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https://theintercept.com/2020/07/30/dismantle-homeland-security/
FEDERAL AGENTS AT PROTESTS RENEW CALLS TO DISMANTLE HOMELAND SECURITY
After months of protests demanding the defunding of police, the abduction of protesters turns the focus to Homeland Security.
Alice Speri
July 30 2020, 6:31 a.m.
IN HIS FORMAL PROPOSAL to create the Department of Homeland Security, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush wrote that “the changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.”
The Bush administration wanted a new agency to oversee everything from border security to emergency preparedness and response — “the most significant transformation of the U.S. government in over a half-century,” the document noted.
Eighteen years later, the Department of Homeland Security has ballooned into the third largest agency in the U.S. government, employing 240,000 people, including more than 60,000 law enforcement agents — nearly half the total number of federal law enforcement agents. DHS oversees two dozen subagencies and offices and has an annual budget of $50 billion. Since its founding, in 2002, the department has run agencies as different in scope as the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while also largely replicating, through dozens of regional law enforcement hubs known as fusion centers, the counterterrorism mission that premised its founding but remains the primary responsibility of other agencies.
And yet the invisible enemy Bush feared arrived nonetheless. Every two to three days, the coronavirus is killing the number of Americans who died on September 11. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the virus has killed 50 times as many.
Criticism of DHS has accompanied the department through its existence, most recently when former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen became the face of the Trump administration’s brutal policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border. Calls to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — one of DHS’s most visible and abusive agencies — have echoed from street protests to the halls of Congress and the 2020 presidential primary. Then earlier this month, as President Donald Trump deployed DHS troops, primarily from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, against protesters rallying against police violence in Portland, Oregon, he once again trained the spotlight on the troubled department. The unidentified agents abducting people in unmarked rental cars raised questions about what the Border Patrol was doing on the streets of an American city and awareness about the impunity with which it operates elsewhere. And their presence stoked calls to not only abolish ICE or CBP, but also to dismantle their parent agency altogether.
“This current moment is bringing this opportunity for widening the frame and having people understand just how large this force has grown, and who are the people working there, and who do they listen to,” said Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, one of the groups that popularized the call to abolish ICE. “Has dumping, dropping, flushing all this money down the toilet into these agencies made us any safer? Has it done any real good? Would we rather spend that money somewhere else? I think that’s a really critical conversation to have.”
Franco noted that after 9/11, some might have been hesitant to target DHS because of how closely it was associated with the attacks on New York and Washington. But the last two decades, and particularly the last several months, have radically transformed how many Americans understand what security means and what their government should do to keep them safe.
“I just think the veneer is off,” said Franco. “I think people are pretty shocked at what’s happening, and they are really thinking about how to stop it.”
From 9/11 to Abolition
Trump has been threatening to “send the feds” into American cities, mostly ones run by Democrats, for as long as he has been in office. By the time DHS deployed its federal agents, the nationwide protests that started with the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had mostly dwindled after raging for weeks. In Portland, before the agents’ presence set them off once again, they had shrunk in size to a few hundred protesters.
The deployment of federal law enforcement — particularly BORTAC, a tactical unit some have dubbed CBP’s “RoboCops” — came after weeks of growing calls to defund police departments across the country moved from protest chants to budget negotiation hearings. The deployment is widely understood to be political theater aimed at distracting from the administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But at a moment when criticism of law enforcement has reached an unprecedented number of people, Trump’s show of force is having the effect of elevating the local call to defund and abolish police to a sprawling federal law enforcement apparatus that remains largely nebulous to most Americans.
“There is more skepticism of law enforcement on every level of government than there has been in this country’s history, and it’s arguably a result of the overreach of law enforcement,” said Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “Their unaccountability, the violence of the policies they are carrying out, and the violence with which they are doing it is more known and understood by more people than ever before.”
“The latest deployment of DHS, and especially CBP officers, going into American cities without the request of local political authorities is incredibly disturbing,” he added. “It’s like a novel written by a libertarian about the encroaching powers of federal law enforcement.”
CBP is not the only federal agency Trump has dispatched to fight his political battle: Last week, the Department of Justice launched what it called “Operation Legend” — a coordinated initiative “across all federal law enforcement agencies working in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight the sudden surge of violent crime,” according to the department’s announcement. As The Intercept has reported, federal-local partnerships of this sort, flooding cities with FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other federal agents, along with local police, are nothing new. On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr was grilled by legislators about the Justice Department’s response to the protests; testimony from DHS officials is scheduled for later this week.
