but not with the idea that this is "a huge shift". The FBI was founded by J Edgar Hoover after all.

"the most transparent administration in history" https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=the+most+transparent+administ...

Has anyone ever quantified the dollars spent per criminal captured for these kinds of programs? I mean flying a small plane, using proprietary technology, agents' time... I'm guessing this is in the millions of dollars, but who are we catching with this?

The roughly one in a hundred citizens imprisoned in the US.

People who steal cellphones: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-...

Could one use some form of cell tower white-list as a countermeasure to stingray? Or is it a purely passive attack?

This is being done with IMSI Catcher detector [1] using machine learning to learn which towers you commonly connect to, then warning you when:

a) a new cell tower ID has suddenly appeared at a specific lat/long when it wasn't there before

b) the encryption/protocol changes or gets degraded

[1] https://secupwn.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/

Furthermore, since these IMSI catchers are mounted on planes, can't they be detected by the fact that they are moving?

Couldn't a stingray mimic a whitelisted tower? Much like your computer can use a different MAC address at your whim.

Whether alone (with user movement and precise clocking) or in a coordinated group effort, devices might begin to triangulate tower location and check this against historical and geographic data.

It would be a bit ironic, if/when triangulation begins to "work" "in the other direction".

It already is: Mozilla has been building apps¹ that allow users to contribute to a shared database of the locations of cellphone towers and WiFi APs.

The idea is to allow GPS-less devices to find where they are, but it could certainly be used to identify new towers in places which had already been mapped.

EDIT: It seems there's also opencellid.org, which actually allows you to download the full database.

¹ https://location.services.mozilla.com/apps

It is theoretically possible to avoid that via cryptography but I doubt the cell phone protocols include that.

3G provides some cryptographic basis for this, but you might not have a UI on your device to require 3G or to warn you about roaming (which could defend at least against early generations of IMSI catchers).

Why are these planes even required? Cant the US government simply get this information directly from the phone carriers? Given all of the power the NSA seems to have, surely they have this capability already.

I suspect that the planes are a lot more fun...

I'm not sure that carriers keep the IMSI tower association records (vs. call or data transmission logging information). This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain, since a given phone is always associated with at least one tower and may be re-negotiating its association thousands of times per day.

I believe they do. I'm hardly an expert, but on the Serial podcast, which details a murder investigation, cellphone tracking gathered from the carrier is introduced as evidence, and the events are described as "pings" (not calls, and probably not data since this was in the early 90s). I don't think they actually triangulate the position, they just know the tower the cellphone "pinged" and the approximate distance based on signal power.

This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain

Not really. An IMSI takes about 7 bytes, plus a few for location, let's say 12 bytes. Multiplied by, say, 2000 pings a day per user, by 300M users, that's just 7TBs/day, for all carriers.

Facebook alone deals with 600TBs/day.

Deleted comment

> going to the telecom company with a sweeping warrant

Would it be a sweeping warrant? If they are only targeting 1 person/phone, then it sounds like a very specific warrant. Plus, the phone companies wouldn't give them all the data ("the whole haystack"), the phone companies would only give them the specific data to that person.

I imagine intercepting it yourself means you need less cooperation from private entity, less paperwork (or paper-trail), and the ability to react to stuff being said/sent in real-time.

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