U.S. Planes Spying on Americans

It was reported this week that there is a secret government program using airplanes to retrieve information from mobile phones. The top secret program works as follows:

1. Planes are equipped with “dirtbox” devices which are designed to pick up cell phone signals and track criminals
2. The program tracks and locates phones which are known to be suspect phones and supposedly discards all other data
3. Program determines where the signals were the strongest to determine an approximate location
4. Law enforcement agencies use the collected data to capture the criminal suspects

Cell phones try to stay constantly connected to cellular networks and as a result are constantly sending pings of information every few seconds. Using these pings, a person’s location can be determined with fairly good accuracy.

The devices that the government agency is using work by essential faking being a cell phone tower. Cell phone devices are tricked into sending their information to the boxes instead of actual cell phone towers. These pings usually contain identifying information as well as sensitive location data. Although just revealed this past week, it is alleged that the government, specifically the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, has been using this technology all the way back to 2010.

Since 2001, the amount of surveillance going on in America has drastically increased as we have discussed in class the past few weeks. This is just another layer of how the government is keeping track of people within the United States. The government has not confirmed or denied the existence of this program, but it has many citizens and groups significantly concerned. The government said discussing any specifics would allow for criminals and foreign governments to find the vulnerabilities, capabilities, and limitations of the system.

 A program like this “vastly increases the number of completely innocent bystanders whose information is being swept up by law enforcement”. The American Civil Liberties Union, also known as the ACLU, was one of the first groups to express concern about the program. Nathan Freed Wessler, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney came out and said, “This is a disturbing progression of the federal government's use of this technology”. It is particularly concerning that Americans are just now hearing about this technology. Considering its existence since 2010, one would have expected public discussion around its legality. Likely this technology has led to the capture of numerous individuals. Since the technology is just coming to light, these captured individuals were likely denied the chance to challenge the technology and how it was used to capture them. Another major concern is verifying the agencies are actually dumping the data of non-criminals. Although the devices are supposed to get rid of any unnecessary data, who is to say that it actually is? There have been many cases of the government saying they are not tracking something when in reality they have been collecting data the whole time. At the very least, some sort of verification that only criminal data is being kept would be nice.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/13/technology/security/federal-planes-spy/index.html