While it is hardly the only agency facing criticism, DHS embodies much of the unaccountable culture of policing that a growing number of Americans have come to reject. And in the middle of a public health and economic crisis of historic proportions, DHS’s massive, and costly, infrastructure has also become an emblem of government’s misplaced priorities. The Cato Institute, which has called for the abolition of DHS for nearly a decade, argued in a 2011 policy paper that the agency had already failed. “DHS has too many subdivisions in too many disparate fields to operate effectively,” David Rittgers, a former legal policy analyst at the institute, wrote at the time. “Americans are not safer because the head of DHS is simultaneously responsible for airport security and governmental efforts to counter potential flu epidemics.”
Today, the greatest threat to American safety in decades has come not in the form of a terrorist attack, but as a pandemic and the resulting economic disaster that have only been exacerbated by years of investment in the country’s sprawling security apparatus at the cost of everything else. “If this is not a clear failure of DHS, and this is not a clear failure of the billions of dollars that were poured in, then I don’t know what else would be a clearer example,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a group that has called for an end to mass surveillance across levels of government. “Billions of dollars, and for what?”
Calls to dismantle, or at least rein in, DHS have surfaced repeatedly over the years, for instance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as at the height of the Trump administration’s family separation effort. Last year, following the exposure of a Facebook group for CBP agents filled with racist, violent, and misogynistic content, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocated the disbandment of DHS altogether, calling the department’s establishment “an egregious mistake.” Now, the scenes in Portland, against the backdrop of the health, economic, and policing crises the nation is facing, have given those calls new momentum.
“If the Trump years have shown anything, it is that the agencies within D.H.S., and especially ICE and C.B.P., are in desperate need of root-and-branch reform or some other fundamental change,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times. “If and when we close the book on Trump, perhaps we should use the opportunity to close the book on Homeland Security too.”
“I never thought that the Department of Homeland Security would be used against our own people,” former Sen. Barbara Boxer wrote earlier this month, calling her own vote in favor of the agency’s creation “myopic.” “Congress can act to both condemn this gross tyranny and then restructure the department so that no president, now or ever again, can have a private police force and menace the people he or she swears to protect.”
As the movement to defund police grew over recent months, a number of people have also called on legislators to withhold DHS funding until more robust checks can be imposed on an agency whose current oversight is the jurisdiction of more than 100 committees and subcommittees — a bureaucratic nightmare that’s effectively allowed parts of the department to go rogue.
“Given this state of affairs, there is no excuse for Congress to rush through another multi-billion-dollar appropriation for the department,” analysts with the national security forum Just Security wrote this week ahead of a DHS appropriations vote. “Before any funds are made available, Congress should conduct some of the oversight that’s been missing to date.”
The Just Security analysts also called on legislators to demand that Trump nominate a DHS secretary. Chad F. Wolf, a lobbyist, is currently running the department in an acting capacity, unconfirmed by the Senate, as are Ken Cuccinelli, his deputy, and dozens of other Trump administration officials. And the analysts called on legislators to push for greater transparency on part of DHS, including the publication of operational guidelines and assurances that the department’s law enforcement activities are conducted “with appropriate care for constitutional rights and clear channels of accountability.”
“This trend toward lawlessness is on full display in Portland,” they wrote. “The leverage afforded by the appropriations cycle presents the best and perhaps only opportunity for Congress to confront a department run amok.”
Tackling the Monster
DHS was founded on the belief that a lack of interagency communication had caused the government to miss cues about the 9/11 attacks. The department brought together agencies that had previously operated under several different departments, creating an unwieldy mess of clashing cultures and duplicative efforts, and setting up a massive bureaucracy whose scope, and cost, ballooned over the years.
DHS’s size and sprawling nature are part of the reason why a broader grassroots movement targeting the agency has not yet emerged. “It’s a department that has so many layers, and so many tentacles to it,” said Khan. “So it’s a matter of how do we pick it apart and look both at the larger infrastructure and at the points of this monstrosity that can be exposed and picked upon one by one?”
