Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight

From Wired:

A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.

Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.

Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.

The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location.

In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.

To make sure the air card connected to the FBI’s simulator, Rigmaiden says that Verizon altered his air card’s Preferred Roaming List so that it would accept the FBI’s stingray as a legitimate cell site and not a rogue site, and also changed a data table on the air card designating the priority of cell sites so that the FBI’s fake site was at the top of the list.

Rigmaiden makes the assertions in a 369-page document he filed in support of a motion to suppress evidence gathered through the stingray. Rigmaiden collected information about how the stingray worked from documents obtained from the government, as well as from records obtained through FOIA requests filed by civil liberties groups and from open-source literature.

During a hearing in a U.S. District Court in Arizona on March 28 to discuss the motion, the government did not dispute Rigmaiden’s assertions about Verizon’s activities.

The actions described by Rigmaiden are much more intrusive than previously known information about how the government uses stingrays, which are generally employed for tracking cell phones and are widely used in drug and other criminal investigations.

The government has long asserted that it doesn’t need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages and operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.

The government has conceded, however, that it needed a warrant in his case alone — because the stingray reached into his apartment remotely to locate the air card — and that the activities performed by Verizon and the FBI to locate Rigmaiden were all authorized by a court order signed by a magistrate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who have filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden’s motion, maintain that the order does not qualify as a warrant and that the government withheld crucial information from the magistrate — such as identifying that the tracking device they planned to use was a stingray and that its use involved intrusive measures — thus preventing the court from properly fulfilling its oversight function.

“It shows you just how crazy the technology is, and [supports] all the more the need to explain to the court what they are doing,” says EFF Staff Attorney Hanni Fakhoury. “This is more than just [saying to Verizon] give us some records that you have sitting on your server. This is reconfiguring and changing the characteristics of the [suspect's] property, without informing the judge what’s going on.”

The secretive technology, generically known as a stingray or IMSI catcher, 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 devices connect, stingrays can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location.

By moving the stingray around and gathering the wireless device’s signal strength from various locations in a neighborhood, authorities can pinpoint where the device is being used with much more precision than they can get through data obtained from a mobile network provider’s fixed tower location.

Use of the spy technology goes back at least 20 years. In a 2009 Utah case, an FBI agent described using a cell site emulator more than 300 times over a decade and indicated that they were used on a daily basis by U.S, Marshals, the Secret Service and other federal agencies.

The FBI used a similar device to track former hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1994, though the version used in that case was much more primitive and passive.

A 1996 Wired story about the Mitnick case called the device a Triggerfish and described it as “a technician’s device normally used for testing cell phones.” According to the story, the Triggerfish was “a rectangular box of electronics about a half a meter high controlled by a PowerBook” that was essentially “a five-channel receiver, able to monitor both sides of a conversation simultaneously.” The crude technology was hauled around in a station wagon and van. A black coaxial cable was strung out of the vehicle’s window to connect the Triggerfish to a direction-finding antenna on the vehicle’s roof, which had four antenna prongs that reached 30 centimeters into the sky.

The technology has become much sleeker and less obtrusive since then, but still operates under the same principles.

Full article by Kim Zetter can be found here.

US Citizenship and Immigration - Subpoena Compliance

US Citizenship and Immigration Services

National Records Center
PO Box 648010
Lee's Summit, MO 64064-8010

Lice assistance- 1-800-375-5283
Uscis.foia@dhs.gov

Fax request with the Completed and signed G-639 form.

U.S. Prison Population Seeing “Unprecedented Increase”

From IPS:

The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of “historically unprecedented” build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now “taking a toll on the infrastructure” of the federal prison system.

Over the past 30 years, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent. Swollen by such figures, for years the United States has incarcerated far more people than any other country, today imprisoning some 716 people out of every 100,000. (Although CRS reports are not made public, a copy can be found here.)

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,” Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

In recent years, as a consequence of the imposition of very harsh sentencing policies, McFarland’s office has seen new patterns emerging of juveniles and very elderly people being put in prison.

“Last year, some 95,000 juveniles under 18 years of age were put in prison, and that doesn't count those in juvenile facilities,” she noted.

“And between 2007 and 2011, the population of those over 64 grew by 94 times the rate of the regular population. Prisons clearly aren’t equipped to take care of these aging people, and you have to question what threat they pose to society – and the justification for imprisoning them.”

According to the new CRS report, a growing number of these prisoners are being put away for charges related to immigration violations and weapons possession. But the largest number is for relatively paltry drug offences – an approach that report author Nathan James, a CRS analyst in crime policy, warns may not be useful in bringing down crime statistics.

