Never use your burner phone at home or near your everyday cell phone. Update to this story.

Via Extreme Tech

Over the past 12-18 months, there’s been an increased level of scrutiny applied to the various ways local, state, and federal law enforcement officials track and monitor the lives of ordinary citizens. One tool that’s come under increasing fire is the so-called stingray — a fake cell phone tower that law enforcement officials deploy to track a suspect, often without a warrant or any other formal approval.

A stingray is a false cell phone tower that can force phones in a geographical area to connect to it. Once these devices connect, the stingray can be used to either hone in on the target’s location or, with some models, actually eavesdrop on conversations, text messages, and web browser activity. It’s not clear how much the police cooperate with the cell phone carriers on this — in at least some cases, the police have gone to carriers with requests for information, while in others they seem to have taken a brute-force approach, dumping the data of every single user on a given tower and then sorting it to find the parties they’re interested in tracking. Stingrays can be used to force the phone to give up its user details, making it fairly easy for the police to match devices and account holders.

The potential uses for the information are enormous. Say a murder occurs on a particular street with an estimated time of death between 2 and 4 AM. Local law enforcement would have an obvious interest in compelling cell phone companies to turn over the records of every cell phone that moved in and out of the area between those two time periods. At rush hour, this kind of information would be useless — but if the cell phone network data shows a device in the same approximate area as the murder suddenly leaving the area at a high rate of speed, that cell phone owner is a potential suspect.

Virtually all the stingray devices in use across the United States are manufactured by one company, the Harris Corporation, which makes a variety of other tracking devices. Its other products can be used to conduct denial-of-service attacks on cell phones, monitor voice traffic, amplify the range and power of stingray attacks, and more sophisticated monitoring tools for triangulating an individual’s location.
A consistent disregard for constitutional safeguards

Used properly, stingrays could be an incredibly useful tool for law enforcement, but there are enormous problems with their current deployments. Police often fail to submit a warrant request — one police department in Florida has admitted to using a stingray more than 200 times since 2010 without ever getting a warrant for its use. These devices are indiscriminate — in rare cases, such as a stolen cell phone, police may know in advance precisely which device to target, but in the majority of scenarios they’re fishing for bait to see what they can find. The only indication that a phone has been trapped into connecting to a stingray may be a sudden increase in power consumption (the stingray tells the phone to run its antenna at maximum power).

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HT Doug Ross