02/15/17 – George Joseph on the cell phone spying tools being used by American police departments – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, introducing George Joseph.
He wrote this thing.
Man, you're gonna have to read it.
Post it on your Facebook.
Cell phone spy tools have flooded local police departments.
It's at citylab.com, which is apparently a project of the Atlantic magazine, which I think is a project of the Washington Post, right?
Anyway, welcome to the show.
How are you doing, George?
Hey, good to be here.
Thank you very much for joining us.
This is a hell of a piece you got here.
Very interesting stuff.
And I think everybody's probably heard of a stingray by now, but you got a lot deeper dive than that.
And including, as you say here, in the headline, in the subline, I guess, you've really got a tally on how much is being spent in different cities and all different examples from around the country and this kind of stuff, too.
So really good work here.
Appreciate you joining us.
First of all, I guess, can you tell us specifically the, I guess, it's just really like a handful of different technologies that are really at issue in this article.
Could you go through those for us?
Sure.
So the impetus of the story was last year, The Intercept published a sort of catalog of various cell phone surveillance devices that an intelligence community source was afraid were sort of seeping down from the national security world into local domestic law enforcement circles.
So we followed up on that by sending public records requests to the top 50 largest police departments across the country, not really knowing what cell phone surveillance devices they had.
I mean, we had an idea that they'd have stingrays, as you mentioned, but we didn't really know what we were going to find.
And after going through months and months of doing records requests and compiling the documents and tracking the money, we found that police nationwide have spent millions of dollars, over $4.7 million, on primarily two types of devices, cell phone interception devices, which include stingrays, but go beyond them.
These are devices that kind of can be deployed in certain areas and suck up information on your call logs, your text logs, where your phone is, how long you're making calls within a certain radius, generally about 200 meters.
And then cell phone extraction devices, which are tools that when police have them in possession, can suck up years worth of your data.
That can include your emails, your Facebook posts, your texts, your deleted texts, your photos, your geolocated Google location history, sort of if you keep your Maps app on where you've been at all times in the past.
And so we just see these a lot of really interesting tools that, you know, not really major police departments are now acquiring that were once in the military world and are now sort of being deployed for local crime fighting and potentially other purposes.
So those are the two basic categories, the interception devices, which can sort of suck up data out of the air, and the extraction devices, which can take data when in police possession.
All right, well, so let's go through the first first, then the interceptions, I guess I'm thinking specifically when people go out to a protest, and there's a police helicopter overhead or whatever.
You're saying they cannot just mimic, I think everybody knows, everybody, you guys all know, right, that the Stingray means that the police device can mimic the cell phone tower, and I guess direct your calls and everything.
But then that means they can intercept any information in transit too, right?
So it's complicated.
These tools are generally called cell site simulators, although Stingray sort of become the colloquial term for them because that's a specific brand of device from Harris Corporation.
That's the most common device.
And most of these tools, at least from the records we've found in police departments, are generally the type of devices that, as you said, connect to a phone, mimicking a cell phone tower, and then collect various types of metadata, such as your call logs, your text logs.
And that stuff in itself is very powerful because it can allow police to quickly build up data to show who our networks are, the kind of people we're talking to, and sort of timeline histories of when and where we're talking to individuals.
So that in itself, when collected in bulk, is very powerful, and that was sort of one of the major concerns about the NSA collection of data that Snowden revealed a few years ago.
But beyond those types of tools, there's another type of cell site simulator, which we discovered at the Baltimore Police Department, which is which we discovered the Baltimore County Police have, called a DirtBox.
And this is the type of tool that the military loves and the NSA loves, and it can be put on a helicopter or a plane and track 10,000 phones at once.
So already much more powerful than your traditional Stingray or cell site simulator.
But also, it can capture content.
So we're not sure how local police have configured their DirtBoxes when they have them, but these tools are actually advertised as being able to capture the content of your text, the context of your, the content of your calls.
And we know that Chicago police and LA police also have these tools, but there's been very little investigation or at least revelations as to how police are using these tools.
So this is sort of a new era we're embarking on where police can actually capture potentially the content of our calls, but it's pretty murky about how they use it, what practices regulate they use it, their use of it, and any audits that may be done to ensure that these practices are in keeping with constitutional safeguards.
Well, you know, a lot of times, I mean, I guess there are guidelines and what have you, but the Fourth Amendment really only prevents them from using illegally obtained evidence against you.
It doesn't say they can't illegally obtain evidence against you all the time.
They can collect all kinds of data without a warrant, just as long as they don't prosecute you with it.
And then even then they got parallel construction.
Right.
I was about to bring up parallel construction.
Go ahead and explain that for people who aren't familiar.
Well, sure.