“Research suggests that while incarceration did contribute to lower violent crime rates in the 1990s, there are declining marginal returns associated with ever increasing levels of incarceration,” James notes. He suggests that one potential explanation for this could be that people have been increasingly incarcerated for crimes in which there is a “high level of replacement”.

For instance, he says, if a serial rapist is incarcerated, the judicial system has the power to prevent further sexual assaults by that offender, and it is likely that no one will take the offender’s place. “However, if a drug dealer is incarcerated, it is possible that someone will step in to take that person’s place,” James writes. “Therefore, no further crimes may be averted by incarcerating the individual.”

Smarter on crime

Of course, the U.S. prison population’s blooming needs to be traced back to changes within the federal criminal justice system. Recent decades have seen an expanding “get tough” approach on crime here, under which even nonviolent offenders are facing stiff prison sentences.

In turn, overcrowding has become a massive issue, with the federal prison system as a whole operating at 39 percent over capacity in 2011, according to CRS. The result has also been significant price overruns, with the Bureau of Prisons budget doubling to nearly 6.4 billion dollars even while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unaddressed infrastructure problems continue to mount.

Yet the problems being experienced by the federal prison system actually stand in contrast to certain trends at the state level. While some states have dealt with even more worrisome problems of prison overcrowding – including California, which in 2011 was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take steps to reduce the pressure – recent years have seen movement at the state level to counter over-incarceration.

Some of this action may have come from serious state budget crises. Currently, after all, it costs between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars to house a prisoner in the United States.

According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group working on prison reform, prisoner populations in the United States overall declined by around 1.5 percent in 2011. Furthermore, last year lawmakers in 24 states adopted policies that “may contribute to downscaling prison populations”.

“There has been a marked change in the amount of activity at the state level to end our addiction to incarceration,” Vineeta Gupta, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS.

“Some states are currently having many discussions they would not have had 10 years ago – getting smarter on crime rather than tougher on crime. None of these moves are comprehensive enough to address the large scope of the problem, but they’re very important starting points.”

She continued: “Unfortunately, the federal government has been going in the opposite direction.”

Full article can be found here.

Voters to Decide Future of Spokane Police Oversight

Worried about 'Sextortion'? FBI Shares Cautionary Tale.

From NBC News:


The FBI is urging computer users — young teens and parents of those teens — to take precautions to help prevent becoming victims of "sextortion," where criminals use social networks to gain users' trust, convincing them to send lewd or pornographic photos or videos, then threatening to share them widely if more photos aren't sent.

In one recent case, a 13-year-old girl pleaded with a man who had initially gained her trust that she did not want to take her shirt off in front of a webcam, telling the extortionist she had "a life, please do not ruin it," the FBI said in a release. But eventually, stricken with fear, the teen gave into his demands.

That man, Christopher Patrick Gunn, of Montgomery, Ala., was sentenced last month to 35 years in prison for producing child pornography through his massive online sextortion scheme, the FBI said.

For more than two years, he gained the trust of girls in a half-dozen states and in Ireland by using two ruses. One was the "new kid" approach. He created a fake Facebook profile, and posted in messages to the girls that he was new in the area and looking to make friends, said the FBI. "Once he established a level of trust, he began making demands."

In the second ruse, he pretended to be Justin Bieber on various video chat services, including Skype. (Gunn, in his 30s, does not look like the teen heartthrob, so he may have only been using text chat on the services.) Once Gunn convinced the teens he was Bieber, the FBI says, "he offered them free concert tickets or backstage passes in exchange for topless photos or webcam videos."

With either ploy, Gunn "got to know everything about the girls — their friends’ names, their schools, their parents’ names — it was like a script," Erik Doell, a special agent in the FBI’s Montgomery office who investigated the case, said in the release. "Once he got a picture, the girls would just go along with it. They would do whatever they could to keep their reputations intact."

Frighteningly, the Gunn case is hardly an isolated one.

Just last week, the FBI arrested a 27-year-old Los Angeles-area man who they say tricked women into posing nude on Skype's video chat service. The man, Karen "Gary" Kazaryan, is believed to have hacked into hundreds of women's Facebook accounts, looking at them for naked pictures. He then took on the persona of some of the women and persuaded their friends to send naked photos of themselves or appear nude on Skype, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement.

Full article at NBC News can be found here.

FBI Lists Most Significant Cases of 2012

The following list was posted by the FBI.

