Posted on 11/14/2014 4:22:00 AM PST by John W
(Reuters) - An agency of the U.S. Justice Department is gathering data from thousands of cell phones, including both criminal suspects and innocent Americans, by using fake communications towers on airplanes, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The program run by the U.S. Marshals Service began operations in 2007 and uses Cessna planes flying from at least five major airports and covering most of the U.S. population, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the operations.
The planes use devices made by Boeing Co that mimic the cell phone towers used by major telecommunications companies and trick mobile phones into revealing their unique registration data, the report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Once again Your Tax $$$ hard at work.
The Stazi would be wetting their pants over $&!t like this.
It’s no trick to reveal the “unique number”. It’s analogous to a PC MAC address - out in the open.
Did we ever find out who put up the fake cell towers around the US? If I remember correctly they even had one by the Pentagon.
But our law enforcement won’t follow unconstitutional orders?
I would think that if law enforcement/feds didn’t investigate and remove them immediately then we have all the information we need to figure out who they belong to.
It is as simple as one two three. Create a government agency with a mission.
Do not provide oversight. As in Congress in charge of all bureaucratic agencies having neither the time nor inclination for oversight.
Watch the mission expand to heights undreamed of.
I guess there should be a number four, watch the destruction of freedom and liberty, followed by the end of the Republic.
No. Since mid-September, nothing. Nor does the media care apparently.
I’ve looked at the map. There are 15 of these sites around the DC area. One tower is about half-a-mile from the White House. Four circle the Capital Building in DC. None of these people raised a fuss....so take the hint...they likely all belong to either the Justice Department or Homeland Security.
If you wanted to settle the debate of ownership....just take down one of these and wait a couple of hours for some maintenance team to arrive and fix it. But oddly enough....no on has been smart enough to even pursue that angle.
It isn’t just the URD - read the article. They claim that capturing the URD is part of the program, but not all of it. The device can disrupt calls, but they (authorities per the article) made software changes so that 911 calls don’t get disrupted.
Another article I found claims that:
The program is more sophisticated than anything previously understood about government use of such technology...
Newer versions of the technology can be programmed to do more than suck in data: They can also jam signals and retrieve data from a target phone such as texts or photos. It isn’t clear if this domestic program has ever used those features.
Source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/new-spy-program-planes-cell-data.html
This sounds like the old Soviet Union. Whatever happened to that right to privacy that the Supreme Court insisted on when approving abortion?
Heh. Caught me posting without reading the article. In the end phones are simply mobile computing end points. As such they can be compromised if you have the ‘back door’ or the brute force. There is software that will put 256 bit, AES encryption on your data plus FIPS 140-II level security, and that might keep them out of your data. But the signal side of it probably could always be detected and jammed.
How do they mount the towers to the airplanes?
The US Marshal’s Service operates out of Will Rogers in Oklahoma City. I wonder if that is one of the airports they stage out of.
Okay. I wonder if the planes being used are actually Cessnas, or whether perhaps "Cessna" is just some idiot reporter's "synonym" for "small plane".
I wonder at what point will the American people finally be 100% fed up with the loss of liberties and rights? Sadly I fear that there won’t be enough that will to make a difference.
I am disillusioned for the future of my children and grandchildren.
I know. It was a joke.
I like the source they specify in the lower left corner:
“people familiar with the operations of the program”
I thought the same thing. It is unreal how badly English gets muffed up in print from supposedly reputable sources like this on a regular basis.
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