US Police Now Armed With Israeli Spy Vans Simulating Mobile Phone Towers (cybernews.com)
- Reference: 0184541686
- News link: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/26/07/21/0541215/us-police-now-armed-with-israeli-spy-vans-simulating-mobile-phone-towers
- Source link: https://cybernews.com/privacy/us-police-israeli-spy-vans-falconet-cognyte/
> If you thought [2]Flock [3]was [4]bad check out Falconet. Falconet from Israeli company Cognyte [5]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.
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> 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.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/07/11/0556236/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-a-journalist-for-days-then-sent-police-to-arrest-him
[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/06/21/1939214/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using-flocks-cameras-to-stalk-people
[4] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/06/07/2357243/police-sued-after-imprisoning-innocent-man-placed-near-violent-crime-by-flock-license-plate-reader
[5] https://cybernews.com/privacy/us-police-israeli-spy-vans-falconet-cognyte/
Stingray? (Score:2)
These have been a thing since forever no?
Re:Stingray? (Score:5, Informative)
They were deemed illegal without a warrant a long time ago as well.
[1]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]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement
Re:Stingray? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, well, the U.S. are led by a bunch of criminals for quite a long time right now. "The System" seems to be unable to deal with that situation. If the midterms don't bring even a smidge of change, I assume it'd be best to leave the country before it turns into a second North Korea...
Re: (Score:3)
We know you are not from the USA, we know who pays you and we know what is going on.
Re: (Score:2)
You dont need to lie, we know.
Re: (Score:2)
> Yeah, well, the U.S. are led by a bunch of criminals for quite a long time right now. "The System" seems to be unable to deal with that situation. If the midterms don't bring even a smidge of change, I assume it'd be best to leave the country before it turns into a second North Korea...
What's sad is that even if the Democrats get as much power as possible, they'll use it to piss themselves into doing nothing in the name of healing the country or some bullshit. And with no consequences, it'll just be one more election before the pendulum swings back this direction. We need consequences for the outright lawbreaking, constitution ignoring ignoramuses in charge now, but I don't see it happening with our current round of available politicians.
Re: Stingray? (Score:2)
Must admit I was under the impression they continued using them regardless of warrants. Thank you for the information.
Re: (Score:3)
> Must admit I was under the impression they continued using [Stingrays] regardless of warrants.
Maybe they do? Just saying.
IANAL, but here goes. If you're law enforcement trying to build a case against someone, you may not be able to admit into trial information gathered from Stingrays, or any information derived from the Stingray evidence. (Fruit from the poisoned tree rule.)
On the other hand, if you're a government agency that wants to harass someone, with no intention of going to trial, then why not use Stingrays to help you do it? Or even use their supposed presence to chill the population into su
Re:Stingray? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Be it Bluetooth, meshtastic or meshcore
I hate to tell you (Score:1)
This has been going on for decades.
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:lotta "excuses" here (Score:4, Insightful)
> 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:lotta "excuses" here (Score:4, Interesting)
> Israel was created to get Jews out of Europe.
Israel was proposed to get Jews out of Europe, but then the UK decided it didn't want to run that ball in because (among other reasons) T.E. Lawrence convinced them it would lead to atrocity. The US is ok with atrocities (being founded on top of them) and went ahead and completed the touchdown and has been busy spiking the ball directly into Iran ever since. If you still think the US gives two shits about Europe after refusing to enter WWII until after Pearl Harbor, I really have no idea what to say to you about that.
Re: (Score:2)
Zionists were were buying and cultivating the land when the Ottoman Empire still was a thing. They coexisted with the local Muslims pretty well until the British got involved. The British originally tried to create a territory just for a Jewish homeland after WWI. There were several small migrations up till WWII.
Re:lotta "excuses" here (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting rid of AIPAC would be a great start. They literally brag about getting politicians elected.