Insider trading: Charges against seven investment professionals were announced in New York in January alleging an insider trading scheme that netted nearly $62 million in illegal profits. Details

California gang takedown: A total of 119 defendants were charged in San Diego in January with federal racketeering conspiracy, drug trafficking violations, and federal firearm offenses in one of the largest single gang takedowns in FBI San Diego history. The target was the Mexican Mafia gang and its affiliates.Details

Economic espionage: In February, a federal grand jury in San Francisco charged five individuals and five companies with economic espionage and theft of trade secrets in connection with their roles in a long-running effort to obtain U.S. trade secrets for the benefit of companies controlled by the People’s Republic of China. Details

Cyber hackers charged: Several hackers in the U.S. and abroad were charged in New York in March with cyber crimes affecting over a million victims. Four principal members of the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec were among those indicted; another key member previously pled guilty to similar charges. Details

Anchorage man indicted for murder: In April, Israel Keyes was charged with the kidnapping and murder of an Anchorage barista. Keyes is believed to have committed multiple kidnappings and murders across the country between 2001 and March 2012. In December, after Keyes committed suicide in jail, the FBI requested the public’s help regarding his other victims. Details

Financial fraudster receives 110-year sentence: In June, Allen Stanford—the former chairman of Stanford International Bank—was sentenced in Houston to 110 years in prison for orchestrating a 20-year investment fraud scheme in which he misappropriated $7 billion to finance his personal businesses.Details

Nationwide sweep recovers child victims of prostitution: The FBI and its partners announced the results of Operation Cross Country, a three-day law enforcement action in June in which 79 child victims of prostitution were recovered and more than 100 pimps were arrested. Details

International cyber takedown: Also in June, a two-year FBI undercover cyber operation culminated in the arrest of 24 individuals in eight countries. The investigation focused on “carding” crimes—offenses in which the Internet is used to steal victims’ credit card and bank account information—and was credited with protecting over 400,000 potential cyber crime victims and preventing over $205 million in losses.Details

Health care fraud: In July, global health care company GlaxoSmithKline pled guilty to fraud allegations and failure to report safety data and agreed to pay $3 billion in what officials called the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history. Details

Gun purchasers set new record in December

Reuters:

The number of FBI background checks required for Americans buying guns set a record in December, as the Connecticut school massacre stirred interest in self-defense and prompted renewed talk of limits on firearms, according to FBI data.

The FBI said it recorded 2.8 million background checks during the month, surpassing the mark set in November of 2 million checks. The number was up 49 percent over December 2011, when the FBI performed a then-record 1.9 million checks.

Consumer demand for guns appears to have accounted for the uptick in activity. There were no changes in FBI background check procedures that would have affected the December numbers, FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer said.

However, December is typically the busiest month of the year for checks, due in part to Christmas gift sales.

The figures do not represent the number of firearms sold, a statistic the government does not track. They also do not reflect activity between private parties, such as family members or collectors, because federal law requires background checks only for sales from commercial vendors with a federal license.

Someone who passes a background check is eligible to buy multiple firearms.

FBI checks for all of 2012 totaled 19.6 million, an annual record and an increase of 19 percent over 2011.

The FBI system - known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) - "processed transactions following normal established protocols," Fischer said.

The national debate on guns has grown louder since December 14 when Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children and six adults before committing suicide in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, investigators said. Lanza also killed his mother, the registered owner of the guns used in the killings, before going to the school.

Interest in guns tends to increase after a mass shooting, as customers fear for personal safety or worry that lawmakers might ban certain firearms.

President Barack Obama has committed to pushing new legislation, possibly including a proposed ban on some semi-automatic weapons, this year.

University of North Carolina's Fraud Running Deeper?

Forbes:

In early December, former Governor of North Carolina, Jim Martin, declared the University of North Carolina free from any wrongdoing in an alleged athletic scandal, which revolved around questionable classes within the Department of African American Studies. Martin claimed that officials tried to raise red flags on a couple different occasions. Specifically, Martin said that in 2002 and 2006, officials informed the Faculty Committee of Athletics of the abnormally higher than expected number of independent enrollments and lecture courses that had all of a sudden turned in to independent studies. Martin reported that this committee responded by stating that the professors operated with “high latitude on how to teach a course”, and Martin firmly stated that while the courses were filled with mainly athletes, there was no athletic scandal.

After the proclamation by the former Governor, the University of North Carolina seemed to have mitigated some of its potential damage. However, a recent review of the faculty minutes do not allude to any such red flags ever being raised. In fact, several faculty members have specifically addressed the proclamation and asserted that the alleged red flags were never raised or that they do not remember them existing.