Questions about the efficiency of the consolidation of profoundly different agencies under DHS were raised from the beginning, across party lines, but the department’s creation was hastily approved anyway. Despite early promises that spending would be contained, the agency’s cost more than doubled in the first decade of the department’s existence, in part thanks to the funding of dozens of state, local, and regional information and intelligence-sharing centers, known as fusion centers. The centers were established ostensibly to improve collaboration among law enforcement agencies but in practice replicated the work of the FBI and FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces. DHS had little to show for its price tag: A 2012 Senate Homeland Security report found that the department’s fusion centers “often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever.” In 2015, Sen. Tom Coburn issued a scathing report concluding that “despite spending nearly $61 billion annually and $544 billion since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security is not executing any of its five main missions.”
But DHS was not just a colossal waste of money: Its very existence, and the need to justify it, puts civil liberties at risk. Over the years, fusion centers that had been set up to counter terrorism dedicated much of their time and resources to sharing intelligence about crime, which was already the responsibility of local law enforcement. And increasingly, they started monitoring the constitutionally protected activities of activists and government critics. “There are not enough terrorists to go around; the police and the FBI already identify and prosecute potential terrorists whenever possible,” the Cato report noted in 2011. “So fusion centers seem to be treating mere political dissent as a threat without any indication of violent intent in order to justify their continued existence.”
A product of the war on terror, in more recent years DHS came to be defined by the work and human rights violations of two of its largest agencies, CBP and ICE, whose treatment of migrants, as well as immigration activists, has been a precursor to the abuses now on display in Portland.
CBP in particular operates far beyond the border, as its authority extends 100 miles into the interior to an area that encompasses nine of the country’s 10 largest cities and nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population. In recent months, hundreds of CBP agents were dispatched to respond to protests against police violence in Washington, D.C., and a CBP drone monitored the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. The move to police protests has been a disturbing development for an agency that for years has been accused of pushing the limits of its legal authority.
“This is an opportunity for the broader public to see and really ask themselves, if this is what DHS agents and this is what Border Patrol agents do to mostly white people in Portland, imagine what they are doing to women crossing alone in the middle of the night with children, to young people coming across the desert in the borderlands,” said Franco. “I think people asking themselves that question should really send a chill down their spine, imagining what might happen, and what is happening, and what has been happening.”
When immigration enforcement and border protection were moved away from the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice to the jurisdiction of the newly formed DHS, “there was an explicit reframing of immigration from being a labor issue to a national security issue,” noted Franco. “And what is happening now is that they’re trying to frame people exercising their freedom of speech and their right to protest and their right to organize as an issue of national security. And calling people who do those things terrorists.”
“Customs and Border Protection is, in liberal terms, one of the least professionalized agencies, and to name it more plainly, it’s been captured by white supremacists.”
While critics of DHS and its war on terror ethos have been warning of those dangers since the agency’s early days, their concerns came into sharper focus under the Trump administration. CBP and ICE in particular, whose rank and file were among the first to endorse Trump’s presidential bid, have often contributed to the impression that they are more loyal to the president than to their legal mandate. “The DHS houses Trumpism’s true believers,” sociologist Stuart Schrader wrote in the New Republic earlier this month.
“I think there’s a good reason why it’s Customs and Border Protection that’s in Portland and not another law enforcement agency,” said Brendan McQuade, a professor at the University of Southern Maine who studies the Homeland Security apparatus. “And that is because Customs and Border Protection is, in liberal terms, one of the least professionalized agencies, and to name it more plainly, it’s been captured by white supremacists.”
Migrants and their communities have known that for years, and as Americans connect the dots between what is happening in Portland and what has been happening along the border and in immigration detention centers nationwide, scrutiny of DHS is bound to grow.
What is coming into focus is a more general rejection of the notion of “security” that the U.S. has long peddled, said McQuade.
“The unique circumstances of Covid, the Trump administration’s very poor handling of it, and the insecurity and uncertainty that has created have created textbook circumstances for political rupture and realignment,” he added. “Now is the time to push everything on the table and fight for the biggest demands.”
A guide to stingray surveillance technology, which may have been deployed at recent protests.
