Leaked : Secret catalogue of spying gear that US government uses to spy on you
By Kavita IyerCatalogue of smartphone spying equipments the Feds and police don’t want you see
Wantto know what kind of equipments the United States law enforcement
agencies use to snoop on your cellphone? A secret internal U.S.
government catalogue containing dozens of cellphone surveillance devices
used by the military and by intelligence agencies have been obtained by
The Intercept. The catalogue includes mostly variants on the Stingray/Dirtbox,
which pretend to be cellular towers in order to gather the subscriber
details of all the people within range (up to an entire city, for the
airplane-mounted Dirtboxes).
“The Intercept obtained the catalog
from a source within the intelligence community concerned about the
militarization of domestic law enforcement,” states the post published
on The Intercept.
“A few of the devices can house a “target list”
of as many as 10,000 unique phone identifiers. Most can be used to
geolocate people, but the documents indicate that some have more
advanced capabilities, like eavesdropping on calls and spying on SMS
messages. Two systems, apparently designed for use on captured phones,
are touted as having the ability to extract media files, address books,
and notes, and one can retrieve deleted text messages.”
Some are
designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly
carried by an individual. Other have names like Artemis, Blackfin, Cyclone, Gilgamesh, Jugular, Maximus, Spartacus and Yellowstone.
The
capabilities and costs of the different devices that are in use in at
least 60 law enforcement agencies in the US are detailed in the catalog,
though most of the law enforcement agencies will not admit to owning
them. While some of these devices are paid for with civil forfeiture
funds stolen from random citizens, they are more often bought with DHS
anti-terror grants.
The catalog also includes 53 cellphone spying devices, including Stingray I/II surveillance boxes and Boeing “dirt boxes.”
Small enough to fit in a backpack, there are some devices such as the REBUS Ground Based Geo-Location that “provides limited capability to isolate targets utilizing Firewall option.”
