<
div class=”field field–name-body field–type-text-with-summary field–label-hidden”>
<
div class=”field__items”>
<
div class=”field__item even”>
At EFF we spend a lot of time thinking about Street Level Surveillance technologies—the technologies used by police and other authorities to spy on you while you are going about your everyday life—such as automated license plate readers, facial recognition, surveillance camera networks, and cell-site simulators (CSS). Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out CSS around the world.
CSS (also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.
CSS operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device’s radius. Law enforcement use CSS to pinpoint the location of phones often with greater accuracy than other techniques such as cell site location information (CSLI) and without needing to involve the phone company at all. CSS can also log International Mobile Subscriber Identifiers (IMSI numbers) unique to each SIM card, or hardware serial numbers (IMEIs) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some CSS may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications in some circumstances.
What makes CSS especially interesting, as compared to other street level surveillance, is that so little is known about how commercial CSS work. We don’t fully know what capabilities they have or what exploits in the phone network they take advantage of to ensnare and spy on our phones, though we have some ideas.
We also know very little about how cell-site
[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.
Read the original article: