
EFF Files FOIA Suit Over U.S. Marshals’ Cell-Tracking Spy Planes - declan
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-files-foia-suit-over-us-marshals-spy-planes
======
diafygi
This silence on FOIA requests is in line with what the FBI has been
instructing local law enforcement to do[1]. Here's the relevant FBI letter:

    
    
        In the event that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension receives a
        request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (5 USC 552) or an equivalent
        state or local law, the civil or criminal discovery process, or other judicial,
        legislative, or administrative process, to disclose information concerning the
        Harris Corporation [REDACTED] the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension will
        immediately notify the FBI of any such request telephonically and in writing in
        order to allow sufficient time for the FBI to seek to prevent disclosure through
        appropriate channels.
    

This is a written policy that FOIA requests should by default be resisted.
This combined with the change from a mission of "law enforcement" to "national
security"[2] signifies a huge shift in the FBI away from a rule-of-law culture
to a rule-of-man culture.

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/fbi-really-
doesnt...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/fbi-really-doesnt-want-
anyone-to-know-about-stingray-use-by-local-cops/)

[2]: [http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/fbis-main-mission-now-
not...](http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/fbis-main-mission-now-not..).

~~~
guelo
I agree with your sentiment but not with the idea that this is "a huge shift".
The FBI was founded by J Edgar Hoover after all.

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Shinkei
Has anyone ever quantified the dollars spent per criminal captured for these
kinds of programs? I mean flying a small plane, using proprietary technology,
agents' time... I'm guessing this is in the millions of dollars, but who are
we catching with this?

~~~
tracker1
The roughly one in a hundred citizens imprisoned in the US.

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ta75757
Could one use some form of cell tower white-list as a countermeasure to
stingray? Or is it a purely passive attack?

~~~
delinka
Couldn't a stingray mimic a whitelisted tower? Much like your computer can use
a different MAC address at your whim.

~~~
pasbesoin
Whether alone (with user movement and precise clocking) or in a coordinated
group effort, devices might begin to triangulate tower location and check this
against historical and geographic data.

It would be a bit ironic, if/when triangulation begins to "work" "in the other
direction".

~~~
icebraining
It already is: Mozilla has been building apps¹ that allow users to contribute
to a shared database of the locations of cellphone towers and WiFi APs.

The idea is to allow GPS-less devices to find where they are, but it could
certainly be used to identify new towers in places which had already been
mapped.

EDIT: It seems there's also opencellid.org, which actually allows you to
download the full database.

¹
[https://location.services.mozilla.com/apps](https://location.services.mozilla.com/apps)

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xexers
Why are these planes even required? Cant the US government simply get this
information directly from the phone carriers? Given all of the power the NSA
seems to have, surely they have this capability already.

~~~
URSpider94
I'm not sure that carriers keep the IMSI tower association records (vs. call
or data transmission logging information). This would be a tremendous amount
of information to retain, since a given phone is always associated with at
least one tower and may be re-negotiating its association thousands of times
per day.

~~~
icebraining
I believe they do. I'm hardly an expert, but on the Serial podcast, which
details a murder investigation, cellphone tracking gathered from the carrier
is introduced as evidence, and the events are described as "pings" (not calls,
and probably not data since this was in the early 90s). I don't think they
actually triangulate the position, they just know the tower the cellphone
"pinged" and the approximate distance based on signal power.

 _This would be a tremendous amount of information to retain_

Not really. An IMSI takes about 7 bytes, plus a few for location, let's say 12
bytes. Multiplied by, say, 2000 pings a day per user, by 300M users, that's
just 7TBs/day, for all carriers.

Facebook alone deals with 600TBs/day.