So if I'm an officer and I'm having trouble pinning down, you know, a suspect of some sort, and I can't really get a maybe perfectly licit way of information about someone's suspected criminal activity.
If I use this tool to figure out, you know, what someone's saying, then I can then sort of figure out what I actually wanted to figure out and then use various means, such as, you know, finding an anonymous source later to confirm what I already found or to sort of set up someone in a situation where they would reveal what I already knew.
And all of these practices are sort of enabled by this, as you would say, kind of dubious type of collection of data, which couldn't have been possible without these tools before.
So the courts, when they're reviewing the evidence that is now obtained through these other methods, doesn't actually hear about the first chain that led to that evidence.
And so that gives police a far greater advantage in terms of the sort of defendants of law enforcement balance than they would have had previously.
All right.
Well, so I like stingrays and dirt boxes.
I can tell why the cops like all these names.
They're catchy names and they're good for us people who care about being free too.
Easy for us to remember and they sound like they're up to no good just on the face of it too, I think is good.
So, but are there any more on the interception end?
Are there any more brand names that the audience can learn today?
We can keep our ears open.
I think, you know, this article certainly is the first place I had heard of these dirt boxes, as you call them.
Anything else there?
There probably are some, but the two main companies that we got documents on are from DRT, which is the Creative Dirt Boxes, Digital Receiver Technologies, which is based in Maryland, and Harris Corporation's Stingrays, which is based in Melbourne, Florida.
So those are the two main companies to keep an eye on.
We didn't see any other police departments which have cell site simulators from other companies, although it's possible given that many of the departments redacted their documents they gave to us.
Now, so they had the whole, I don't know if it was a big fake fight or some kind of fight with Apple about hacking the phone of the San Bernardino shooter, and then they said, aha, well, screw you, we got the Israelis to help us crack the phone anyway.
That was, I think, the most high profile news story of cops breaking into a cell phone without the assistance of the person telling them the passcode, this kind of thing.
And I guess the protocol is, if you try to brute force it, it'll erase itself kind of thing, right?
So they couldn't just keep trying and trying and trying.
But so this is the extraction technology.
As you said, the dirt box can apparently do some extraction, but when they get it back to the office, and by the way, this is being recorded in the beginning of 2017.
So in just a few years, every little sheriff's department will have these, but this is a thing where they just plug it in, the lightning cable jammer, and they can just download and crack your iPhone, no problem.
Yeah, I mean, there's certain, I think, past the iPhone 6, most of these Celebrite tools, and this is from an Israeli forensic company called Celebrite, aren't able to crack into phones.
But for the vast majority of smartphones and just regular phones, these tools can crack them open and suck up their data.
And what's interesting about this development is that in the past, let's say, even if you did have a warrant as a law enforcement office to go search someone's office, you may, you could go to their file cabinet, you could go look at their files, find some important information about it, but it would be clearly delineated.
It's like, whatever is in that safety lock box or whatever's in that file cabinet, that's what you're going after.
But with phone data, if a warrant isn't constructed extremely narrowly, access to a phone can give us years worth of information in ways that we as phone users probably aren't even sort of aware of.
Not only do they give us, do they give whoever has these tools, massive information on our networks through the collection of our metadata, they also give years worth of our communications, our communications patterns, our photos, our past locations, pretty much everything about us in a way that's historically unprecedented.
You couldn't have gathered so much information on someone in the 80s without a massive personnel operation devoted to it.
But now we're doing all that collection of data ourselves on our phones.
And then once that's turned over to departments, again, depending on the construction of the warrant and the responsibility of the officers, a lot of data is now up for fair game.
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Yeah.
I mean, at this point to even call them a phone is just a euphemism, a custom.
I mean, that's not what they are at all.
They're super computers that also make phone calls.
And that's what this former LAPD officer told me.
You're not really carrying a phone.
You're carrying a computer with a phone app in your pocket that is constantly pinging information about you everywhere you go.
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing is, I mean, for a cook like me, I've seen this as a double edged sword at best ever since this all started.
You know, have you ever sent a fax from the beach?
You will.
And AT&T is going to make it all possible.
Well, that means that they're following your ass around everywhere you go or else you can't make a fax from the beach.
That was when they were first debuting the Palm Pilot and whatever crap back in 1993 that, you know, you yes, you can go to the beach, but you have to work at the beach now.
But at least maybe you can go to the beach while you're at work.
So, okay.
But it you can't go to the beach ever again without it being on your permanent record that you were there at the beach that day.
If it's someone else decides it's their business.
Whereas, like you're saying, the 1980s life just wasn't like that.
You could go to 7-Eleven, get a slurpee, come home.
And there was no permanent record of that unless there was some reason for it to be, you know.
