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Science-Technology Title: Behold, the catalog of cellphone spying gear the feds don’t want you to see A secret catalog of cellphone spying gear has been leaked to The Intercept, reportedly by a person inside the intelligence community who is concerned about the growing militarization of domestic law enforcement. Among the 53 items are the now-familiar Stingray I/II surveillance boxes. They're billed as the "dragnet surveillance workhorse [that] has been deployed for years by numerous local law enforcement agencies across the United States." It has a range of 200 meters and sells for $134,000. A chief selling point is the "ready-made non-disclosure agreements from the FBI and Harris Corp. [that] will provide a pretext for concealing these features from the public." The listing also touts Harris' "next-generation Hailstorm, a must-have for cracking the 4G LTE network." Besides manufacturing the Stingray brand of surveillance gear, Harris once employed a spokesman name Marc Raimondi. According to an Intercept article accompanying the leaked catalog, Raimondi is now a Department of Justice spokesman who says the agency's use of stingray equipment is legal. The REBUS Ground Based Geo-Location, meanwhile, has a model small enough to fit in a backpack and "provides limited capability to isolate targets utilizing Firewall option." Almost a third of the entries advertise equipment that the Intercept said has never been publicly described before. The National Security Agency is listed as the vendor of one device, while another was designed for use by the Central Intelligence Agency, and a third was developed for a special forces requirement. The Intercept reports: Above all, the catalogue represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes. The mass shooting earlier this month in San Bernardino, California, which President Barack Obama has called an act of terrorism, prompted calls for state and local police forces to beef up their counterterrorism capabilities, a process that has historically involved adapting military technologies to civilian use. Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and others are increasingly alarmed about how cellphone surveillance devices are used domestically and have called for a more open and informed debate about the trade-off between security and privacydespite a virtual blackout by the federal government on any information about the specific capabilities of the gear. Weve seen a trend in the years since 9/11 to bring sophisticated surveillance technologies that were originally designed for military uselike Stingrays or drones or biometricsback home to the United States, said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has waged a legal battle challenging the use of cellphone surveillance devices domestically. But using these technologies for domestic law enforcement purposes raises a host of issues that are different from a military context. Federal authorities have worked hard to prevent the public from knowing much about the cell-site simulators used by law enforcement. Today's leak is a stark counterpoint to that secrecy. Poster Comment: No doubt, the hunt for the whistleblower is in full gear by now. They'll want him as bad as Ed Snowden. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 7.
#1. To: TooConservative (#0)
There's a specific video the feds don't want you to see either, and that video is the video taken by the pentagon's rooftop surviellance system showing what actually hit the pentagon on 9/11/01.
Makes you wonder what all of the other surveillance cameras from the gas station and motels actually saw. Yeah - the feds seized those videos too.
But they didn't do use cellsite simulators. If you look through the linked material, you'll also find that most of these very pricey cellsite simulators got paid for by...civil asset forfeitures. It is the primary way the PDs got the cash to buy them apparently. The reproduced catalog they made is pretty extensive.
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