Kim Zetter
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/
SINCE MAY, AS protesters around the country have marched against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists have spotted a recurring presence in the skies: mysterious planes and helicopters hovering overhead, apparently conducting surveillance on protesters. A press release from the Justice Department at the end of May revealed that the Drug Enforcement Agency and U.S. Marshals Service were asked by the Justice Department to provide unspecified support to law enforcement during protests. A few days later, a memo obtained by BuzzFeed News offered a little more insight on the matter; it revealed that shortly after protests began in various cities, the DEA had sought special authority from the Justice Department to covertly spy on Black Lives Matter protesters on behalf of law enforcement.
Although the press release and memo didn’t say what form the support and surveillance would take, it’s likely that the two agencies were being asked to assist police for a particular reason. Both the DEA and the Marshals possess airplanes outfitted with so-called stingrays or dirtboxes: powerful technologies capable of tracking mobile phones or, depending on how they’re configured, collecting data and communications from mobile phones in bulk.
Stingrays have been used on the ground and in the air by law enforcement for years but are highly controversial because they don’t just collect data from targeted phones; they collect data from any phone in the vicinity of a device. That data can be used to identify people — protesters, for example — and track their movements during and after demonstrations, as well as to identify others who associate with them. They also can inject spying software onto specific phones or direct the browser of a phone to a website where malware can be loaded onto it, though it’s not clear if any U.S. law enforcement agencies have used them for this purpose.
Although law enforcement has been using the technologies since the 1990s, the general public learned about them only in the last decade, and much about their capabilities remains unknown because law enforcement agencies and the companies that make the devices have gone to great lengths to keep details secret. Stingrays are routinely used to target suspects in drug and other criminal investigations, but activists also believe the devices were used during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, and against Black Lives Matter protesters over the last three months. The Justice Department requires federal agents to obtain a probable cause warrant to use the technology in criminal cases, but there is a carve-out for national security. Given that President Donald Trump has referred to protesters as “terrorists,” and that paramilitary-style officers from the Department of Homeland Security have been deployed to the streets of Portland, Oregon, it’s conceivable that surveillance conducted at recent demonstrations has been deemed a national security matter — raising the possibility that the government may have used stingray technology to collect data on protesters without warrants.
To better understand the kind of surveillance that may be directed at protesters, here’s a breakdown of what we know and still don’t know about stingrays, and why their use is so controversial.
What is a stingray?
Stingray is the generic name for an electronic surveillance tool that simulates a cell phone tower in order to force mobile phones and other devices to connect to it instead of to a legitimate cell tower. In doing so, the phone or other device reveals information about itself and its user to the operator of the stingray. Other common names for the tool are “cell-site simulator” and “IMSI catcher.”
Why is it called a stingray?
The name stingray comes from the brand name of a specific commercial model of IMSI catcher made by the Florida-based Harris Corporation. That company’s StingRay is a briefcase-sized device that can be operated from a vehicle while plugged into the cigarette lighter. Harris also makes products like the Harpoon, a signal booster that makes the StingRay more powerful, and the KingFish, a smaller hand-held device that operates like a stingray and can be used by a law enforcement agent while walking around outside a vehicle. About a dozen other companies make variants of the stingray with different capabilities. The surveillance equipment is pricey and often sold as a package. For example, in documents obtained by Motherboard in 2016, Harris offered a KingFish package that cost $157,300 and a StingRay package that cost $148,000, not including training and maintenance. Documents obtained this year by the American Civil Liberties Union indicate that Harris has upgraded the StingRay to a newer device it calls a Crossbow, though not a lot of information is known about how it works. Separately, a classified catalog of surveillance tools leaked to The Intercept in 2015 describes other similar devices.
How does the stingray work?
Phones periodically and automatically broadcast their presence to the cell tower that is nearest to them, so that the phone carrier’s network can provide them with service in that location. They do this even when the phone is not being used to make or receive a call. When a phone communicates with a cell tower, it reveals the unique ID or IMSI number (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) associated with the SIM card in the phone. The IMSI number identifies that phone and its owner as a paying customer of a cell carrier, and that number can be matched by the carrier to the owner’s name, address, and phone number.
