Report: The U.S. is putting fake cell towers in planes to spy on people
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putting devices that emulate cellphone towers in Cessna aircraft and
flying them around the country to track the locations of cell phones, a
practice that targets criminal suspects but may also affect thousands of
U.S. citizens, according to a news report Thursday.
The program is run by the Department of Justice’s U.S. Marshals
Service and has been in operation since at least 2007, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal,
which cited two unnamed sources. The aircraft are flown out of at least
five metropolitan-area airports and can cover most of the U.S.
population, it said.
Cell phones are programmed to connect to whichever nearby cell tower
has the strongest signal. The fake cell towers trick phones into
thinking they have the strongest signal, then read the devices’ unique
registration numbers when they connect, the Journal report says.
The goal is to locate cell phones linked to people under
investigation for crimes like selling drugs, but in the process the
program collects data about people not suspected of any crime, the
report says. The fake cell towers determine which phones belong to
criminal suspects and “let go” of those that aren’t.
The Journal quoted a representative of the American Civil Liberties
Union who called it an inexcusable “dragnet surveillance program.”
