Rein In The Warrior Cops: State House, Tuesday March 8, 10:30am

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Last year, across the country, over 1,100 people were shot by police.

In Massachusetts, we pride ourselves as being somehow different and more sophisticated than the rest of the country, but our police still shoot people at sixteen times the rate of people in Germany.

We have a situation so absurd that the police chief of the tiny town of Rehoboth can apply for, and receive, a $700,000 mine-resistant military assault vehicle, and the town doesn’t even bat an eye. They didn’t hold hearings, they didn’t take a vote, they just left it up to the police to decide how much to turn themselves into a military occupying force in that town.

Our police are trained, through initiatives like Urban Shield, to think of themselves as quasi-military, and the people as their enemies.

None of this is good enough.

This morning, Tuesday March 8, there will be a hearing at the State House on our bill to help deal with this, H. 2169. Come make your voice heard; head below the fold for the background.

H. 2169, “An Act assuring municipal control of military equipment procurement by local law enforcement”, sponsored by Rep. Denise Provost
Press Release
Digital Fourth’s Testimony to the Committee

Continue reading Rein In The Warrior Cops: State House, Tuesday March 8, 10:30am

Our New Bill, H2169, Reining In Militarization in Massachusetts

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Last month, we broke the news that even small towns in Massachusetts, like Rehoboth and Norfolk, were getting mine-resistant armored vehicles for free from the federal government, and had no good answer for why they needed them.

Last Friday was the deadline for filing bills for the Massachusetts legislature’s 2015-16 session, and we took the opportunity to draft a solution to the state’s police militarization problem.

Sponsored by Rep. Denise Provost (D-Somerville), our bill doesn’t ban police departments altogether from getting military-style equipment. What it does is forbid them from getting them for free, either from the federal government or as a gift from any third party. If they want to get military equipment (including stingrays or drones), the mayor and city council (in a city) or the selectmembers (in a town) have to vote publicly to approve that purchase, in effect forcing the purchase to come out of municipal funds.

Right now, the process is not democratic. The federal surplus programs are a remote corner of the federal budget, and their costs are a rounding error in DC. But to the taxpayers of a town like Rehoboth, it makes a big difference whether it’s them or the feds paying for a $700,000 MRAP.

Continue reading Our New Bill, H2169, Reining In Militarization in Massachusetts

Mr. Anderson’s Rough Guide to Anonymous Protest

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Note: These methods are not foolproof. Even if you take every precaution described below, you should still assume that you are being watched, tracked, and recorded. Act accordingly.

I. Leave your cellphone at home. It is safe to assume that “Stingrays” (also known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI catchers”) are being used at every #BlackLivesMatter protest around the country. These devices trick your phone into connecting to them by simulating a cell tower, allowing law enforcement to intercept your text messages and phone calls as well as your location information and International Mobile Subscriber Identity (your phone’s unique identifier). They are small enough to be mounted on vehicles and can even be placed on airplanes and helicopters to track protesters from the sky. It is probably best to leave your cellphone at home. If this is impractical for you, you might want to consider using secure messaging apps such as Wickr or TextSecure. Note that as long as your phone is turned on, your location information and IMSI information can still be intercepted.

II. Avoid exposing your face to cameras. Police love to video record protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. Unless you want to run the risk of having images of your face uploaded to a network of shadowy databases to be matched with driver’s license photographs and other government records for tracking purposes, it is wise to consider covering up your face or applying face paint in a manner that prevents facial recognition software from identifying you. Some believe covering your face is cowardly, but if the choice is between being indexed in a virtually boundless, unaccountable surveillance system and the right to protest anonymously without retribution, I’ll take the latter any day.

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III. Avoid advertising your location or other personal information on social media. Fusion centers and police departments like to track people using social media geolocation software to track social media posts in real-time. This is likely one of the tools used by the Massachusetts fusion centers for tracking #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Boston. You may want to avoid using social media altogether while at a protest; but if you feel the need, it might be a good idea to create a fake account to make it a little more difficult for spies to monitor you.

IV. Use PGP for encrypted emails. Encryption is your friend. “PGP” stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”, and it holds true to its name. Think of PGP as an airtight container that keeps your emails away from the eyes of anyone except the intended recipient(s). Sure, it can be a little tough to set up, but once you have it installed, it’s actually very easy to use.

Here is a guide to installing PGP for Mac OS X.
Here is a guide to installing PGP for Windows and GNU/Linux.

V. Use Tor and/or a VPN. Tor is free software that provides anonymity by routing your Internet activity through a series of other users running Tor relays. The goal is to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing the web pages you visit by bouncing your connection around the network, making it appear as if you are accessing the Internet from a completely random location. Similarly, Virtual Private Networks route your connection through a server of your choice, making it appear as if you are connecting to the Internet from France, Canada, Sweden, or pretty much anywhere. Unlike Tor, good VPNs are not free, but they can be as inexpensive as $3.33 per month.

Local Police May Be Hacking Your Phone: Piercing Secrecy Around Stingrays

Without your knowledge or permission, your smartphone’s calls could be being intercepted right now by your local police department, and your taxes are definitely being misused to pay for unconstitutional police snooping.