A stingray masquerades as a cell tower in order to get phones to ping it instead of legitimate cell towers, and in doing so, reveal the phones’ IMSI numbers. In the past, it did this by emitting a signal that was stronger than the signal generated by legitimate cell towers around it. The switch to 4G networks was supposed to address this in part by adding an authentication step so that mobile phones could tell if a cell tower is legitimate. But a security researcher named Roger Piqueras Jover found that the authentication on 4G doesn’t occur until after the phone has already revealed its IMSI number, which means that stingrays can still grab this data before the phone determines it’s not communicating with an authentic cell tower and switches to one that is authenticated. That vulnerability still exists in the 5G protocol, says Jover. Though the 5G protocol offers a feature that encrypts the IMSI when it’s disclosed during pre-authentication communication, law enforcement would simply be able to ask phone carriers to decrypt it for them. And a group of researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa also found a way to guess an IMSI number without needing to get a carrier to decrypt it.
Because a stingray is not really a tower on the carrier’s network, calls and messages to and from a phone can’t go through while the phone is communicating with the stingray. So after the stingray captures the device’s IMSI number and location, the stingray “releases” the phone so that it can connect to a real cell tower. It can do this by broadcasting a message to that phone that effectively tells the phone to find a different tower.
What can law enforcement do with the IMSI number?
Law enforcement can use a stingray either to identify all of the phones in the vicinity of the stingray or a specific phone, even when the phones are not in use. Law enforcement can then, with a subpoena, ask a phone carrier to provide the customer name and address associated with that number or numbers. They can also obtain a historical log of all of the cell towers a phone has pinged in the recent past to track where it has been, or they can obtain the cell towers it’s pinging in real time to identify the user’s current location. By catching multiple IMSI numbers in the vicinity of a stingray, law enforcement can also potentially uncover associations between people by seeing which phones ping the same cell towers around the same time.
If law enforcement already knows the IMSI number of a specific phone and person they are trying to locate, they can program that IMSI number into the stingray and it will tell them if that phone is nearby. Law enforcement can also home in on the location of a specific phone and its user by moving the stingray around a geographical area and measuring the phone’s signal strength as it connects to the stingray. The Harris StingRay can be operated from a patrol vehicle as it drives around a neighborhood to narrow a suspect’s location to a specific cluster of homes or a building, at which point law enforcement can switch to the hand-held KingFish, which offers even more precision. For example, once law enforcement has narrowed the location of a phone and suspect to an office or apartment complex using the StingRay, they can walk through the complex and hallways using the KingFish to find the specific office or apartment where a mobile phone and its user are located.
Does the device only track mobile phones?
No. In 2008, authorities used a StingRay and a KingFish to locate a suspect who was using an air card: an internet-connectivity device that plugs into a computer and allows the user to get online through a wireless cellular network. The suspect, Daniel Rigmaiden, was an identity thief who was operating from an apartment in San Jose, California. Rigmaiden had used a stolen credit card number and a fake name and address to register his internet account with Verizon. With Verizon’s help, the FBI was able to identify him. They determined the general neighborhood in San Jose where Rigmaiden was using the air card so they could position their stingray in the area and move it around until they found the apartment building from which his signal was coming. They then walked around the apartment complex with a hand-held KingFish or similar device to pinpoint the precise apartment Rigmaiden was using.
What is a dirtbox?
A dirtbox is the common name for specific models of an IMSI catcher that are made by a Boeing subsidiary, Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology — hence the name “DRT box.” They are reportedly used by the DEA and Marshals Service from airplanes to intercept data from mobile phones. A 2014 Wall Street Journal article revealed that the Marshals Service began using dirtboxes in Cessna airplanes in 2007. An airborne dirtbox has the ability to collect data on many more phones than a ground-based stingray; it can also move more easily and quickly over wide areas. According to the 2006 catalog of surveillance technologies leaked in 2015, models of dirtboxes described in that document can be configured to track up to 10,000 targeted IMSI numbers or phones.
Do stingrays and dirtboxes have other capabilities?
Stingrays and dirtboxes can be configured for use in either active or passive mode. In active mode, these technologies broadcast to devices and communicate with them. Passive mode involves grabbing whatever data and communication is occurring in real time across cellular networks without requiring the phone to communicate directly with the interception device. The data captured can include the IMSI number as well as text messages, email, and voice calls.
If that data or communication is encrypted, then it would be useless to anyone intercepting it if they don’t also have a way to decrypt it. Phones that are using 4G employ strong encryption. But stingrays can force phones to downgrade to 2G, a less secure protocol, and tell the phone to use either no encryption or use a weak encryption that can be cracked. They can do this because even though most people use 4G these days, there are some areas of the world where 2G networks are still common, and therefore all phones have to have the ability to communicate on those networks.
