Feds Engage in Massive Spying on Americans’ Cellphones from the Air

The Wall Street Journal has today a
terrific article, “Americans’
Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program,” that details
how U.S. Marshals Service aircraft deploy “dirtbox” technology to
spy on millions of Americans’ cellphones from above. The dirtbox
technology (so named as an acronym for the company that makes the
devices, Digital Receiver Technology) functions in much the same
way as “stringray”
spy technologies which obtain information about the location of a
person’s cellphone by pretending to be a legitimate cellphone
tower. While stingray devices can scoop up information about
hundreds of innocent cellphone users, dirtbox devices can pick up
information from thousands and tens of thousands of innocent
Americans. 

From the Journal:

The program is the latest example of the
extent to which the U.S. is training its surveillance lens inside
the U.S. It is similar in approach to the National Security
Agency’s program to collect millions of Americans phone records, in
that it scoops up large volumes of data in order to find a single
person or a handful of people. The U.S. government justified the
phone-records collection by arguing it is a minimally invasive way
of searching for terrorists. …

By taking the program airborne, the government can sift through
a greater volume of information and with greater precision, these
people said. If a suspect’s cellphone is identified, the technology
can pinpoint its location within about 10 feet, down to a specific
room in a building. Newer versions of the technology can be
programmed to do more than suck in data: They can also jam signals
and retrieve data from a target phone such as texts or photos. It
isn’t clear if this domestic program has ever used those features.
…

Christopher Soghoian, chief technologist at the American Civil
Liberties Union, called it “a dragnet surveillance program. It’s
inexcusable and it’s likely—to the extent judges are authorizing
it—[that] they have no idea of the scale of it.”

With bitter amusement and dismay I noted the juxtaposition of
these two headlines in today’s Washington Post:

“Marshals
said to monitor phones from the air” and “Report:
Most think they live in a privacy dystopia.”

The second article is reporting the results of a Pew Research
Poll which the Post notes:

Eight in 10 Americans believe the public should be concerned
about the government’s monitoring of phone calls and Internet
communications according to a survey conducted by the organization
in January. 

No kidding. It’s beginning to seem like the list of Federal
agencies that don’t spy on Americans is shorter than the
list of those that
do.