Re: (Score:2)
not really. aipac as such is just an administrative tool, the cover-up. what buys politicians and all sorts of "leaders" is the flow of money and the client network underneath. that has lots of ways to operate and is not at all easy to get rid of. if anything if you shut down aipac the whole thing would just become more obscure and you get a false closure (much like usaid, ned, etc).
popular support for zionism is already declining, which is a good thing, but that only gets that far. now what's needed is tha
Re: lotta "excuses" here (Score:2)
I heard that line somewhere before... Ah, the Jews inflicted drunkeness on the Great Russian People.
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:3, Informative)
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:Where's the FCC in all this? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
There are also power limits on unlicensed frequencies. Would you like to guess what my experience has been working on police surveillance and whether they respect those limits or not?
Different country, same problem; cops often put themselves above the law.
Question (Score:2)
Is it possible to put software on a phone that prevents it from being tracked this way? Sort of like randomized MAC addresses with WiFi.
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.
Relies on an ancient 2G exploit (Score:1)
The only reason most phones still support 2G out of the box is to enable this kind of spying. The FCC actually requires it, for this specific reason. If your phone supports disabling fallback to 2G, you should disable it.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
We are in an era where defending the US Constitution is seen as being a bad thing by the current administration in the White House. While law enforcement has had access to this sort of thing for a long time, the USE of them has required a search warrant, with a specific target in mind. Use of this sort of thing for anything that does NOT involve a search warrant is very very illegal.
Think about it another way, when you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't need to be afraid of law enforcement. In
EFF Rayhunter (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
[1]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]
[2]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.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying
[2] https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter
Re: (Score:1)
Your right to protest is unimpeaded. What Constitutional right are you talking about?
Re: (Score:3)
He's clearly talking about the right of not being unlawfully tracked.
Re: (Score:3)
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:EFF Rayhunter (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean ICE showing up to demand you delete the post that hurt their feelings? [1]https://newrepublic.com/post/2... [newrepublic.com]
Sounds like a blatant first amendment violation to me.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/post/212340/ice-poll-worker-election-delete-instagram-post
Re: (Score:2)
> Your right to protest is unimpeaded. What Constitutional right are you talking about?
Go make that argument to Renee Nicole Good or Alex Pretti. Oh wait... you CAN'T do that, because they're DEAD!!!
So much for the right to protest being "unimpeaded".
MITM attack not possible with 5G (Score:2)
5G RAN has been designed to make MITM attacks like this not work. The mobile base station would need to be part of the telco's network in order to function - and these SUVs are not part of AT&T or Version's network. What these SUVs can do is force your phone to downgrade from 5G to 4G/LTE (or 3G) and then attack you. I suspect that Israel is making bank on selling equipment to Texas without Texas realizing the limitations.
Re: (Score:2)
> The mobile base station would need to be part of the telco's network in order to function - and these SUVs are not part of AT&T or Version's network
For the local cops, true.
For the feds, NSL incoming!
Stingrays have been around for years. (Score:3, Funny)
Not sure this is really news. Well, except that Texas has stopped buying American.
That's a source? (Score:4, Interesting)
An X post by someone with a substack (so, a rumormonger who rumormongers), linking to a Lithuanian site? Why am I to trust the reporting of someone in Lithuania about the Texas State Dept. of Safety?
Be a terrible shame (Score:3)
if we applied Flock cameras and devices like this loose on the politicians, police, and Epstein class. I'd love to see police, police chiefs, politicians, and members of the Epstein class like Peter Thiel, under constant DIRECT surveillance like they want to directed toward other people worldwide.
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 their private jet flights?
Re: (Score:2)
On one hand, the only way society should accept surveillance is if it's applied to the elites first .
On the other hand, there's no way we can trust that it's being applied to the elites at all .
Therefore, there's no way we can trust surveillance at all .
Pubic Service Announcement (Score:3, Interesting)
PSA: Never point those inexpensive, ridiculously powerful and probably FDA-regulation-violating green laser pens sold on Amazon and AliExpress at Flock cameras, as this may damage their sensors and require expensive replacements.
