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How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 19:42:44 -0400
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: June 3, 2018 at 17:22:51 EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This item comes from friend Jock Gill. DLH] How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him And how it might change what cops can do with our smartphones. By CYRUS FARIVAR Jun 3 2018 <https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/03/cyrus-farivar-book-excerpt-stingray-218588> On a warm summer’s day in 2008, police spotted a man walking outside his apartment in Santa Clara, California, one of the many bedroom communities spread across Silicon Valley. Undercover FBI officers saw him outside the building and began following him on foot, radioing to their colleagues nearby. The man saw the agents, and so he began to walk quickly. They followed suit. After months of tracking him via sting bank accounts and confidential informants, the officers had their man. He had told the apartment complex’s manager that he was Steven Travis Brawner, software engineer: a profile that fit right in with many other tenants in the area. But at the time of his arrest, officers didn’t know his real name: After watching his activities at a distance, they called him simply the “Hacker.” Between 2005 and 2008, federal investigators believed that the Hacker and two other men filed over 1,900 fake tax returns online, yielding $4 million sent to over 170 bank accounts. The Hacker was found out through the warrantless use of a secretive surveillance technology known as a stingray, which snoops on cell phones. Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, act as false cell phone towers that trick phones into giving up their location. They have become yet another tool in many agencies’ toolbox, and their use has expanded with little oversight—and no public knowledge that they were even being used until the Hacker went on an obsessive quest to find out just how law enforcement tracked him that summer day. When he tugged on that thread, he found out something else: that police might be tracking a lot more than we even know on our phones, often without the warrants that are usually needed for comparable methods of invasive surveillance. The Hacker began breathing more heavily. He may have thought about heading toward the nearby train station, which would take him out of town, or perhaps towards the San Jose International Airport, just three miles away. The Hacker couldn’t be sure if there were cops following him, or if he was just being paranoid. But as soon as he saw the marked Santa Clara Police Department cars, he knew the truth, and he started running. But the Hacker didn’t get far. He was quickly surrounded, arrested and searched. The police found the key to the Hacker’s apartment. Later, after police obtained a warrant to search his apartment, they found there a folding chair and a folding table that served as a desk. There was no other furniture—his bed was a cot. Law enforcement also found his Verizon Wireless mobile Internet AirCard, and false driver’s licenses with the names “Steven Travis Brawner,” “Patrick Stout” and more. A 2010 FBI press release later stated that the agency also “seized a laptop and multiple hard drives, $116,340 in cash, over $208,000 in gold coins, approximately $10,000 in silver coins, false identification documents, false identification manufacturing equipment, and surveillance equipment.” Investigators identified the Hacker, via his fingerprints, as Daniel Rigmaiden, previously convicted of state-level misdemeanors. According to an Internal Revenue Service special agent’s search warrant, Rigmaiden’s computer also included “email regarding leaving the United States for the country of Dominica . . . [and] documents regarding obtaining citizenship in other countries; emails regarding paying off Dominican officials to get Dominican birth certificates and passports; and a Belize residency guide.” Rigmaiden’s case dates back several years. In 2007 and early 2008, the IRS identified a bank account at Compass Bank in Phoenix that was receiving fraudulent tax refunds under an LLC as being involved in the possible scheme. Rigmaiden’s indictment was initially sealed, pending cooperation with a federal investigation. But from the start, Rigmaiden declined to cooperate, and moved to represent himself (after firing three attorneys), and the case was subsequently unsealed in 2009. “The question is what’s the law that governs its use?” Eric King, a longtime London-based privacy activist, said when I asked him about the stingray. “We know that the police have them and we know that the police use them, not that they’ve ever admitted it, and have done so for 10 years. They refuse to engage, they refuse to say that they bought them. We need a public debate around this sort of stuff.” That debate is very slowly starting to happen. And that is due, in large part, to Rigmaiden’s unlikely exposure of the stingray. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
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- How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him Dave Farber (Jun 03)