Subject: Privacy World’s June 2014 Newsletter Issue 3 Jun
> Privacy World – The WORLD’S SHREWDEST PRIVACY NEWSLETTER
> The US Government Doesn’t Want You To Know How The Cops Are
> Tracking You
> Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration
> are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house,
> and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform
> “The Guardian” – All across America, from
> Florida to Colorado and back again, the country’s increasingly
> militarized local police forces are using a secretive technology to
> vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – including from
> people inside their own homes – almost always without a warrant. This
> week, numerous investigations by major news agencies revealed the
> US government is now taking unbelievable measures to make sure you
> never find out about it. But a landmark court ruling for privacy
> could soon force the cops to stop, even as the Obama administration
> fights to keep its latest tool for mass surveillance a secret.
> So-called International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI)
> catchers – more often called their popular brand name, “Stingray”
> – have long been the talk of the civil liberties crowd, for the
> indiscriminate and invasive way these roving devices conduct
> surveillance. Essentially, Stingrays act as fake cellphone towers
> (usually mounted in a mobile police truck) that police can point
> toward any given area and force every phone in the area to connect
> to it. So even if you’re not making a call, police can find out
> who you’ve been calling, and for how long, as well as your precise
> location. As Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU explained on Thursday,
> “In one Florida case, a police officer explained in court that he
> ‘quite literally stood in front of every door and window’ with his
> stingray to track the phones inside a large apartment complex.”
> Yet these mass surveillance devices have largely stayed out of
> the public eye, thanks to the federal government and local police
> refusing to disclose they’re using them in the first place -
> sometimes, shockingly, even to judges. As the Associated Press
> reported this week, the Obama administration has been telling local
> cops to keep information on Stingrays secret from members of the
> news media, even when it seems like local public records laws would
> mandate their disclosure. The AP noted:
> Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It
> comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a
> debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency
> about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal
> surveillance programs.
> Some of the government’s tactics to hide Stingray from journalists
> and the public have been downright disturbing. After the ACLU had
> filed a records request for information on Stingrays, the local
> police force initially told them that, yes, they had the documents
> and to come on down to the station to look at them. But just before
> an ACLU rep was due to arrive, US Marshals seized the records and
> hid them away at another location, in what Wessler describes as
> “a blatant violation of state open-records laws”.
> The federal government has used various other tactics around the
> country to prevent disclosure of similar information.
> USA Today also published a significant nationwide investigation about
> the Stingray problem, as well as what are known as “cellphone tower
> dumps”. When police agencies don’t have Stingrays at their disposal,
> they can go to cell phone providers to get the cellphone location
> information of everyone who has connected to a specific cell tower
> (which inevitably includes thousands of innocent people). The paper’s
> John Kelly reported that one Colorado case shows cellphone tower
> dumps got police “‘cellular telephone numbers, including the date,
> time and duration of any calls,’ as well as numbers and location
> data for all phones that connected to the towers searched, whether
> calls were being made or not.”
> It’s scary enough to think that the NSA is collecting so much
> information, but this mass location and metadata tracking at the
> local level all may be about to change. This week, the ACLU won
> a historic victory in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (serving
> Florida, Alabama and Georgia), which ruled that police need to get
> a warrant from a judge before extracting from your cellphone the
> location data obtained by way of a cell tower. This ruling will
> apply whether cops are going after one person, the whole tower
> and, one can assume, Stingrays. (The case was also argued by the
> aforementioned Wessler, who clearly is this month’s civil liberties
> Most Valuable Player.)
> This case has huge implications, and not just for the Stingrays
> secretly being used in Florida. It virtually guarantees the US
> supreme court will soon have to tackle the larger cellphone location
> question in some form – and whether police across the country have
> to finally start getting a warrant to find out where your precise
> location for days or weeks at a time. But as Stanford law professor
> Jennifer Granick wrote on Friday, it could also have an impact
> on NSA spying, which relies on the theory that indiscriminately
> collecting metadata is fair game until a court says otherwise.
> You may be asking: how, exactly, are the local cops getting their
> hands on such advanced military technology? Well, the feds are,
> in many cases, giving away the technology for free. When the US
> government is not loaning police agencies their own Stingrays, the
> Defense Department and Homeland Security are giving federal grants
> to cops, which allow departments to purchase the gear at the cost
> of $400,000 a pop from defense contractors like Harris Corporation,
> which makes the Stingray brand.
> Speaking of which, the New York Times’s Matt Apuzzo wrote another
> essential, overlooked story this week detailing all of the other free
> military gear – like machine guns, armored vehicles and aircraft -
> that police are receiving from the Pentagon. An example from his
> story about the militarization of what used to be routine police
> activities also comes from Florida: “In Florida in 2010, officers
> in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops
> that mostly led only to charges of ‘barbering without a license.’”
> Like Stingrays, and the NSA’s phone dragnet before them, the
> militarization of America’s local cops is a phenomenon that’s only
> now getting widespread attention. As journalist Radley Balko, who
> wrote a seminal book on the subject two years ago, said this week,
> the Obama administration could easily limit these tactics to “cases
> of legitimate national security” – but has clearly chosen not to.
> No matter how much President Obama talks about how he has “maintained
> a healthy skepticism toward our surveillance programs”, it seems the
> Most Transparent Administration in American History remains much
> more interested in maintaining a healthy, top-secret surveillance
> state
> The above by Trevor Timm
> Until our next issue stay cool and remain low profile!
> Privacy World
> PS – Need a highly anonymous cell phone and anonymous offshore
> sim card (mobile number?) Email and place “Freedom Phone” in your
> subject heading for details.
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