The Feds Are Now Using ‘Stingrays’ in Planes to Spy on Our Phone Calls

It’s bad enough the government has been skulking around in cars and vans with a little device that can impersonate a cell phone tower and track you.

Now, in a move that should surprise no one, it’s taking to the skies to expand its tracking reach, in a move that would also allow it to collect data on more people at once.

That’s according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicating that the government has been using Cessna planes outfitted with special phone surveillance equipment to track suspects. But the surveillance system is designed to pick up the phone signals of anyone within range. The range of the equipment is currently unknown, but it means that data on potentially tens of thousands of phones could be collected during a single flight.

The airplane-based system is a 2-foot-square box called the Dirtbox—after the Boeing subsidiary that manufactures it (the Boeing division is known as DRT, for Digital Receiver Technology Inc). It appears to be the same or similar to so-called IMSI catchers or stingrays that law enforcement, the military, and intelligence agencies have been using for more than a decade.

The secretive stingray technology allows law enforcement agents to spoof a legitimate cell tower in order to trick nearby mobile phones and other wireless communication devices like air cards into connecting to the stingray instead of a phone carrier’s legitimate tower. When a device connects, stingrays can see and record its unique ID number as well as information that points to the device’s location.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/feds-motherfng-stingrays-motherfng-planes/