A Police Gadget Tracks Phones? Shhh It’s Secret

There's still a pervasive fear of being the one who let the terrorists win. It's utterly absurd, but when the DHS and FBI are saber rattling and procurement departments have the backing of all the three-letter agencies, town and city officials often show deference. People have been trained to respect authority - not entirely unjustly - but don't realize that we put them in office to be the check we can't be as average citizens.

When people say "nothing will ever be the same" this is what they're talking about.

Edit: we should respect authority, but we shouldn't bow down to it unjustly or allow it to run amok based on FUD.

> How on Earth are our elected officials agreeing to such insane requirements?

Unfortunately, this is what happens when Good People don't get involved in politics. We let the lowest common denominator rule; and they are easily bamboozled by the terror bogeyman.

Word to fellow techies: there are more ways to help your fellow human beings than just doing a "hack for good". Get involved in politics; run for your local office.

Security features are not being obscured, exploits and vulnerabilities are. That, of course, is very valuable if you presume that knowledge of vulnerabilities would lead to them being closed and fixed.

In this particular case, the obscurity seems nonsensical because we know very well how StingRay and IMSI catchers in general operate. The reason the vulnerabilities they exploit are not closed is down to inertia in what is a huge market. That's only half of the equation, though; the other side is that while it's a huge market, it is dominated by very few big global companies that posess the necessary resources to pursue R&D in this very specialized area of technology. This is an area where every opensource solution is easily 10, 20 years behind if there even is one at all, and they run on hardware the same age.

The only curious thing here is why theres been this recent hightened interest in IMSI catchers, as the concept is very old, and why there is a particular interest in obscuring the mode of operation, as again, that is theorethically known. The only explanation I can think of is that advances in hardware have made it possible to produce a small (think truck sized) system that can crack various propietary (and generally old) encryption systems used by mobile phones in realtime and thereby gather more data than you could with an IMSI catcher telling victims to use no encryption. But then with 3G and other systems came improved encryption systems that can certainly not be broken in realtime yet.

The only other explanation I can think of is that Harris has deals with various telcos to get the encryption keys beforehand, which would be worth obscuring.

There is also a possibility here that I'm overthinking all of this and the typical defence contractor that is 20 years behind at all times just thinks IMSI catchers are the hot stuff and their IP they need to protect.