And but now it's just taken.
We all take it for granted that we're surveilled all day long.
I find myself rationalizing it.
Well, I guess if I'm ever falsely accused of a crime, I'll have an ironclad alibi because my technology is ratting on me all day long for everything I do.
Right.
But the interesting part about that is that when we collect so much data, when so much is available to sift through, it's very easy to select certain data points that fit with a narrative that we want to show.
So, for example, in New York, the local police have been doing a lot of gang policing.
But what gang policing actually means is very unclear.
It's not always going after people who are part of criminal enterprises, you know, engaging in commercial activity.
It's often just young kids whose social media posts are collected, showing them flashing, quote unquote, gang signs and used to then implicate them in criminal conspiracies when they're connected to one or two individuals who have committed some sort of violent offense.
So when you have enough data about people, you can parse what you want and then create a narrative around it.
And that is worrying because, you know, we're not necessarily in control of how the data points are selected.
Right.
Well, and you said it, too.
And it's funny because it always goes without saying that this is the legitimate use of the term conspiracy.
When a prosecutor wants to put an innocent person in prison for something somebody else did, they call it a conspiracy.
But in the rest of the world, a conspiracy theorist is somebody like, I don't know, a district attorney who makes up a bunch of data points and weaves together a story to implicate people in things that they actually didn't do.
But they're the only ones who ever get away with it.
But that's exactly what you're talking about is basically cops as truthers going, oh, well, now I'm an MS-13 truther.
So let me go through all the Mexicans that live on the southeast side of town and see which one of them, which one of them have each other's phone numbers.
And now we do like link analysis, like we're Petraeus and Flynn in Afghanistan, figuring out, pretending to figure out who's the Taliban insurgency and who's not.
And which they did nothing but target innocent people all day, by the way.
And that's all they're doing.
They're basically a bunch of conspiracy kooks with fancy computers and tax dollars to make it seem all like, you know, slick and fancy, like some primetime TV show to give it this legitimacy.
But basically all they are, they're making up stories about people.
They're making up, like you said, then kind of cherry pick it and make it make some innocent kid look like he's part of, you know, some big Rico thing, because his cousin knows a guy who had some cocaine in his pocket.
Right.
And they used to these Rico laws, which for once, you know, used to prosecute the mobs are now being trained on 13, 14 year olds growing up in the projects in New York.
So there's clearly a pretty broad overreach there in terms of their power.
Yeah, it really is incredible.
And you can see how, I mean, on the face of it, it seems very scientific and therefore rational, but it's just garbage in garbage out a bunch of idiot assumptions by a bunch of idiot meathead cops with fancy tools is still nothing but bad police work, going out fishing after people.
You know, there's a book called three felonies a day that says everybody, you can't even get out of bed without committing a felony because of, you know, your sheets violate some regulation or God knows what, you know?
Well, I mean, part of this is that it's not just local officers taking their initiative.
It's, you know, district attorneys building up big cases over years and years and sort of wanting to target certain populations, let's say.
And then the officers do, you know, whatever is necessary within those parameters to find what, what the prosecutors want.
That's at least from what I've seen has happened in New York often.
Yeah.
And now, so what about the the link analysis and all the data mining and all of that?
Did you study up on that much here?
Yeah.
So in the article, we show that both in terms of the intercepted data, like with stuff like stingrays, and in terms of the extracted data from stuff like still bright forensic tools, officers are able and departments are able to collect a large amount of data, which it's very murky as to what happens to that data.
But we found some tools, such as pen link, which is a company out of Nebraska that police have, it sells both software and servers to departments.
And it allows them to easily collect, for example, information from stingrays, which will then allow you to sort of keep a historical data set on all calls made in a certain area, for example, and allow you to visualize networks with just a few strokes of a mouse that, you know, would have taken weeks in the past to do with sort of by hand network analysis.
We see a similar thing with extracted phone data, where, you know, you can just download data from my phone, see all my call logs, and then quickly, pretty much make a fairly accurate picture of who I've been in contact with over the last few months, and then sort of size nodes based on various centrality measures and kind of decide, you know, who the suspects are.
But what if the person that node I'm talking to is a pizza guy, or, you know, my mom, you know, does that make them part of a criminal conspiracy?
Well, yeah, let me ask you that kind of devil's advocate sort of thing here, if I can, because I'm thinking, you know, my assumption is that this is idiocy, right?
That they're basically, like I said, mechanized conspiracy kookery on the part of the cops here.
But on the other hand, take my cell phone list.
I got journalists and weirdos and God knows who all over the world.
I got Dan Ellsberg in there, and who knows who, but I also have completely normal people from my regular life who don't even have an interest in politics, or who knows what.