A former committee chair in 2002, Dr. Stanley Mandel, commented on the alleged red flags being brought up. “You won’t find any reference to it in the committee minutes because there was no reference to it,” said Mandel. “There was no discussion. Nothing was brought up.” A former committee member from 2006 stated, “It seemed like everyone around the table was congratulating themselves about what a squeaky clean program they had.”  With this recent news about the red flags never being brought up via the evidence of the committee minutes, it seems as if Martin has potentially made some borderline fraudulent statements. Still, Martin’s report showed that 216 classes had either proven or potential problems, and 560 classes were suspected to have incurred unauthorized grade changes. The opposite of squeaky-clean.

Full article by Darren Heitner can be found here.

Buyers Rush to Firearms Dealers

From the Spokesman-Review:

Sam Bishop stood Tuesday at the counter of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range and Gun Shop. He was looking at a gun for home security while he felt he still could, he said.

“I want to be just one step ahead of everybody else,” said Bishop, who was checking out the Spokane gun store’s selection of pistols. “I don’t want to come in here to get something left over that nobody wants.”

Bishop isn’t the only buyer rushing to a nearby firearms dealer. Spokane gun stores are reporting increased sales since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre Friday, which has sparked talk in Congress of potential gun control legislation.

Sales already appeared to be up in 2012 before the latest tragedy. The FBI, which operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, reports record gun background checks for the year. The FBI ran checks on more than 16.8 million people through November nationwide. Even without December’s numbers, that’s a 2 percent increase from last year. About 444,000 of those were in Washington state.

Several Democratic lawmakers, including Washington’s U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, are promising gun reform in the wake of last week’s school shooting, as well as the Clackamas Town Center shooting in Portland.

The lawmakers say that at the very least they will push to reinstate the Clinton-era ban on certain types of semi-automatic rifles often called assault weapons. The ban expired in 2004.

“My biggest fear is what our lawmakers are going to do,” Bishop said. “I just think the future for recreational and self-defense is potentially being jeopardized with the way our lawmakers look at gun ownership.”

Sharp Shooting owner Robin Ball said sales set a store record on Saturday. The most popular seller is the AR-15 style of semi-automatic rifle that was used in the Connecticut and Aurora, Colo., shootings. Ball said it’s a sporting rifle, usually used for hunting or competition.

Full article can be found here.

Delta Air Lines Subpoena Compliance

Delta Air Lines, Inc.
1030 Delta Blvd., Dept. 982
Atlanta, GA. 30354
Attn: Judith A. Gorham, Paralegal Specialist


Corporate Office: (404) 715-5212
FAX:   (404) 677-3221

Chief of Change

By Jacob James from the Inlander:

It would seem to take a strange kind of masochist to want to assume responsibility for the Spokane Police Department.

Considered misunderstood at best and dangerous at worst, the Lilac City’s police force remains plagued by widespread public cynicism, ongoing legal entanglements and a fractured sense of purpose.

Who would be crazy enough to take on this mess?

With three brass stars on his collar and a two-month-old badge over his heart, Frank Straub can at first glance appear surly, a bit unenthusiastic. He is not an overly animated public cheerleader, wearing his passion on his sleeve. He asks engaged questions, but rarely smiles. He speaks at a deliberate, analytical pace.

Hardly unpacked in his new city, Straub brings with him broad experience in regional and federal law enforcement. He carries the title “doctor” from a Ph.D. in criminal justice. He also carries a loaded .40-caliber Glock on his hip.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering the task ahead of him, he seems of sound mind.

But before Straub could even take his oath, two potential allies — Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and the Spokane Police Guild — had already questioned his selection as chief. City officials had eyed cuts to his budget and staffing. Union negotiations had stalled for nearly a year, and the sticky issue of marijuana legalization had gone to voters. Above all, crime rates had continued to spike within a community long estranged from its police force.

Straub took the job anyway.

On this recent afternoon, Straub has called together more than a dozen local mental health experts to discuss cross-agency partnerships. Around the conference table, he asks for their support and expertise, promising them reform in return. Hospital directors, nonprofit leaders and psychiatry professors nod along with his suggestions.

“All I hear is the department sucks at helping the homeless or the mentally ill,” Straub tells the group. “I know we don’t suck. … We need to figure this out collectively because it’s better for all of us.”

They nod again. Not one questions his sanity.

Straub knows he still has much to prove to his own officers and the city they serve. Many local leaders, weary of in-fighting and perceived institutional incompetence, have high hopes for his administration. But they also have little tolerance left for failure.

Revealing a hidden optimist, Straub says he sees only opportunity. He sees officers too long held back from the work they love. He sees a police department too long distracted by politics and tragedy. He sees a city too long divided. But, beyond that, despite its bitter and broken history, he sees a community yearning for a new direction.

“We need to change the story,” he says.

Full article can be found here.

The House I Live In (2012)