Stingrays — the trade name for an "IMSI catcher," a fake cellphone tower that tricks cellphones into emitting their unique ID numbers and sometimes harvests SMSes, calls, and other data — are the most controversial and secretive law-enforcement tools in modern American policing. — Read the rest

Michael from Muckrock sez, "After scouring American police departments (via public records requests) for drone usage, MuckRock is setting its sights a little lower with a crowdfunding campaign hoping to fund thousands of public records request on how local agencies are using fake cell phone towers, warrantless wiretaps, and other techniques to get your cell phone to phone home."

US Marshals swept into the offices of police in Sarasota, Florida to whisk away records related to operation of "stingray" surveillance tools that the ACLU had requested. The records detailed the farcically low standard for judicial permission to use a stingray (which captures information about the movements, communications and identities of all the people using mobile phones in range of them), and is part of a wider inquiry to their use without a warrant at all — at least 200 Florida stingray deployments were undertaken without judicial oversight because the police had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the device's manufacturer and they decided that this meant they didn't have to get warrants anymore. — Read the rest

One of my favorite things about language is the quirky way cultures interpret animal noises. Dogs for example bark "Woof, Woof" here in the US, "Mong, Mong" in S. Korea, "Av, Av" in Serbia, "Ghav, Ghav" in Greece, and "Hau, Hau" in Ukraine. — Read the rest

Watch as fishermen and scientists from the USAID-supported research project Wonders of the Mekong capture and measure (and then release) the world's largest freshwater fish. The giant stingray was captured and released in northern Cambodia on June 13, 2022. The record-breaking fish weighed in at 661 pounds. — Read the rest

At New Jersey's Adventure Aquarium, a hammerhead shark cohabitating with a stingray decides the tank isn't big enough for the both of them.

"Don't do that! That's mean!" exclaims one of the young onlookers.

_{front page thumbnail: Tomas Kotouc/Shutterstock}

The trend in bike for local kids in my late 1970s neighborhood was BMX or 'dirt bikes,' but one of my neighbors had the Stingray with the stick shift and daaaaaaamn if it wasn't badass. There was no bike that gave a more 'free-spirit on the open road' feel to cruising around a suburban neighborhood than the Stingray. — Read the rest

Earlier this month, a group of fishermen in Cambodia accidentally caught a rare endangered giant stingray that was nearly 12 feet long and weighed in around 400 pounds.

From Reuters:

The stingray was accidentally caught by fishers in an 80-metre (260ft) deep pool in the Mekong in Cambodia's north-eastern Stung Treng province.

Nebula-75 is a new "puppet lockdown drama" being made by some of the folks at Century 21, the Gerry Anderson studio that was responsible for "Supermarionation" programming in the 60s (and beyond), with such shows as Thunderbirds, Stingray, Supercar, and Fireball-XL5. — Read the rest

Stingrays were once the most secretive of surveillance technology: devices whose existence was so sensitive that the feds actually raided local cops and stole their crime files to stop them from being introduced in court and revealing the capability to spy on cellular phones.

Every year, security researchers, hardware hackers and other deep geeks from around the world converge on an English nature reserve for Electromagnetic Field, a hacker campout where participants show off and discuss their research and creations.

Cops use Stingrays—fake cellular towers that fool cellphones into connecting to them instead of the real thing—to track people and hack into their devices. Sen. Ron Wyden, in a publicized letter to the U.S. Department of Jusice, exposes the fact that these devices disrupt and disable attempts to call emergency services. — Read the rest

A scuba diver in shallow water was surprised to see what looked like a "ghostly apparition" coming toward her. It turned out to be a rare albino stingray.

This just in. — Read the rest

A group of researchers from Oxford and TU Berlin will present their paper, White-Stingray: Evaluating IMSI Catchers Detection Applications at the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, demonstrating countermeasures that Stingray vendors could use to beat Stingrays and other "cell-site simulators" (AKA IMSI catchers).

Well, there's a second-decade-of-the-21st-century headline for you!

Police who rely on vulnerabilities in crooks' devices are terminally compromised; the best way to protect crime-victims is to publicize and repair defects in systems, but every time a hole is patched, the cops lose a tool they rely on the attack their own adversaries.

An outstanding post on the EFF's Deeplinks blog by my colleague Ernesto Falcon explains the negligent chain of events that led us into the Stingray disaster, where whole cities are being blanketed in continuous location surveillance, without warrants, public consultation, or due process, thanks to the prevalence of "IMSI catchers" ("Stingrays," "Dirtboxes," "cell-site simulators," etc) that spy indiscriminately on anyone carrying a cellular phone — something the FCC had a duty to prevent.

The Intercept has got hold of a set of Harris's super-secretive manuals for their even-more-secret Stingray devices: fake cellular towers used to spy indiscriminately on whole populations by hacking their cellphones into giving up identifying information and more.

A bio-engineering team at Harvard made a tiny robotic stingray from "a pinch of rat cardiac cells, a pinch of breast implant, and a pinch of gold," says Kit Parker, who lead the project. "That pretty much sums it up, except for the genetic engineering." — Read the rest