How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> 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]
>
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