And then they have people in their cell phones that I don't know, but all over the country, family, friends, whatever, whatever.
Maybe the software engineers and the algorithm writers are smart enough to tell the difference between me and my kind of anomalous cell phone list and the local pizza place.
I mean, I understand certainly the one hop, two hop theory with the pizza place, meaning they can get away with surveilling a lot of people under the law, but that's kind of a separate question.
But just, I mean, is it really a safe bet that this is mostly useless?
Or, you know, maybe they can, maybe they can differentiate and maybe they can really figure out the difference between, you know, a murderer's accomplices and just his friends and associates who really are.
What's more important is that, yes, like any officer, when they call the number and realize it's dominoes, can understand that.
But as you said, with the one hop, two hop theory, it justifies a pretty sort of dragnet collection of data.
And so when you have that, you can collect, let's say, a lot of phone activity in a certain neighborhood, let's say a pretty over police neighborhood.
And then with the one hop, two hop theory, you're able to justify the retention of that data.
And what that means is later, if you have that data set and a crime happened to occur during one of those phone calls, you can then go back to that data set and say, okay, well, we know this crime happened on this block and we know X, Y, Bob, John, and Tom all made phone calls and texts around this time.
So now those people are our suspects and or our witnesses.
We're going to go to them and sort of try to see if they're the ones who were connected to this incident.
Now, the controversial part about that is that these tools are disproportionately used where communities are already highly policed.
So in past reporting, we found that stingrays, for example, are mostly used in low-income African-American communities.
So those residents who, despite not being suspected of any crime, but are caught up in the dragnet of these interceptions are now liable to be seen more increasingly as suspects within criminal investigations simply for living in an area where the interceptions are occurring frequently.
And when we look at usage logs in places like Baltimore, they're using stingrays just for really low-level crimes such as, you know, cell phone robberies.
And if you're doing that every day in certain neighborhoods, you're going to just collect a lot of data on innocent residents, which then puts them in suspicion of police.
And for police, it's a no-brainer.
You want to have as much data as you can so you can more efficiently and precisely find target suspect leads and witness leads.
And that makes perfect sense from a law enforcement perspective.
It just makes your job a lot easier.
But the civil liberties question, I guess, is, are these people who just happen to live in a neighborhood, is it fair to make them suspects simply because they live near where a crime is committed?
Yeah.
And, you know, really, it sounds like when you put it that way, calling it confirmation bias rather than conspiracy quackery is probably better because that's really what you're describing there is, you know, just even if they're really trying to do the right thing, they're basically, the context that they're putting themselves and the context that they're putting the people of the neighborhood in just makes it that much more likely that they're going to be going after innocent people just because of the association.
Whereas before, you know, they might kind of have an idea of the association.
Now it's all mapped out pretty on the screen and whatever.
And so they can maybe intuit meaning into it where it doesn't really belong.
You know, sounds like.
Right.
Yeah.
And you don't really ever know how this data is going to be used later once it's collected.
So, you know, if the government knows all of the DACA recipients, for example, they have information on them in their databases, they know their, let's say their addresses and can they figure out, you know, their home phone numbers or something, or just their sort of contact information.
Is that then going to be used retroactively to look within the intercepted databases and see who their contacts are to try to figure out networks of undocumented immigrants and then use that for federal deportation proceedings?
I mean, there's a lot of possibilities once this data is collected about how it's distributed and then what it's used for that people don't necessarily think about because they don't even know the data is being collected in the first place.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, I think what we're sort of getting at here is the growing and growing capability of total enforcement where all the data is integrated.
If everybody's guilty of three felonies a day and every police agency is networked together and their ability to spy on what we're all doing is basically unlimited.
And they have our location data, which means, again, little dots on their computer screen showing whoever was around who, which they can interpret to mean however they like.
And like you said, going back in time.
Well, now that this guy's been accused of a crime, let's go back and see who he's been near for the last five years and and see how bad we want to go on fishing expeditions against them.
This kind of thing can turn into East Germany really, really quick here.
In fact, there are a couple million people in prison right now might argue we already are.
Yeah, I mean, our our prison population rate, at least in the last few years, has been pretty much comparable to the height of Stalin's gulags.
So it's hard to argue that we're not in, you know, a very, you know, hyper policed, hyper prison, imprisoned society, just statistically.
Yeah.
Man, well, it's it's really great work that you've done here.
I hope everyone will check it out.
It's cell phone surveillance gear floods U.S. cities, millions of dollars, almost five million dollars.
And that can buy a lot of equipment here.
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And thanks, y'all.
George Joseph editorial fellow at City Lab and good Texan.
Thanks very much, George.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Have a good one.
Appreciate it.
That's Scott Horton Show.
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Thanks.
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