“Stingray” Towers: How the Feds Intercept Cell Phone Calls
From 2011
So, you pull out your cell phone to make a call. The call goes through. You chat.
What you did not know was this: the cell phone tower that you thought was owned by your carrier was in fact a decoy. It was what is known as a “stingray.” It functions like a cell phone relay tower, but it is owned and operated by the U.S. government.
This was reported in Wired, the high-tech magazine.
You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.
What about your Fourth Amendment rights? As Nancy Pelosi would say, “Are you serious?”
The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.
At some point, encryption software for cell phones will get popular. People will not chat openly on cell phones. Maybe such an app will become a must-have killer app. Anyway, I hope so.
It gets worse. Your cell phone carrier can install a piece of software on your phone that lets the government monitor everything you say, not just when you are calling. This is called a roving bug. A federal judge says this is legal. You can read about this here.
As always, your privacy is slipping away.
For more examples, read the article. It offers some shockers.
Continue reading on Wired.
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Posted on December 19, 2011. The original is here.
Update
The use of the devices has been frequently funded by grants from the Department of Homeland Security. The Los Angeles Police Department used a Department of Homeland Security grant in 2006 to buy a StingRay for "regional terrorism investigations". However, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the "LAPD has been using it for just about any investigation imaginable."In addition to federal law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies, StingRays have in recent years been purchased by local and state law enforcement agencies. . . .
The American Civil Liberties Union, commonly referred to as the ACLU, confirmed that local police have cell site simulators in Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Missouri, New Mexico, Georgia, and Massachusetts. State police have cell site simulators in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Local and state police have cell site simulators in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, and New York. The police use of cell site simulators is unknown in the remaining states. However, many agencies do not disclose their use of StingRay technology, so these statistics are still potentially an under-representation of the actual number of agencies. According to the most recent information published by the American Civil Liberties Union, 72 law enforcement agencies in 24 states own StingRay technology in 2017. Since 2014, these numbers have increased from 42 agencies in 17 states.