I've lived in Fort Worth, TX for about a year. I was already aware of the existence of these devices. I had no clue that my local PD was spending such an insane amount of money on surveillance. It's also worth mentioning that our population is <i>only</i> 792K.<p>I've lived in Texas most of life and in general I think the people here are great. However, Texans do have a tendency to blindly support anything the Military and Police want to do, while at the same time complaining about big government.<p>I guess I'd better start bringing this up in my circles. I don't think many people are fully aware of what's going on.
So what is the move if you are caught with your pants down, and a LEO is requesting access to your actual phone? Does a factory restore wipe all data, or is in necessary to wipe, fill up with bunk data, wipe again?<p>I don't know about everyone else but my phone is has data including me talking about controversial opinions, intimate photos, and various other data that I would not want anyone else to have.
'Cellebrite "Pro Series" purchases all appear to include the firm’s Cloud Analyzer tool, which extracts “private-user cloud data” by "utilizing login information extracted from the mobile device.'<p>Chilling that is can be done without a warrant e.g. arrested protesters or to citizens crossing the US border.
“Criminals tend to try and make tracking their data more difficult, so this kind of mass collection of telephony data will more easily find our political activists, our civil society leaders, and just regular people,” he says. “If the courts—if the public—knew how powerful these tools were, they would move to restrict their use.”<p>The mass surveillance system is about control, not security, and I think time and time again that is being proven. On the constitutional post-warrant data anlysis tools I have these issues:<p>1) This is local law enforcement wising up and playing a similar game to the big three letters.<p>2) I have concerns about the privacy protections for those associated with suspects, and see ripe abuse potential for guilt by association or even "using data from a warrant to get the data on the person you really want but can't get the warrant" type of situations.<p>3) I have concerns with the level of data sharing between the LEA's, and the post shared protections of said data.<p>4) I have concerns with private companies providing these services because private companies often have sub-par data security practices, and often have strange third-party data selling loopholes so they often end up "scrubbing" data and selling it, but most of us know it's not that hard these days to "unscrub" that kind of data.<p>All of this is assuming we are just talking about constitutional methods too. What I find even more insidious and dangerous is the unconstitutional tools like imsicatchers and others being used for parallel construction.<p>Bottom line is this: the LEA's and LEO's need to remember that they swear an oath:<p>"I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;"<p>The problem as I see it, is that I tracked down the law that punishes congress for a few specific violations of oath of office (5 U.S. Code § 7311), but I have yet to find any law for punishing people in the executive branch for violation of oath of office. If anyone knows of such, please let me know. IANAL, so perhaps 5 U.S. Code § 7311 could apply to the executive and I just misunderstand it.
Holy passive voice, Batman. Surely a better title would have been "Local Police Departments Buying Loads of Cellphone Spy Tools", since it's not like the damn things are mysteriously appearing unbidden...
I think the only thing that can prevent the US from spiraling into a dictatorship is a successful Netflix show about US spiraling into a dictatorship. Maybe it is too late for that too.
hackingteam breach has shown that law enforcement are among the biggest customers of HackingTeam. They supply not just the tools but also a subscription (to the constantly changing) payloads to breach a target. Kind of a poor man's TAO for the "neighborhood" police-unit. These tools make planting evidence just as easy so it is a massive change in the amount of trust put into individuals working in LE. This is even more scary when you think of how little the average cop knows about the tech they use from some questionable outside private vendor.<p><a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5439_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312292105_-_to_protect_and_infect_-_claudio_guarnieri_-_morgan_marquis-boire" rel="nofollow">https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5439_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312292...</a><p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543991/the-growth-industry-helping-governments-hack-terrorists-criminals-and-political/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543991/the-growth-industr...</a>
I think it's not just the Govt and Police who involves in spying on people's data. Multiple spy apps i.e. TheOneSpy, PhoneSherif, FlxiSpy, and much more are readily available in the online market to spy on anyone's data through his/her smartphone. In my point of view first, we should ban these data and privacy breach apps in our state then move on the other Governmental monitorings and protect our privacies.
Do the cell site simulators spoof existing towers? How hard would it be to write an app to detect when you connect to another tower and shut the phone down. Unless Google and Apple don't let you programmatically shut down the phone.
Analyzing this sort of data is why the NYPD is suddenly hiring 100 statisticians?<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/245927769" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/245927769</a>
<a href="http://www.nypdrecruit.com/statistician-level-1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nypdrecruit.com/statistician-level-1/</a>
So if the Washington D.C. police, or anyone who can afford it, are tracking protesters, or merely tracking, near the White House, they may inadvertently intercept calls from all those insecure, non-presidentially locked phones carried by top White House aides, and by the President?
I have no idea how this works. Can someone explain the site simulators? When the site simulators intercept the traffic, they can see all the data. If it's encrypted, can they still read it or decrypt it somehow?