Rudy Carcamo-Carranza was an undocumented restaurant worker in Michigan wanted for a DUI and a hit-and-run; the FBI and ICE used IMSI catchers — powerful, secretive cellphone tracking tools that the agencies bill as a kind of superweapon in the war on terror — to catch him and put him up for deportation.
Art beinArt Gallery in Brunswick, Australia is exhibiting Gerard Geer's "Chimaephera," which "features mythically inspired creatures constructed from assorted animal bones and a series of diaphonised wet specimens."
The Women’s Marches last weekend were collectively some of the largest protests ever conducted in the United States. While we would love to have some hard data to be able to inform the public about what type of surveillance being used on the demonstrations, unfortunately many of the police department’s we have requested in our Cell Site Simulator Census have either not given us any documents yet, or used sweeping law enforcement exemptions in order to not disclose some of the more sensitive, and important, information about their use.
During the Standing Rock confrontations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation got reports of police use of IMSI Catchers — secretive surveillance devices used to gather data from nearby cellphones, often called Stingrays or Dirtboxes — so it dispatched lawyers and technologists to monitor the situation, and filed 20 public records requests with law enforcement agencies.
Fidel Castro confessed on his deathbed to killing JFK, Prince Harry has impregnated his American actress girlfriend, Priscilla Presley has six months to live, and President Donald Trump will save 25 million jobs.
Those are the headlines in this week's tabloids, and it's salutary to see Trump's wild imaginings promulgated alongside equally fact-challenged celebrity "news." — Read the rest
Muckrock has been sending Freedom of Information requests to state police forces to find out how they're using "cell-site simulators" (AKA IMSI catchers/Stingrays), and they hit the motherlode with the Virginia State Police.
What are we coming to when the 'National Enquirer' accurately reports Donald Trump's speech promising reforms in his "first 100 days" in office? They even add, in giant print on the front page, "in his own words" – because they know how rare it is for anyone quoted in the 'Enquirer' to actually be quoted correctly. — Read the rest
Julian Oliver is a playful and media-savvy security researcher; previously, he documented hidden cell-phone towers in bad disguises and produced a hand-grenade shaped "transparency device" that spied on everything going on in the room.
AT&T's secret "Hemisphere" product is a database of calls and call-records on all its customers, tracking their location, movements, and interactions — this data was then sold in secret to American police forces for investigating crimes big and small (even Medicare fraud), on the condition that they never reveal the program's existence.
Since 2009, the Chicago Police Department has seized $72M worth of property from people who were not convicted of any crime, through the discredited civil forfeiture process, keeping $48M worth of the gains (the rest went to the Cook County prosecutor's office and the Illinois State Police) in an off-the-books, unreported slush fund that it used to buy secret surveillance gear.
Cobham PLC is a surveillance vendor who sells to some of the world's most egregious human rights abusing governments; in 2014, they provided a catalog of cyberweapons and spy tools to Florida Department of Law Enforcement, from whom it leaked.
The baseband firmware in your phone is the outermost layer of software, the "bare metal" code that has to be implicitly trusted by the phone's operating system and apps to work; a flaw in that firmware means that attackers can do scary things to your hone that the phone itself can't detect or defend against.
Gizmodo's Matt Novak filed a clever request to the FCC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): what are all the FOIA requests you've "withheld in full"? So they sent him the list.
US Federal Magistrate judge Stephen William Smith sounds the alarm about the skyrocketing trend of US courts operating in secret, with their findings (or even the fact that they're hearing a case at all) sealed to scrutiny, and an ever-increasing portion of judicial action taking place in off-record arbitration. — Read the rest
The 2016 Car Hacker's Handbook expands on the hugely successful 2014 edition, in which the Open Garages movement boiled down all they'd learned running makerspaces for people interested in understanding, improving, penetration testing and security-hardening modern cars, which are computers encrusted in tons of metal that you strap your body into. — Read the rest
Maryland attorney general Brian E Frosh has filed a brief appealing a decision in the case of Kerron Andrews, who was tracked by a Stingray cell-phone surveillance device.
Orange County has many claims to fame: Richard Nixon, the S&L scandal, subprime boiler-rooms, Disneyland, an airport honoring a cowboy named Marion, and now, the revelation that its police force secretly uses low-flying surveillance aircraft to break the encryption of thousands of cellphone users, track their movements, and intercept their communications.
Protonmail is a Swiss pro-privacy email provider that offers end-to-end encyption to its customers. When the Swiss government proposed the Nachrichtendienstgesetzt — a bill to create a "mini NSA" with the power to effect warrantless mass surveillance, including hacking residents' computers — the company called on its users and supporters to petition the government for a referendum on the law.
The Intercept has obtained a secret government catalog that law enforcement agencies use to source even-more-secret cellular spying devices, mostly variants on the Stingray/Dirtbox, which pretend to be cellular towers in order to harvest the subscriber details of all the people within range (up to an entire city, for the airplane-mounted Dirtboxes).
Backslash — an "art/design" project from NYU Interactive Technology Program researchers Xuedi Chen and Pedro G. C. Oliveira — is a set of high-tech tools for protesters facing down a "hyper-militarized," surviellance-heavy state adversary, including a device to help protesters keep clear of police kettles; a jammer to foil Stingray mobile-phone surveillance; a mesh-networking router; a "personal cloud" that tries to mirror photos and videos from a protest to an offsite location; and tools for covertly signalling situational reports to other protesters.