The versions of stingrays used by the military can intercept the contents of mobile communications — text messages, email, and voice calls — and decrypt some types of this mobile communication. The military also uses a jamming or denial-of-service feature that prevents adversaries from detonating bombs with a mobile phone.
In addition to collecting the IMSI number of a device and intercepting communications, military-grade IMSI catchers can also spoof text messages to a phone, according to David Burgess, a telecommunications engineer who used to work with U.S. defense contractors supporting overseas military operations. Burgess says that if the military knows the phone number and IMSI number of a target, it can use an IMSI catcher to send messages to other phones as if they are coming from the target’s phone. They can also use the IMSI catcher for a so-called man in the middle attack so that calls from one target pass through the IMSI catcher to the target phone. In this way, they can record the call in real time and potentially listen to the conversation if it is unencrypted, or if they are able to decrypt it. The military systems can also send a silent SMS message to a phone to alter its settings so that the phone will send text messages through a server the military controls instead of the mobile carrier’s server.
Can the devices be used to infect phones with malware?
Versions of the devices used by the military and intelligence agencies can potentially inject malware into targeted phones, depending on how secure the phone is. They can do this in two ways: They can either redirect the phone’s browser to a malicious web site where malware can be downloaded to the phone if the browser has a software vulnerability the attackers can exploit; or they can inject malware from the stingray directly into the baseband of the phone if the baseband software has a vulnerability. Malware injected into the baseband of a phone is harder to detect. Such malware can be used to turn the phone into a listening device to spy on conversations. Recently, Amnesty International reported on the cases of two Moroccan activists whose phones may have been targeted through such network injection attacks to install spyware made by an Israeli company.
U.S. law enforcement use of stingrays domestically is more curtailed, given that they, unlike the military, need to obtain warrants or court orders to use the devices in federal investigations. But there is little transparency or oversight around how the devices are used by federal agents and local police, so there is still a lot that is unknown: for example, whether they’ve ever been used to record the contents of mobile phone communications or to install malware on phones.
News stories suggest that some models of stingrays used by the Marshals Service can extract text messages, contacts, and photos from phones, though they don’t say how the devices do this. Documents obtained by the ACLU in 2015 also indicate such devices do have the ability to record the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and the date, time, and duration of the calls, as well as to intercept the content of voice and text communications. But the Justice Department has long asserted publicly that the stingrays it uses domestically do not intercept the content of communications. The Justice Department has stated that the devices “may be capable of intercepting the contents of communications and, therefore, such devices must be configured to disable the interception function, unless interceptions have been authorized by a Title III [wiretapping] order.”
As for jamming communications domestically, Dakota Access pipeline protesters at Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016 described planes and helicopters flying overhead that they believed were using technology to jam mobile phones. Protesters described having problems such as phones crashing, livestreams being interrupted, and issues uploading videos and other posts to social media.
Why are stingrays and dirtboxes so controversial?
The devices don’t just pick up data about targeted phones. Law enforcement may be tracking a specific phone of a known suspect, but any phone in the vicinity of the stingray that is using the same cellular network as the targeted phone or device will connect to the stingray. Documents in a 2011 criminal case in Canada showed that devices used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had a range of a third of a mile, and in just three minutes of use, one device had intercepted 136 different phones.
Law enforcement can also use a stingray in a less targeted way to sweep up information about all nearby phones. During the time a phone is connecting to or communicating with a stingray, service is disrupted for those phones until the stingray releases them. The connection should last only as long as it takes for the phone to reveal its IMSI number to the stingray, but it’s not clear what kind of testing and oversight the Justice Department has done to ensure that the devices release phones. Stingrays are supposed to allow 911 calls to pass through to a legitimate cell tower to avoid disrupting emergency services, but other emergency calls a user may try to make while their phone is connected to a stingray will not get through until the stingray releases their phone. It’s also not clear how effective the devices are at letting 911 calls go through. The FBI and DHS have indicated that they haven’t commissioned studies to measure this, but a study conducted by federal police in Canada found that the 911 bypass didn’t always work.
Depending on how many phones are in the vicinity of a stingray, hundreds could connect to the device and potentially have service disrupted.
How long has law enforcement been using stingrays?
