
Stingray manuals detail how police can spy on phones - nxzero
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/
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upofadown
This makes it quite clear that these devices are intended and used for the
routine disruption of a licensed radio system ... which is Federal offence in
the US. The interesting question here is; why? Why would someone working in
law enforcement risk a year in jail just so they can do warrantless
wiretapping? That suggests a certain level of desperation.

One answer is that we to a certain extent make it impossible for law
enforcement to do their job any other way. We have a lot of laws on the books
where none of the people violating those laws are likely to go down to a
police station and file a complaint. The prohibition on illegal drugs is a
good example. It's like asking a friend to help you with your diet while
forbidding them from looking in your fridge. Your friend is likely to look in
your fridge if they don't just refuse to help at all. We are sending mixed
signals.

Another answer is purely economic. It is very expensive to have law
enforcement people sitting around on stakeouts and/or following people. It
saves a tremendous amount of time and effort if you can find out where people
are going to be. If warrantless surveillance becomes technologically
impossible, then we are going to have to pay a lot more salaries to have all
our laws enforced.

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nxzero
>> "If warrantless surveillance becomes technologically impossible, then we
are going to have to pay a lot more salaries to have all our laws enforced."

Completely agree, cost would rapidly get out of control without warrantless
surveillance and criminal activities would surge. In fact, why even use tech
like this when everyone by law should just wear a device to broadcast their
location, all their communications, etc. All the data collected should be
admissible in court too.

/sarcasm

~~~
upofadown
Particular categories of criminal activities would surge. A strong argument
can be made that the associated problems shouldn't be handled with law
enforcement ... but that is not something law enforcement gets to decide, we
do.

In a sense we are being crummy bosses, we want our employees to do two
mutually incompatible things at the same time. Our conflicted thoughts about
things like recreational drugs trickle down into bad policy.

~~~
hood_syntax
The thoughts on recreational drugs are not conflicted (for the most part),
they are separate thoughts from groups which are at odds with each other.

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helthanatos
It's not really new information, as knowledge of stingrays has been around for
a while, but it is still amazing that so few people know about this. Since
this is essentially MitM. I wonder how easily they could just get the data
from the actual tower (without a warrant).

~~~
nxzero
They could, but to do so, legally they be entering the property without a
warrant, even if it was executed wirelessly.

Whole legal arguments about the wireless signals is that they're "public"
data.

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DanBC
The lack of accountability and oversight is really scary.

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cryoshon
great, now maybe we can develop countermeasures to illegal & unethical
surveillance methods like these. there are a few imsi-catcher detection apps
out right now, maybe we will see more.

~~~
patcheudor
What scares me is that we all thought we had countermeasures in HTTPS and
anonymizing proxies. When using both, so long as you only did things over
HTTPS you were safe. It turns out that wasn't true at all for at least iOS
dating back many years:

[https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/905344](https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/905344)

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dogma1138
A commercial product comes with a technical manual why is this even news?

Is The Intercept running out of stories that they need to turn "user guides"
into news? Did anyone expected equipment and software that can cost millions
of dollars not to be supported?

Heck commercial malware these days comes with online support, manuals, an SDK,
and a development community w/ access to Jira.

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DanBC
The story is not "this is a manual", but "here's this manual which the
manufacturers have tried really hard to keep secret".

~~~
duskwuff
Not only "here's this manual", but also "the manual for this product documents
some scary features which we didn't know about before".

~~~
dogma1138
>"the manual for this product documents some scary features which we didn't
know about before"

Name one.

~~~
duskwuff
Two that were mentioned explicitly in the article:

1\. Permanently storing data on devices under surveillance.

2\. Selectively degrading service for a target device.

