Quote: (11-29-2017 06:17 PM)debeguiled Wrote:
Have you guys heard of this?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-29...as-written
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Imagine you are in the middle of your typical day-to-day activities. Maybe you are driving, spending time with family, or working. If you are like most people, your phone is at your side on a daily basis. Little do you know that, at any time, police and law enforcement could be looking at information stored on your phone.
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How? They use a shoebox-sized device called a StingRay. This device (also called an IMSI catcher) mimics cell phone towers, prompting all the phones in the area to connect to it even if the phones aren't in use.
The police use StingRays to track down and implicate perpetrators of mainly domestic crimes. The devices can be mounted in vehicles, drones, helicopters, and airplanes, allowing police to gain highly specific information on the location of any particular phone, down to a particular apartment complex or hotel room.
Quietly, StingRay use is growing throughout local and federal law enforcement with little to no oversight. The ACLU has discovered that at least 68 agencies in 23 different states own StingRays, but says that this "dramatically underrepresents the actual use of StingRays by law enforcement agencies nationwide."
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Little Regulation
Law Enforcement is using StingRays without a warrant in most cases. For example, the San Bernardino Police Department used their StingRay 300 times without a warrant in a little over a year.
In 2010, the Tallahassee Police Department used a StingRay in a warrantless search to track down the suspect of a crime. A testimony from an unsealed hearing transcript talks about how police went about finding their target. The ACLU sums it up well:
"Police drove through the area using the vehicle-based device until they found the apartment complex in which the target phone was located, and then they walked around with the handheld device and stood ‘at every door and every window in that complex’ until they figured out which apartment the phone was located in. In other words, police were lurking outside people’s windows and sending powerful electronic signals into their private homes in order to collect information from within."
A handful of states have passed laws requiring police and federal agents to get a warrant before using a StingRay. They must show probable cause for one of the thousands of phones that they are actually searching. This is far from enough.
Additionally, there are many concerns that agents are withholding information from federal judges to monitor subjects without approval - bypassing the probable cause standard laid out in the Constitution. They even go as far as to let criminals go to avoid disclosing information about these devices to the courts.
If the public doesn’t become aware of this issue, the police will continue to use StingRays to infringe on our rights in secret and with impunity.
Yes and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Even Running Turtle's post has questionable success detecting these. Mostly because the company only sells to police departments and of course those customers will never allow such a device to be used like that. You can bet however that the tools at Stingray are testing the app against it themselves to obscure it further.
The only safe solution is to connect to VPN into a server that you have physical ownership of and then use a VOIP app to dial through that. Don't bother renting service to some 3rd party, you just handed over all of your content to a man in the middle.
Treat all of your actions on the internet as trackable and do your best to obscure your activities Make it hard for someone to google your name. If you really want 100% privacy, get rid of your phone and get an old-fashioned flip phone and regularly swap and dump sims between the major carriers (verizon, t-mobile, att, and sprint). Avoid MVNOs because switching from Verizon to Virgin Mobile means diddly since you're technically still on Verizon.