Image Credit: Saving the republic
The Guardian is running a piece by Trevor Timm, of the Greenwald-Poitras-Snowden- associated Freedom of the Press foundation. (H/T to Scott Lazarowitz, LRC)
It’s about Stingray, a technology that lets the government locate and track you via cell-phone tower signals.
Timm is correct to point out the privacy implications of the NSA’s meta-data collection, which has filtered down to local police departments.
Meta-data is data about communications that doesn’t include the actual content.
It’s the date, the address (from and to), the length of time, the location.
Very rich, if collected continuously.
All very well, but, as even Timm does admit in the Guardian, this technology has been around for a couple of years.
Yet, last year, in a piece at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Timm wrote:
A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country.”
Secretive and new? Really?
The Louisville Law Review says the Feds used the Stingray from 2006 on.
[The Stingray is really a brand that refers to a family of technologies, says the Review.]
Local police departments were using the Stingray as early as 2007 (seven years ago).
“Oakland’s Targeted Enforcement Task Force made 21 ”Electronic Surveillance [StingRay] arrests” in 2007, 19 in 2008, and 19 in 2009 for charges including robbery, kidnapping, attempted murder and homicide. Further records show employees receiving up to 40 hours in training on the technology.”
This was discussed in the major media, at least as far back as 2011.
At the cyber- security blog, Schneier on Security, a commenter in January 2013, called the Stingray “very old technology.”
And the Stingray is now old and very expensive technology, I’d actually be more woried by the likes of pocket picocells that hackers cobble together from COTS equipment for less than 200USD. “
A spy technology for under 200 bucks?
I’d be more worried by picocells too.
So, why isn’t the Guardian?
Or the EFF?
Or the Freedom of the Press Foundation?