The military surveillance devices known as “Dirtboxes” have been in secret operation for more than a decade, tracking citizens’ locations and intercepting their calls, breaking the encryption on hundreds of calls at once.

DRT boxes (named for Digital Receiver Technology Inc, a Boeing subsidiary), are called “Stingrays on steroids” — Stingrays are the powerful, secretive fake cell towers used to track whole populations’ movements around cities. Dirtboxes are often mounted on low-flying aircraft and used for mass-scale urban surveillance.

Dirtboxes are used by the US military and NSA overseas, including in France. Because of the secrecy surrounding Dirtboxes, they are acquired through no-bid contracts, and many of the cases in which they are used collapse in court because police departments are unwilling to reveal their phone surveillance capabilities in public forums.

Chicago bought their Dirtboxes with cash seized in dubious civil forfeiture cases; LAPD’s funding came from a DHS national security grant.

The main difference between the Harris and Digital Receiver Technology devices, Martinez said, is the ability of the most sophisticated Digital Receiver Technology devices to simultaneously break the encryption of communications from hundreds of cellphones at once. A 2011 purchase order for this equipment by the Washington Headquarters Services, a branch of the Pentagon, states the devices can retrieve the encryption session keys for a cellphone “in less than a second with success rates of 50 to 75% (in real world conditions).”

In Chicago, cell-site simulators have been used to eavesdrop on the activities of demonstrators during a 2012 NATO summit and Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.

“What’s happened here is the U.S. goes to war against a foreign country under dubious circumstances, private companies develop these surveillance technologies with the help of the CIA and NSA, and they import them back home and use them on Americans,” Martinez said.

Chicago and Los Angeles have used ‘dirt box’ surveillance for a decade [Ali Winston/Reveal News]

This story originally reported by Cyrus Farivar for Ars Technica

The sheriff in San Bernardino County — east of Los Angeles County — has deployed a stingray hundreds of times without a warrant, and under questionable judicial authority.

In response to a public records request, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department (SBSD) sent Ars, among other outlets, a rare example of a template for a “pen register and trap and trace order” application. (In the letter, county lawyers claimed this was a warrant application template, when it clearly is not.) The SBSD is the law enforcement agency for the entire county, the 12th-most populous county in the United States, and the fifth-most populous in California.

Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, can be used to determine location by spoofing a cell tower, but they can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone as well as information from other phones within the vicinity. For years, federal and local law enforcement have tried to keep their existence a secret while simultaneously upgrading their capabilities. Over the last year, as the devices have become scrutinized, new information about the secretive devices has been revealed.

This template application, surprisingly, cites no legal authority on which to base its activities. The SBSD did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

“This is astonishing because it suggests the absence of legal authorization (because if there were clear legal authorization you can bet the government would be citing it),” Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told Ars Technica by e-mail.

“Alternatively, it might suggest that the government just doesn’t care about legal authorization. Either interpretation is profoundly troubling,” he said.

The documents sent to Ars by the SBSD’s county attorneys also show that since acquiring a stingray in late 2012, the agency has used it 303 times between January 1, 2014 and May 7, 2015.

Further, the SBSD, like other departments nationwide, maintains a questionable non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the FBI that indicates that the agency will work with local prosecuting authority to dismiss cases rather than reveal information in court about stingrays. (This has happened in at least some known jurisdictions elsewhere in the country.)

Just last week, the FBI released a statement regarding the use of stingrays, which claims the opposite of what its NDA with local law enforcement actually says. The SBSD also declined to produce policies, guidelines, training materials, nor the specific cases where stingrays were used.

The FBI and the Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of the device, have repeatedly declined to respond to Ars’ specific questions.

The rest of this story is available on Ars Technica

UPDATE

TruthVoice reader Tony Policicchio recommended the open source Snoopsnitch app, which purports to warn phone users of potential Stingray tracking. The app requires a rooted android device with a Qualcomm chipset in order to function correctly.

Thanks Tony!