Now, when will Amazon start selling megawatt pulsed microwave emitters...?
android 16 flags them (Score:3)
android 16 is expected to start flagging rogue cell phone towers.
[1]https://www.techradar.com/phon... [techradar.com]
[1] https://www.techradar.com/phones/android/android-16-will-soon-flag-fake-cell-towers-and-warn-you-if-someone-is-spying-on-your-phone
Re: (Score:2)
GrapheneOS, at least, does this on recent Pixel hardware (confirmed as of Pixel 9 Pro, unknown on lower models.)
It's doing a couple different things, controllable by toggles in settings:
1) Disable 2G network connections globally, which may break a few weird old international roaming connections, but also blocks some old shitty IMSI catchers. Mainly this is done because 2G has little to no protections, blindly offering up globally-trackable identifiers to anyone who asks.
2) "Network notifications" gives the
Don't trust your phone (Score:2)
Its security sucks badly, exactly to allow governments of all kinds to spy on you. US police is just a little less shameless about it.
I saw one of these this year in NY (Score:3)
I was running a road race in upstate NY. Within 100 yards of one of the checkpoints, there was a small police vehicle towing a trailer with a bunch of antenna. Since the checkpoint had race timing, all the police had to do was download the race results and compare race timing to the gathered cell data and you'd have names matched with cell phone signatures.
WTF? (Score:2)
> 4 brand-new Chevrolet Tahoes for $4.5 million this March, it looked like a routine fleet upgrade.
To be sure, the Chevy Tahoe is an over priced piece of shit. But, on what planet would a $1million price tag be a routine purchase?
What the actual factual fuck?
Re: (Score:2)
Is it ok to grift the grifters?
Re: (Score:2)
Not with my money, it isn't.
imagine (Score:2)
having the world's worst criminal state as your greatest ally
Re: (Score:3)
> having the world's worst criminal state as your greatest ally
I take your point, but I have to ask "Which state is which"? If forced to choose between Israel and America for the title of worst criminal state, I'd have to flip a coin.
Now Armed With? (Score:2)
Now?
This is old technology. Given the applicable laws (or apathy toward them) the tech has been available for years.
Let's hear it for landlines! (Score:2)
If you have internet service to your home, or "cable" TV, you probably still have a lanline available to subscribe to - either coax or fiber.
Going back to CB radio (Score:3)
I've had enough of this, I'm going back to CB radio.
Ummmm..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re: Ummmm..... (Score:3)
Gentlemen... behave.
Re:Ummmm..... (Score:5, Insightful)
> "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)
Google Pixel phones also have switched off the older tech, making LTE/5G ubiquitous.
Re:Ummmm..... (Score:5, Informative)
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 administration will get it in front of their paid for Nazis on the Supreme Court which will find in these extenuating circumstances that the alleged administration can ignore the 4th Amendment as if it never appeared in the Constitution.
Re: (Score:2)
Nazis on the Supreme Court lol
Nothing is a crime anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
Donald Trump sold 2 billion dollars in pardons, accepted a $1 billion dollar jet from Qatar that he is clearly planning on taking with him if he doesn't get a third term and has accepted billions of dollars in money through a cryptocurrency scheme much of which came from foreign governments. Absolutely none of this mattered and Trump still has a 37% approval rating.
Your neighbor gave up on the rule of law. Maybe for the promise of cheap eggs. Maybe because trans girls give them the ick. Maybe because Fox News is entertaining for some reason. Doesn't matter why they gave it up they gave it up and you got dragged into it.
There is a small chance the Democrats will save us yet again but it's going to be tough. The amount of voter suppression going on is unlike anything we've seen since Jim Crow
Re: Nothing is a crime anymore (Score:1)
The jet belongs to the Air Force not to Donny, but I guess I should not confuse you with facts