The Mets stance on this to me seals any doubt about their involvement in deploying these boxes. I've been watching developments in the surveillance state in the UK with some concern, this just puts the final nail in the coffin.<p>You can't defend such dragnet surveillance techniques as 'terrorist prevention'. How can I make a difference?<p>I don't want my country to become America 2.0 (It's already starting to look like that with water cannons on standby, internet filtering and now this).
> Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe told Sky News: "We're not going to talk about it, because the only people who benefit are the other side, and I see no reason in giving away that sort of thing."<p>Apply the same logic to the justice system and courts would operate behind closed doors.<p>The public needs to know because it is the public who is supposed to oversee the authorities via the polling booth. The public should be able to assess whether the supposed benefits of this practice are valid and decide whether they want their privacy violated in order to get these benefits.
It's almost guaranteed that whenever something privacy-invading gets uncovered in the US, it shortly is found in the UK too.<p>If I didn't know better, I'd think the UK government have an 'anything you can do, we can do better' attitude about their orwellian antics.
How about I have something on my phone that verifies I'm connected to an authentic provider tower, and not connect to anything else.<p>Another thing to think about, if it's happening in the UK, it's probably happening in your own country too.
Are there any ways to ensure your phone is not interacting with a Stingray device?<p>It was not long ago that the FBI was revealed to be using them from light aircraft routinely:<p><a href="http://bgr.com/2015/06/03/fbi-dirtbox-stingray-spy-plane-program/" rel="nofollow">http://bgr.com/2015/06/03/fbi-dirtbox-stingray-spy-plane-pro...</a>
Why they use such tools? In Turkey police can listen any phone from the police station. Because all telecommunication companies are required to give access to their network and even if you are the owner of the telecommunication company you cannot know when is your custemers being listened.
Don't miss the <i>"All the data captured by the investigation has been put in a Google document"</i> link that points to a 50mb file called "Complete BB firewall logs.rtf," which I'm sure will be of interest.