Feds Put Fake Cell Towers On Planes, Spied On Tons Of Innocent Americans

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Nov. 14, 2014

The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the DOJ has been spying on tons of innocent Americans by putting fake mobile phone towers on airplanes and scooping up all sorts of data from people who thought they were connecting to regular mobile phone towers.
The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices--some known as "dirtboxes" to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them--which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

The technology in the two-foot-square device enables investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location, these people said.
We have, of course, reported for a while now on so-called Stingray devices, which mimic mobile phone towers on the ground (and have noted that Stingray is just one brand of a few such devices, known as IMSI catchers), but putting them on special planes and flying them around would allow law enforcement agencies to get a lot more information on a lot more people. Given that law enforcement efforts like this are supposed to be narrowly targeted towards those actually suspected of breaking the law, this seems like a massive 4th Amendment abuse, creating mass surveillance programs for law enforcement with little real oversight or control.

While it may not be entirely surprising that this is happening, it is yet another surveillance program being done with zero public transparency, zero public debate and zero public input. That's a huge concern as we've seen time and time again how such programs get abused.

And, while the WSJ doesn't come out and say it, it certainly sounds like it got this info from a concerned whistleblower inside the US Marshals Service:
Within the Marshals Service, some have questioned the legality of such operations and the internal safeguards, these people said. They say scooping up of large volumes of information, even for a short period, may not be properly understood by judges who approve requests for the government to locate a suspect's phone.

Some within the agency also question whether people scanning cellphone signals are doing enough to minimize intrusions into the phone system of other citizens, and if there are effective procedures in place to safeguard the handling of that data.
As such programs keep getting disclosed, think of how many such other programs there are that we just don't know about?













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