If you ’ve inspect Disneyland , you may have construe a small carpenter’s plane fly overhead at one point . The OC is full of fat - arse masses , might be a Newport Beach golfer , no braggy deal , right ? Except , as it turns out , the Anaheim police force departmenthad accessto military - grade dragnet phone spying equipment , the kind that can suckle up your phone ’s selective information from an plane along with thousands of others .
Anaheim is n’t a big city . With a universe of 336,265 , it is substantially smaller than Wichita , Kansas and Mesa , Arizona . This is how entrenched America ’s berserk surveillance culture is : A suburban metropolis ’s law department had access to spying tools called dirtboxes , the same spying tools search by the Air Force . harebrained mobilisation is n’t just for big - city cops .
Anaheim Police requested a Homeland Security grant to fund its dirtbox leverage , itclaimed that“every urban center in Orange County has benefited from the DRT equipment . ” Unless the police lied on this request , this means that Anaheim ’s hush-hush undercover agent tool had a wide - enough kitchen range to reach people in other cities . It also means that the zillion of tourists passing through Disneyland would ’ve been within reach .
The FBI is so fiercely tight - lipped about its use of surveillance equipment that it hasadvised police to sack criminal casesrather than expose entropy about Stingrays , which are spy gadget that mime cell earpiece towers , allowing owners to bug info from cell phones . “ Dirtbox ” gadget are similar to Stingrays , except they can go in airplanes , which ready them even more strong since it increase the figure of telephone they can spy on . And as Ars Technica points out , some dirtboxescan break encryption on hundreds of cellphone phonesat once . They are highly powerful dragnet spying gadget .
https://gizmodo.com/here-is-the-spy-equipment-that-powers-the-fbis-secret-d-1686317256
The FBI ’s attitude towards Stingrays and dirtboxes has been mimicked by law of nature enforcement . I say Anaheim was “ get ” with these tools because , like the FBI , it did everything it could to keep them secret . The American Civil Liberties Union released the document yesterday , but only after fight a court battle to hold them .
Californiapassed a lawrequiring warrants for police use of dirtboxes , Stingrays , and other electronic surveillance pecker — but it only went into event January 1 , 2016 . It ’s not open if Anaheim ever seek warrant antecedently . Considering it tag the dirtboxes a “ Covert Purchase , ” and the floor of silence shown in e-mail about the devices , it is well-defined that the police told as few people as possible .
Screenshot from ACLU document
We already knew that Chicago and Los Angeles policeused dirtboxesfor days , along with the FBI , but now it ’s evident that function of these devices is even more widespread than antecedently thought . The good news is that police force are finally catch up with the police . The terrific news is that we need newfangled laws to protect our secrecy from the people purportedly protect us .
[ Ars TechnicaviaACLU ]
figure : AP
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