US Police Now Armed With Israeli Spy Vans Simulating Mobile Phone Towers

US Police Now Armed With Israeli Spy Vans Simulating Mobile Phone Towers (cybernews.com) 41 Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an X post by Josh Walkos, author of the Substack We the Free: If you thought Flock was bad check out Falconet. Falconet from Israeli company Cognyte serves as a cell tower simulator that intercepts cell phone data from all devices within range. Police mount these systems in Tahoes so the vehicles can collect information while driving through areas without any direct interaction with targets. This mobile approach generates ongoing records of phone locations and communications for everyone nearby rather than only suspects, which creates comprehensive movement profiles and bypasses traditional warrant requirements under the Fourth Amendment. Cognyte sells the technology directly to U.S. agencies, as shown by the Texas Department of Public Safety purchase of four Tahoes where over three point eight million dollars went to the interception equipment. Adoption spreads through routine vehicle procurement with little external review of how the collected data is stored or shared. Once active the systems permit warrantless collection of private cell phone data across entire communities during normal patrols, which enables potential misuse and leaves individuals with no effective way to discover or contest the surveillance. Cognyte sells the technology directly to U.S. agencies, as shown by the Texas Department of Public Safety purchase of four Tahoes where over three point eight million dollars went to the interception equipment. Adoption spreads through routine vehicle procurement with little external review of how the collected data is stored or shared. Once active the systems permit warrantless collection of private cell phone data across entire communities during normal patrols, which enables potential misuse and leaves individuals with no effective way to discover or contest the surveillance. Ummmm..... (Score:2) Re: (Score:2) "bypasses traditional warrant requirements under the Fourth Amendment." = VIOLATES the 4th Amendment. Bypassing The US Constitution to track Americans without a warrant, is a Constitutional Violation, and a CRIME. Much more easily this would be a breach of wiretapping laws such as ECPA and would likely need a warrant to be legal, either under FISA or normal criminal law. No need to get into a complex constitutional case. It's also not going to work if you switch off old mobile modes and lock your phone into LTE, 4G, 5G or greater modes of network use, a feature which is definitely available on the free phoneOSs like LineageOS and GrapheneOS. Re: (Score:2) Re: (Score:2) I think the alleged administration under la Presidenta has shown that laws can be conveniently ignored until some entity like the ACLU gets a court order. But that won't stop them, they'll find some comma out of place in the court order and interpret the law in a different way, and the ACLU will have to refile to get the crap stopped. Once stopped with a temporary injunction, the alleged administration will shop for a judge that will lift it. If the ACLU continues to get injunctions, eventually the alleged Stingray? (Score:2) Re:Stingray? (Score:5, Informative) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement [wikipedia.org] "On September 5, 2018, the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal issued two rulings. In the first, Florida v. Sylvestre, it affirmed the lower court's suppression of evidence obtained from the warrantless use of a stingray because it is unconstitutional. In the second case, Ferrari v. Florida, it reversed the lower court's refusal to suppress evidence obtained from warrantless cell-site location information.[36]" Re: (Score:1) Re: (Score:2) Re: (Score:3) Yep. Stingray was ubiquitous when I was in criminal intelligence, and I've been retired for eight years. Set up a stingray focussed on a prison and all incoming/outgoing calls are routed through it. Great for building up a map of contraband users linked to the prison - we never confiscated the phones as there's much greater intel value in letting them run. Time to use some mesh networks (Score:2) I hate to tell you (Score:1) lotta "excuses" here (Score:2) seems a certain country is again invading America and the comment trolls been saying it has been going on "forever" - yeah no it is an invasion and we aren't going to let it stand Re: (Score:2) seems a certain country is again invading America Yes, it's America. Israel was founded by the US specifically for fucking up the middle east, mission accomplished. Wondering how to get more ROI, we used it to conduct research the taxpayer wouldn't pay for here, but accepted "foreign aid" for Israel. Then we import the technology. Re: (Score:1) Israel was created to get Jews out of Europe. Many of the original Zionists were anti-Semites who just wanted Jews to go away, and used the promise of a "homeland" to encourage them to migrate to the Middle East. Re: (Score:2) Getting rid of AIPAC would be a great start. They literally brag about getting politicians elected. Where's the FCC in all this? (Score:5, Interesting) Apart from warrantless mass surveillance, how to you legally operate a cell tower without an FCC licence? Is this just the government deciding not to follow its own rules? Surely the telcos, who paid good money for their spectrum, and who can't enjoy the service disruptions these government devices cause, must be pissed. Or has the FCC issued cellphone tower licences to law enforcement? Can these devices even connect calls and, if not, how could they get a licence? Re: (Score:1) 1) You are national/military intelligence and you have various secret long term warrants / exceptions which never come to court. In practice small things like murder and drugs running are calmly ignored as long as they don't involve state security. 2) You don't; the story is largely spreading misinformation; you get a warrant for an area and spy on people in that area. Courts grant these reasonably readily for limited areas. Re: (Score:2) The administration has spent most of its time gutting federal agencies of enforcement power. Even if the FCC said to stop, who would enforce it? Guess who controls the justice department? Question (Score:2) Re: (Score:2) Kind of but not really. The IMEI number can be changed on most (all?) devices but this has gotten harder over time, and your provider has to know what it is to provide you with phone service anyway. Re: (Score:2) Locking your phone to LTE mode and preferably your home network (might work wierdly in the US?) or better turns on network authentication which means that this only works with the collaboration of the network, which limits it to legal wiretaps. Legal wiretaps on the phone network could use the systems built into the network anyway, beyond the radio interface, so you weren't protected against those in the first place. Re: (Score:2) Might not be 100% true. If the van is integrated with the existing cellular network they could get the needed credentials to mimic the network from the network, in which case they would look exactly like part of the network. That's a different worry, though. "now" ? (Score:2) Seriously, "now" ? These types of vans exist for a decade at least. Maybe not this specific model from that specific manufacturer, but I don't think that's the point here. Yes, your government is spying on you. While hiding from you some of its most serious and worrying internals. Don't we just love how we are the people and in charge? lol. EFF Rayhunter (Score:3) Just the other day I heard an Electronic Frontier Foundation representative talk about their recently released tool called Rayhunter for finding and identifying these surveillance devices. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org] https://github.com/EFForg/rayh... [github.com] The way things are going these days if you attend any kind of protest in the United States right now, you can expect to be surveiled and tracked by police and federal officials. So turn your cell phone off. Sad that not having your constitutional rights protected is the norm these days. I think it's been that way for years but has gotten significantly worse lately. Re: (Score:1) Re: (Score:2) He's clearly talking about the right of not being unlawfully tracked. Re: (Score:2) Besides the abuse of power, and the Constitutional violations via unreasonable search and seizure, this monitoring causes a chilling effect amongst those with dissenting opinions. The protest may go unimpeded but your opinion has you targeted and monitored by the government for not agreeing. Which part of this is lost on you? Re: (Score:2) You mean ICE showing up to demand you delete the post that hurt their feelings? https://newrepublic.com/post/2... [newrepublic.com] Sounds like a blatant first amendment violation to me. MITM attack not possible with 5G (Score:1) Stingrays have been around for years. (Score:2) Not sure this is really news. Well, except that Texas has stopped buying American. That's a source? (Score:2) Be a terrible shame (Score:2) Whenever some fool bleats "well you're in public..." point out the Epstein class whined so hard that the government had the FAA create LADD to hide their jets. I wonder why the Epstein class would want to hide t android 16 flags them (Score:2) android 16 is expected to start flagging rogue cell phone towers. https://www.techradar.com/phon... [techradar.com]