The technology is believed to have originated in the military, though it’s not clear when it was first used in combat zones or domestically in the U.S. The earliest public mention of a stingray-like device being used by U.S. law enforcement occurred in 1994, when the FBI used a crude, jury-rigged version of the tool to track former hacker Kevin Mitnick; authorities referred to that device as a Triggerfish. In a case in Utah in 2009, an FBI agent revealed in a court document that cell-site simulators had been in use by law enforcement for more than a decade. He also said they weren’t just used by the FBI but also by the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, and other agencies. Recent documents obtained by the ACLU also indicate that between 2017 and 2019, the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations unit has used stingrays at least 466 times in investigations. BuzzFeed News had previously obtained records showing that from 2013 to 2017, HSI had used the technology 1,885 times.
Aside from the potential for widespread surveillance, are there other problems with the technology?
The other controversy with stingrays involves secrecy and lack of transparency around their use. Law enforcement agencies and the companies that make the devices have prevented the public from obtaining information about their capabilities and from learning how often the technology is deployed in investigations. Agencies sign nondisclosure agreements with the companies, which they use as a shield whenever journalists or others file public records requests to obtain information about the technology. Law enforcement agencies claim criminals could craft anti-surveillance methods to undermine the technology if they knew how it worked. The companies themselves cite trade secrets and proprietary information to prevent the public from obtaining sales literature and manuals about the technology.
For years, law enforcement used the devices without obtaining a court order or warrant. Even when they did seek approval from a court, they often described the technology in misleading terms to make it seem less invasive. They would often refer to stingrays in court documents as a “pen register device,” passive devices that sit on a network and record the numbers dialed from a certain phone number. They withheld the fact that the devices force phones to connect to them, that they force other phones that aren’t the target device to connect to them, and that they can perform more functions than simply grabbing an IMSI number. Most significantly, they withheld the fact that the device emits signals that can track a user and their phone inside a private residence. After the FBI used a stingray to track Rigmaiden (the identity thief in San Jose) in his apartment, Rigmaiden’s lawyers got the Justice Department to acknowledge it qualified as a Fourth Amendment search that would require a warrant.
Law enforcement agents have not only deceived judges, however; they’ve also misled defense attorneys seeking information about how agents tracked their clients. In some court documents, law enforcement officials have indicated that they obtained location information about the defendant from a “confidential source,” when in truth they used a stingray to track them.
To address this deception, the Justice Department in 2015 implemented a new policy requiring all federal agents engaged in criminal investigations to obtain a probable cause search warrant before using a stingray. It also requires agents and prosecutors to tell judges when the warrant they are seeking is for a stingray; and it requires them to limit the use of the stingray’s capabilities to tracking the location of a phone and logging the phone numbers for calls received and made by the phone. They cannot collect the contents of communication, such as text messages and emails. And agents are required to purge the data they collect from non-targeted phones within 24 hours or 30 days, depending on the circumstances.
The problem, however, is that Justice Department policy is not law. And although the policy includes state and local law enforcement agencies when they are working on a case with federal agents and want to use the devices, it does not cover those agencies when they are working on cases alone. To address this loophole, lawmakers would need to pass a federal law banning the use of stingrays without a warrant, but efforts to do so have so far been unsuccessful.
One bigger issue with the Justice Department policy is that, as noted above, it only applies to criminal investigations, not national security ones, and it also includes a carve-out for “exigent circumstances” that are not clearly defined. Federal agents are not required to seek a warrant to use the technology in cases involving such circumstances. Whether the government has used the technology against Black Lives Matter protesters without a warrant is likely something that will remain a secret for some time.
The incompetent criminals ruling the U.S. are about to push millions of Americans off a terrifying financial cliff.
Jon Schwarz
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/30/coronavirus-unemployment-crisis-national-emergency/
IN SOME ALTERNATE reality, the government and corporate and union and religious leaders of the United States got together in February and told us: “The novel coronavirus is scary, and we’re all going to have to get creative and work together to crush it. Lots of jobs are going to momentarily vanish. But no one in this country will be scared of going hungry, because no one will. No one’s going to be scared of being thrown out of their home, because that’s not going to happen to anyone. This country has the power to take care of everyone’s basic material needs, and we will.”
