Cloakers

A reader alerted me to this article, which shows that Harris Corporation has more to offer than just the Stingray:

…marketing materials come with a warning that anyone distributing them outside law enforcement agencies or telecom firms could be committing a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

These little-known cousins of the Stingray cannot only track movements—they can also perform denial-of-service attacks on phones and intercept conversations.

…documents indicate that the Stingray can also be used with software called “FishHawk,”  which boosts the device’s capabilities by allowing authorities to eavesdrop on conversations. Other similar Harris software includes “Porpoise,” which is sold on a USB drive and is designed to be installed on a laptop and used in conjunction with transceivers—possibly including the Stingray—for surveillance of text messages.

…Agencies: Federal authorities have spent more than $30 million on Stingrays and related equipment and training since 2004, according to procurement records. Purchasing agencies include the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, the Army, and the Navy. Cops in Arizona, Maryland, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and California have also either purchased or considered purchasing the devices, according to public records. In one case, procurement records show cops in Miami obtained a Stingray to monitor phones at a free trade conference held in Miami in 2003.

Other devices Harris sell are variations on the Stingray theme, including Triggerfish, Gossamer, Amberjack, Kingfish, Harpoon and Hailstorm. The latter is brand new & even more powerful than Stingray, although little is known about it at this stage.

In the USA law enforcement officials have legal means of obtaining cell phone data. But that requires time and paperwork. So much easier to just intercept the information with a piece of technological kit:

The Stingray is smaller than a suitcase, costs about $400,000, and its function is pretty straight forward. Basically, it tricks all nearby cell phone traffic into sending data to the Stingray as if it were a cell tower. It then downloads all that data to a computer program that translates it for whoever is operating the Stingray. All the traffic is then passed to the nearest cell tower, with no one the wiser. [Source: CrimeLibrary.com]

Legally or not, as was proven by The Sun newspaper in England, and Wikileaks reports, your cell phone calls can easily be monitored. So either give them no other identifiable or meaningful information; location, content, owner – or just don’t use mobile communications if you operate in illegal or grey areas.

Learn more at USA Today, who claim “at least 25 police departments own a Stingray“.

George Orwell’s 1984 predicted a world of substantial surveillance. Spying on citizens is certainly growing, and if anything it is accelerating. One conclusion is that, with a touch of social massaging, we will end up completely surveilled.

Excerpts via an article reprinted at Mother Earth:

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

It is easy to remove yourself from the web – just choose not to participate. The future, however, will include fixed, 24/7 monitoring that is much harder to switch off.

… The dangers aren’t theoretical. In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway. [Scary – link]

• Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems—and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums?
• Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?

Outside of your home, products like Apple’s iBeacon will offer improved shopping experiences, but the cost is your privacy – the more Apple knows, the better you are served!

Sooner or later, with smart devices seamlessly using sensors and Big Data provided by data aggregators, it will be possible to pick you out of a crowd and identify you in complex ways in real time. If intelligent surveillance cameras armed with facial recognition technology have access to social media profiles as well as the information stored by data aggregators, a digital dossier of your life could be called up on-demand whenever your face is recognized. Imagine the power retailers and companies will exert over your life if they not only know who you are and where you are, but what your weaknesses are—whether that’s booze, cigarettes, or the appealing mortgage rate with the sketchy small print. Are we looking at a future where the car salesman really does know what he has to do to put us in that car?

… “We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” said Hugh Martin, CEO of Sensity Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company interested in making lighting smart. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

The answer, as always in CloakerLand, comes in two flavours:

1. Disconnect completely, and see your life become more and more difficult compared to regular folk, and appear on the radar of the powers that be – your absence makes you worthy of observance.

2. Maintain a natural Big Brother profile by generally participating. But cloak any activities that might be misconstrued by those who can lock you up. It’s the equivalent of being in the French Resistance of WW2 – regular citizen by day, dangerous rebel by night.

This is just the beginning – it is pretty rare for any technology to be restricted unless the military wants it that way. So now the future we have glimpsed in movies like Enemy of the State and TV series like Person of Interest is starting to come real.

Blurry imagery isn’t very useful on its own – but when you combine it with other sources of info and a timeline, suddenly all the pieces can fit together well enough to place a person in a situation.

Shooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.

But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead.

…He said regular flights over the most dangerous parts of Washington — combined with publicity about how much police could see — would make a significant dent in the number of burglaries, robberies and murders. His 192-megapixel cameras would spot as many as 50 crimes per six-hour flight, he estimated, providing police with a continuous stream of images covering more than a third of the city.

Another example:

During one of the company’s demonstration flights over Dayton in 2012, police got reports of an attempted robbery at a bookstore and shots fired at a Subway sandwich shop. The cameras revealed a single car moving between the two locations.

By reviewing the images frame by frame, analysts were able to help police piece together a larger story: A man had left a residential neighborhood at midday and attempted to rob the bookstore, but fled when somebody hit an alarm. Then he drove to Subway, where the owner pulled a gun and chased him off. His next stop was a Family Dollar Store, where the man paused for several minutes. He soon returned home, after a short stop at a gas station where a video camera captured an image of his face.

A few hours later, after the surveillance flight ended, the Family Dollar Store was robbed. Police used the detailed map of the man’s movements, along with other evidence from the crime scenes, to arrest him for all three crimes.

[Source: Washington Post]

Following on from the Edward Snowden leaks about NSA spying, Brazil have announced measures that will protect the online privacy of their citizens and government. Read the full story at SFGate, or these snippets:

President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube.

While Brazil isn’t proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians’ Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.

Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

The most likely result is that governments around the world will decide to do their own spying, now that it has been pseudo-legitimized by the USA. However, if Brazil starts to fracture the global network, that will open the way for a “dark web” to operate, as well as a “safe web”.

Ultimately there are only two ways to go. You either have everything inter-connected with little chance of true privacy, or you have partitions that cannot communicate with each other.

It is great that Brazil might get their own email service, but any emails sent to the USA will still be spied upon.