On Thursday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal published a chilling report on one of the ways the US Marshals Service used to track criminal suspects (USMS) was using small, fixed-wing Cessnas equipped with so-called “dirtboxes”—receivers that act like cellphone towers—to gather data from citizens' phones below.
Sources say the USMS operated these planes from five major airports in the US “covering most of the US population.” The devices on the planes can capture unique identifying information from “tens of thousands” of cellphones on the ground. Using that information, federal authorities can pinpoint a cell phone user's location from “within three meters or within a specific room in a building,”.
The surveillance tactic plays on a basic vulnerability of cell phones in that they're designed to connect to the closest available signal, regardless of how trustworthy it is. While the USMS insists they were going after fugitives and used the technology only under an official warrant, the catch-all dirtboxes can store thousands of other phone owner's information at a time. The more densely populated the target area is, the more data the boxes collect, and it's unclear what steps are in place to safeguard innocent people's information.
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