Here in this reality, we’re governed by a blend of the criminally incompetent and incompetent criminals. As things stand today, they’re about to push a large fraction of Americans off a terrifying cliff. It’s so mercilessly cruel, economically destructive, and even contrary to their own self-interest, that if we’re going to stop them we probably need to figure out why.
Our rulers did demonstrate a spasm of rationality with the passage of the CARES Act in March. It was partly a cash-grab by big business but did get lots of people a $1,200 check and provided an extra $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits on top of state benefits.
Without these benefits, the 30 million people who lost their jobs in March and April would have already plummeted into the void. And because everyone’s spending is someone else’s income, as they fell they would have grabbed onto tens of millions more and taken them down as well.
And in fact, this downward spiral began to happen in mid-March. As the danger of Covid-19 became clear, consumer spending dropped by an astonishing 30 percent in a matter of days. But as soon as the government cash started flowing, spending began to recover, and it’s now more than 90 percent of normal. In poorer zip codes, it’s returned to almost 100 percent.
This has kept the lives of tens of millions of Americans merely bad, rather than totally impossible. But the supplemental unemployment benefits expire at the end of July. The GOP opening bid is to extend them but to cut the amount from $600 to $200. The reason, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin explained in the Oval Office, is to prevent malingering: “We’re going to make sure that we don’t pay people more money to stay home than go to work.” In addition, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that the Republican “red line” in negotiations is making it essentially impossible for employees to sue employers on the grounds that their workplace is failing to protect them from Covid-19. Furthermore, under the proposed new rules, employers and even the Trump Justice Department would find it easy to countersue workers for bringing a coronavirus lawsuit.
Rationally, of course, this makes no sense. For most of the unemployed, there aren’t any jobs to go back to, and won’t be until the pandemic is under control. If their unemployment benefits are cut, people without jobs will desperately cut back on spending, leading to more unemployment, which will lead to less spending, and so on. The process will be accelerated as states and cities, which until now have attempted to avoid slashing payrolls in hopes that the federal government would rescue them, finally do so.
This may plausibly lead to basic material deprivation — true hunger and homelessness — on a scale few alive today have ever seen. According to the Census Bureau, the number of America’s 249 million households reporting that they sometimes or often do not have enough to eat has already jumped from 22.5 million earlier this year to 29.3 million in July. With Republicans opposing an expansion of food stamp funding, as well as the renewal of the CARES Act supplemental food program for children, that is likely just the beginning.
Then there’s housing. The CARES Act contained a federal ban on evictions that covered about 30 percent of U.S. rental units. That ban just ended, as have most state-level bans. Forty million people could potentially lose their homes in the next several months. In states like Florida, Texas, and New York, half of the tenants will shortly be unable to make the rent.
This is a gigantic human emergency. Almost every person in the country is viscerally frightened for themselves or their family and friends.
But beyond an emergency, it’s also politically inexplicable. Donald Trump and Republicans in general are presumably aware that there’s an election this November, and that they’ll do better if Americans aren’t dying in the street. Just their crass self-interest should lead them to throw as much money at everyone as fast as possible.
But they’re not doing so. Why not? It’s easy to believe it’s because they’re mustache-twirling villains who consciously enjoy the suffering they’re inflicting upon us. But the reality is different, and in some ways scarier.
The weird fact is that even the worst people in history never ask themselves, “Are we the baddies?” On the contrary, they’re convinced they’re great heroes marching us all to a glorious future. When interrogated by the FBI, Saddam Hussein sincerely referred to himself as “a humanitarian.”
Leaders like this are able to ignore the consequences of their actions because, to a shocking degree, they honestly are not aware of the consequences. In the past, this state of malignant ignorance was much harder to maintain. There were local newspapers that could shove the facts in front of them. There were unions that they had to pay attention to, and respected liberal archbishops who attempted to speak for the voiceless.
All that’s gone now. Today conservative U.S. elites live their mental lives protected by an almost impenetrable carapace of wealth and power. None of the people they meet at fundraisers are about to be thrown into the street, so therefore no one is. There are no stories on Fox News about children experiencing brain damage from malnutrition, thus such children don’t exist.
If anyone knows what to do about this, now’s definitely the time to speak up. U.S. politics have always been a matter of life and death for some Americans. But the waters are rising fast, and a lot more people are about to find out it’s a matter of life and death for them too.
