[jariel]

Quote:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Police across the country may be intercepting phone calls or text messages to find suspects using a technology tool known as Stingray. But they're refusing to turn over details about its use or heavily censoring files when they do.

Police say Stingray, a suitcase-size device that pretends it's a cell tower, is useful for catching criminals, but that's about all they'll say.

For example, they won't disclose details about contracts with the device's manufacturer, Harris Corp., insisting they are protecting both police tactics and commercial secrets. The secrecy — at times imposed by nondisclosure agreements signed by police — is pitting obligations under private contracts against government transparency laws.

Even in states with strong open records laws, including Florida and Arizona, little is known about police use of Stingray and any rules governing it.

A Stingray device tricks all cellphones in an area into electronically identifying themselves and transmitting data to police rather than the nearest phone company's tower. Because documents about Stingrays are regularly censored, it's not immediately clear what information the devices could capture, such as the contents of phone conversations and text messages, what they routinely do capture based on how they're configured or how often they might be used.

In one of the rare court cases involving the device, the FBI acknowledged in 2011 that so-called cell site simulator technology affects innocent users in the area where it's operated, not just a suspect police are seeking.

Earlier this month, journalist Beau Hodai and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the Tucson Police Department, alleging in court documents that police didn't comply with the state's public-records law because they did not fully disclose Stingray-related records and allowed Harris Corp. to dictate what information could be made public.

Revelations about surveillance programs run by the federal National Security Agency have driven a sustained debate since last summer on the balance between privacy and government intrusion. Classified NSA documents, leaked to news organizations, showed the NSA was collecting telephone records, emails and video chats of millions of Americans who were not suspected of crimes.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/police-kee...ts-postbox

[bigrich]

The FBI is now actively trying to suppress public knowledge of the usage of the technology.

Quote:

Your local police may use a controversial piece of technology—ominously dubbed a stingray—to track your phone. But, the FBI is taking pains to make sure you never find out. The agency encourages police to find additional evidence so that stingray technology never comes up in court, according to a new memo.

http://www.vocativ.com/317708/fbi-local-...stingrays/

This practice seems blatantly unconstitutional. They are probably trying to avoid a court case and Supreme Court smack down.

[Valentine]

What's really worrying is how widely they're used and their power - they can remotely push keyloggers or any other software onto your phone if you're within range.

There's two ways to defend against this though:

1) Get a CDMA rather than GSM based phone for increased security. These however are locked to a particular network and are thus not useful for frequent travellers though.

2) Android users can use an anti-IMSI catcher app to detect when stingrays after being used, when they scan and when they target your phone.

This gives you time to switch off your phone before it's infected as well as detect infection.