Stingray Cellphone Surveillance Device Manual Is Leaked

The Intercept has it:

Harris has fought to keep its surveillance equipment, which carries price tags in the low six figures, hidden from both privacy activists and the general public, arguing that information about the gear could help criminals. Accordingly, an older Stingray manual released under the Freedom of Information Act to news website TheBlot.com last year was almost completely redacted. So too have law enforcement agencies at every level, across the country, evaded almost all attempts to learn how and why these extremely powerful tools are being used — though court battles have made it clear Stingrays are often deployed without any warrant. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department alone has snooped via Stingray, sans warrant, over 300 times.

The documents described and linked below, instruction manuals for the software used by Stingray operators, were provided to The Intercept as part of a larger cache believed to have originated with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Two of them contain a “distribution warning” saying they contain “Proprietary Information and the release of this document and the information contained herein is prohibited to the fullest extent allowable by law.”

Although “Stingray” has become a catch-all name for devices of its kind, often referred to as “IMSI catchers,” the manuals include instructions for a range of other Harris surveillance boxes, including the Hailstorm, ArrowHead, AmberJack, and KingFish. They make clear the capability of those devices and the Stingray II to spy on cellphones by, at minimum, tracking their connection to the simulated tower, information about their location, and certain “over the air” electronic messages sent to and from them. Wessler added that parts of the manuals make specific reference to permanently storing this data, something that American law enforcement has denied doing in the past.

The big problem which I assume Harris is afraid of is that if this becomes widely known, there may be a push to secure communications networks, because anybody can do this, right out of the trunk of a car on the road. Presently, Law Enforcement is going around listening to phone calls at will, tracking phones, opening up mics in blind call mode to use them as bugs to listen to the target while in denied areas, and fully controlling the target’s access to and use of cellular networks, all without warrants. Literally, nobody will ever know, so why not listen? This is happening in large part because the technology has been left open to such exploits, probably purposely at the behest of NSA and domestic security agencies.

The problem is, this is can also be done by foreign intel, private eyes, private industrial espionage companies, and the like if they get the equipment, all, as with law enforcement, without warrants, or any oversight. If it became widely known how widely penetrated the cellular networks are by anybody with the money to acquire the tech, the network providers might be incentivized to upgrade security, and Harris’s business model goes away.

It is a weird time in the nation, where the intel game is proliferating widely, and all the traditional laws, rules, and expectations of privacy and being free from external interference are just going the way of all flesh.

I make predictions about the weird futures we face, so here is one.

There will come a time when everyone will just assume everyone is watching and listening to them every moment of their lives, even in their homes – and people will be, more often than not. They will know this because they will be illegally watching and listening to everyone else illegally watching them. The technology to do so, through the walls of houses, will be so ubiquitous and cheap that everyone will have it and everyone will be watching each other, invading each other’s privacy at will at all times of day and night.

Nobody will be able to complain, because to do so would be to reveal that they only know about their neighbor’s spying because they are breaking the law themselves in spying on their neighbor. And nobody won’t do it because they will know their neighbors are doing it to them, and they will want to not be one-upped. So what you will have is a rule-less, honor-less society, where everyone does what they want, everyone knows the law is bullshit, and all that matters is what you can get away with.

That one may be thirty years off, though, although I expect the listening part to begin in a decade and a half, if there is no apocalypse. It will make for an interesting period at first, as the early adopters begin periodically happening on LE surveillance spying on everyone else.