Catalog of secret American listening devices leaks out
The Intercept possesses US government documents with detailed information about secret eavesdropping devices. The website is publishing the documents because more and more local governments are said to be using the equipment intended for the military.
All the devices in the catalog are cell-site simulators, ie equipment with which a cell tower of providers can be simulated. The devices range from handsets to UAVs and equipment for use in vehicles and aircraft. Phones that connect to the listening devices can be identified by unique identifiers such as imsi or imei. Radio signals can provide information about the location of the phone. It can be concluded from the description of a number of devices that it is also possible to intercept data.
The documents describe numerous spy devices. There are several handsets that seem to be based on existing phones, including the Nokia N95. The devices allow monitoring of networks and the more advanced items, such as the Blackfin I and II, appear to allow interception of cell phone calls and text messages from a preloaded list of targets. Also, a distributed or targeted denial of service attack can be performed with the device. Such a device costs $ 75,000.
The documents also show two ‘Battlefield Data Recovery’ systems for the military. With these systems, data can be retrieved from telephones. The Cyberhawk is said to support 79 phones and can extract phonebook, media files, text, SMS, and deleted SMS, among other things. The Cellbrite is presented as a portable forensic system capable of extracting data from ’95 percent of all mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs’. However, the claim is outdated. The document that describes this system, like many other secret documents, has the date May 1, 2006. Only on January 7, 2034, the documents would lose their secret status. The equipment described is therefore quite old and although it may still be in use, it seems likely that a lot of new eavesdropping equipment has now been put into use.
The Intercept says it received the documents from an intelligence community source who is said to be concerned about the militarization of law enforcement. The devices in the catalog are intended for the military and intelligence services, but some of the devices are also believed to be used by federal and local law enforcement agencies within the United States. Privacy advocates fear that more and more of the spy tools will be used by the police.
Not all information about the equipment has been published, The Intercept says. Details irrelevant to the debate on expanding domestic surveillance have been omitted from the website. Nearly a third of the devices in the catalog would not have previously been described in public form.
The Intercept itself has also processed the data from government documents into its own catalog, in which, in addition to the leaked information, cynical ‘reviews’ have been added to some devices. Lawyers associated with privacy organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation discuss the possibilities and ‘benefits’ of the equipment.