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We have reported before on “stingrays”, which started being used by local police departments in around 2006. These devices impersonate a cellphone tower and intercept the calls that would otherwise flow to other actual nearby towers. Initially bulky, stingrays can now be laptop-sized or smaller, and the most advanced models are light enough to be carried by drones. Police departments conceal their use of this technology when applying for warrants to conduct surveillance, so judges can’t distinguish between applying for a “regular” interception on an individual phone and a stingray interception which gathers all traffic from nearby cellphone towers. The devices’ main manufacturer, Harris Corporation, even obliges police departments contractually to conceal their use of stingrays. The Obama administration is so keen to preserve the cloak of secrecy around stingrays that they sent in the US Marshals to prevent the ACLU from obtaining documents relating to stingray use by a north Florida police department. The courts are beginning to recognize the intrusive nature of cellphone tower dump data, but have not yet grappled with the fact that using stingrays, law enforcement don’t have to ask a cellphone company for the data; they can just suck it up without permission.

Now there is a new way to rip that cloak. Popular Science quotes the CEO of ESD America, which manufactures the $3,500 “CryptoPhone 500”, eagerly describing how his phones could detect when stingrays were being used in their vicinity. While testing the CryptoPhone 500 in August, users found 17 sites around the country where stingrays appeared to be being used on passersby. They could detect the use of stingrays because stingrays downgrade your connection from 4G to the less secure 2G and then turn off your phone’s encryption. Normal Android smartphones or IPhones are oblivious to this process.

Twitter users have been speculating whether these 17 sites map onto the sites of fusion centers around the country. Since we’re familiar with both stingrays and fusion centers, we can say conclusively that they don’t. Most sites seem to be in commercial areas, not around fusion center or military locations. ESD is not providing the precise site locations, and stingrays’ mobility further complicates the process of detecting them. We think that CryptoPhone users have captured what is likely to be only a small subset of stingray usage not by fusion centers, or by the NSA, but by regular local police departments around the nation. We’re supporting the efforts of researchers like Muckrock who want to get more transparency about stingray use by police departments, and to keep an eye out for proposals in your community to “upgrade” police department technology.

So, do we all have to go out and upgrade to the CryptoPhone 500 in order to feel safe in our communications? Well, no; there’s another, cheaper way to find out whether the government is using stingrays in your community.

Continue reading Local Police May Be Hacking Your Phone: Piercing Secrecy Around Stingrays

Are Boston Police Using Stingrays? Help MuckRock Find Out

Today’s news in Wired that the federal government is willing to send in the US Marshals to prevent disclosure of how local police departments are using stingrays, makes it seem that what they’re hiding is pretty important.

Our friends at public information service Muckrock.com are launching a new research project to find out exactly what police are doing with this kind of data. Shawn Musgrave describes their project below. We strongly encourage supporters of Digital Fourth to help them fund this important work. We don’t know yet whether any police departments in Massachusetts are using this secrecy-laden technology – wouldn’t you like to find out?

Continue reading Are Boston Police Using Stingrays? Help MuckRock Find Out

This Is Mass Justice: SJC Requires Warrants For Cellphone Tower Data

On February 18, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared that here in Massachusetts, state cops actually do have to get a warrant if they want to access your cellphone location data.

This is what an independent judiciary looks like. The Justices of our Supreme Judicial Court have withstood over half a century of New England winters. They have endured the long decades of the Curse of the Bambino. Their knotted muscles are carved from whalers’ scrimshaw. They are not to be messed with. The obsequious servants of the surveillance state on the FISA Court could learn a thing or two from them.

Continue reading This Is Mass Justice: SJC Requires Warrants For Cellphone Tower Data

Stingrays Can Do More Than You Ever Imagined: Law Enforcement, Cellphone Interceptions, and Countermeasures

Previously, we reported on the existence of stingrays, also known as `IMSI catchers’, which are used by law enforcement as mobile cellphone towers. Stingrays intercept location and other data from all cellphones in the area, redirecting the traffic from regular cellphone towers. They can be used to get cellphone data without having even to go through phone companies to get it.

Thanks to the case US v. Rigmaiden and terrific reporting from Kim Zetter on the Threat Level blog at Wired, we now have a much more comprehensive picture of how they work and what they can do. It turns out that Stingrays have been around for longer, can do much more and are much more widespread than we might have supposed, and that how much they are really used may well be unknown to the courts.

Continue reading Stingrays Can Do More Than You Ever Imagined: Law Enforcement, Cellphone Interceptions, and Countermeasures

By 2020, Stingray Will Be Launched! New Doohickey Allows Police To Get Everybody’s Cellphone Locations Without Going Through the Telcos

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Yes, since you ask, that is a “Terror Fish”.

We continue our series updating you on the exciting new world of mass surveillance you should expect in a few short years (previous posts include discussions of real-time life recording, terahertz surveillance and indoor cellphone tracking), by bringing you the Stingray.

The Stingray: essentially a cellphone tower that can move around.
The Stingray (image courtesy of the Wall Street Journal)

Continue reading By 2020, Stingray Will Be Launched! New Doohickey Allows Police To Get Everybody’s Cellphone Locations Without Going Through the Telcos