Cellphone Spy Tools Have Flooded Local Police Departments by George Joseph.
From the post:
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In December 2015, The Intercept released a catalogue of military surveillance tools, leaked by an intelligence community source concerned by this perceived militarization of domestic law enforcement. The catalogue included tools that could track thousands of people’s cellphones at once, extract deleted text messages from captured phones, and monitor ongoing calls and text messages. Following this news, last April, CityLab began sending public records requests to the top fifty largest police across the country asking for purchasing orders and invoices over 2012 to 2016 related to any of the devices listed in the catalogue. (Note: The fifty largest list is based on data released in 2010 from the Police Pay Journal, and thus does not include some departments now among the top fifty largest).Of the fifty departments sent public records requests, only eight claimed not to have acquired any spy tools leaked by The Intercept’s intelligence source. At least twelve have admitted to having cellphone interception devices, and nineteen have admitted to having cellphone extraction devices. The responses, security-based rejections, and outstanding requests still being processed for CityLab suggest that, at a minimum, thirty-nine of the fifty departments have acquired at least some of these military-grade surveillance tools over the last four years. (Click here to see the original cache of documents, or scroll down to the bottom of this article)
… (emphasis in original)
George details the results of their investigation by class of software/hardware and provides the original documents supporting his analysis.
Later in the post:
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As these military-grade spy tools pour down into local police departments across the country, legal experts are concerned that their use isn’t in keeping with individuals’ due process rights. Law enforcement practices vary dramatically across the country. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police could not extract data from an arrested individual’s cellphone without obtaining a warrant. But the ruling itself did not give clear guidance on how broad police warrant requests could be designed, and such decisions are still left up to law enforcement discretion in many cases.
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I puzzle over the “lack of rules for digital surveillance” discussions.
The police/government has:
- Lied and/or concealed its use of digital surveillance software/hardware
- Has evaded/resisted any meaningful oversight of its surveillance activities
- Collects data indiscriminately
- etc.,
Yet, fashioning rules for the use of digital surveillance is all the rage.
Why will government agencies fear to break digital surveillance rules when they have systematically broken the law in the past?
Personal privacy depends on defeating military grade surveillance tools.
Not military grade but an item for testing your surveillance defeating work:
Build Your Own GSM Base Station For Fun And Profit.
I don’t keep up on the hardware side of things so please comment with more recent hardware/software for surveillance or defeating the same.