Who Is Tracking Your Phone?

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

It is now widely known that governments the world over eavesdrop on citizens’ electronic communication. Until last year, governmental spying was thought to be restricted to cyberspace. Then, a secretive US Justice Department program was outed. The Justice Department was using Stingrays – a device that allowed it to track cell-phones and collect identifying information from thousands of devices at once.

Then, other programmes in various federal agencies were revealed – the last one to be outed being the Internal Revenue Service. 13 federal agencies are now known to use the devices, and many local law enforcement agencies are known to be using them as well.

Stingrays, as they are commonly referred to after a popular model, are cell-site simulators. Mobile devices, always seeking the strongest possible data connection, normally connect to the nearest available tower. Stingrays pose as such towers in order to pinpoint the location of specific targets after they connect to them, and to collect sensitive data about the cell-phone users. In the process, all devices and users in the area are exposed to the attack as well.

Following the revelations, the Justice Department, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, have published internal guideline and procedures their agents must follow when using the devices. These guidelines include limits on retention of incidental collected data, and establish that agents must obtain warrants before deploying Stingrays.

These guidelines, however, apply only to those agencies. House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, along with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, now want to regulate the use of the devices with a new bill: The Stingray Privacy Act. The bill would extend the DoJ’s and DHS’s usage policies to all Stingray users, down to the state and local levels.

While this development is welcomed by privacy advocates, use of similar devices by unlawful parties still leaves unsuspecting citizens at risk. Due to the architecture of current cell-phone technology a solution seems to be unfeasible at this stage, leaving us all exposed.