Secret military device lets Oakland (Michigan) deputies track cellphones

[Octafish]

The richest county in Michigan is now a Test Bed of Freedom™ in the fight against, uh, Saddam, uh, Al Qaeda, uh Putin...



Secret military device lets Oakland deputies track cellphones

Military device sweeps activity in wide area

Joel Kurth and Lauren Abdel-Razzaq
Detroit News, April 5, 2014

Pontiac— Oakland County commissioners asked no questions last March before unanimously approving a cellphone tracking device so powerful it was used by the military to fight terrorists.

Now, though, some privacy advocates question why one of the safest counties in Michigan needs the super-secretive Hailstorm device that is believed to be able to collect large amounts of cellphone data, including the locations of users, by masquerading as a cell tower.

SNIP...

The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office is one of about two dozen forces nationwide — and the only one in Michigan — with the $170,000 machine. So little is known about Hailstorm that even national experts will only speculate about its capabilities. The technology from Florida-based defense contractor Harris Corp. is believed to be an upgrade of Stingray, a suitcase-sized contraption that is installed in cars and used to trick nearby phones into connecting with it and providing data to police.

SNIP...

Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst and principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said he began noticing police agencies nationwide purchase Hailstorm about the same time as Oakland County. The county received a $258,370 federal grant that paid for all but $105,000 of the device, training and about $56,000 to purchase a vehicle to contain it, records show.

Butler said the machines were developed for military and spy agencies and information about them is on “bureaucratic lockdown” because the manufacturer, Harris, claims specifications are “a trade secret and proprietary.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140404/SPECIAL/304040043

For those who "own and operate" this and the rest of the super secret spy technology on behalf of "We the People," the enemy isn't the Other. It's "Us," as in "We the People."

[WinkyDink]

1. HOW is this device not illegal/unConstitutional?

[Octafish]

5. That is the question as Secret Police spying powers are un-American.

"I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo." -- President Harry S Truman

CIA was just the first of what would become many secret intelligence agencies, operating outside the purview of Congress, and too-often, the law.

What President Truman wrote a month after President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas:

Limit CIA Role
To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

For some reason, Allen Dulles did all he could to get a "retraction," even lying about it.

FWI(still)W: Truman never did.

[dixiegrrrrl]

18. You find the most interesting stuff.

Fascinating.

the more we know, the more depressing it is, tho. Sigh.

[NightWatcher]

2. not only is the seizure and search unwarranted, it's unfocused

You cant just set up a net and catch everything that goes through.

[Autumn]

3. Well you didn't used to be able to just set up a net and catch everything that goes through.

But it seems that it's just fine to do it now.

[Octafish]

7. It's like we live in post-Constitutional America.

Or, martial law was declared, secret-like, for the benefit of the Marshall.

Welcome to Post-Constitution America

What if your country begins to change and no one notices?

Peter Van Buren
The Nation August 5, 2013

On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law, stating “that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

Two hundred and thirty-five years later, on July 30, 2013, Bradley Manning was found guilty on twenty of the twenty-two charges for which he was prosecuted, specifically for “espionage” and for videos of war atrocities he released, but not for “aiding the enemy.”

Days after the verdict, with sentencing hearings in which Manning could receive 136 years of prison time ongoing, the pundits have had their say. The problem is that they missed the most chilling aspect of the Manning case: the way it ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-constitutional America.

The Weapons of War Come Home

SNIP...

Consider, for instance, the rise of the warrior cop, of increasingly up-armored police departments across the country often filled with former military personnel encouraged to use the sort of rough tactics they once wielded in combat zones. Supporting them are the kinds of weaponry that once would have been inconceivable in police departments, including armored vehicles, typically bought with Department of Homeland Security grants. Recently, the director of the FBI informed a Senate committee that the Bureau was deploying its first drones over the United States. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security and already flying an expanding fleet of Predator drones, the very ones used in America’s war zones, is eager to arm them with “non-lethal” weaponry to “immobilize targets of interest.”

Above all, surveillance technology has been coming home from our distant war zones. The National Security Agency (NSA), for instance, pioneered the use of cellphones to track potential enemy movements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSA did this in one of several ways. With the aim of remotely turning on cellphones as audio monitoring or GPS devices, rogue signals could be sent out through an existing network, or NSA software could be implanted on phones disguised as downloads of porn or games.

Using fake cellphone towers that actually intercept phone signals en route to real towers, the US could harvest hardware information in Iraq and Afghanistan that would forever label a phone and allow the NSA to always uniquely identify it, even if the SIM card was changed. The fake cell towers also allowed the NSA to gather precise location data for the phone, vacuum up metadata and monitor what was being said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/article/175589/welcome-post-constitution-america#

For some reason, no one in "authority" has told me or anybody I know about it. Guess government has become just another a "need-to-know" operation.

[NightWatcher]

8. Just as they used the veil of "terrorism" to spend money on war contracts, now it's generic "crime"

And just as with the war on terror, these tools aren't needed for crime fighting but will instead mainly make billions for the domestic military industrials. As a happy side note for these domestic militants, they can spy on us and treat us as enemy combatants.

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. ACLU ...

Is Your Local Law Enforcement Tracking Your Cell Phone's Location?



In a massive coordinated information-seeking campaign, 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 requests in 31 states and Washington, D.C. with local law enforcement agencies large and small to uncover when, why and how they are using cell phone location data to track Americans. Click on a state in the map below to see what requests we filed in that state, and what documents we received. Click here to learn more about the requests.


https://www.aclu.org/maps/your-local-law-enforcement-tracking-your-cell-phones-location

[Octafish]

10. And in my town, next to Detroit, we're cutting EMT jobs. Cops are next on to go.

Thank Moon for this labor saving technology.

You Can't Opt Out

10 NSA Myths Debunked

By Peter Van Buren
Tom Dispatch, Jan. 12, 2014

The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains, and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding -- quite literally -- Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists, and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.

It’s time to face these arguments directly. So here are ten myths about NSA surveillance that need debunking. Let's sort them out.

1) NSA surveillance is legal.

True, if perhaps you put “legal” in quotes. After all, so was slavery once upon a time in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa. Laws represent what a government and sometimes perhaps even a majority of the people want at a given point in time. They change and are changeable; what once was a potential felony in Colorado is now a tourist draw.

Laws, manipulated for terrible ends, must be challenged when they come into conflict with the fundamental principles and morals of a free society. Laws created Nelson Mandela, the terrorist (whom the U.S. kept on its terror watch list until 2008), and laws created Nelson Mandela, the president.

There’s a catch in the issue of legality and the NSA. Few of us can know just what the law is. What happens to you if you shoplift from a store or murder someone in a bar fight? The consequences of such actions are clearly codified and you can look them up. Is it legal to park over there? The rules are on a sign posted right where you'd like to pull in. If a cop tickets you wrongly, you can go to court and use that sign to defend yourself. Yet almost all of the applicable “law,” when it comes to the National Security Agency and its surveillance practices, was secret until Edward Snowden began releasing his documents. Secret interpretations of the shady Patriot Act made in a secret court applied. The fact that an unknown number of legal memos and interpretations of that secret law (themselves still classified) are operative means that we really don’t know what is legal anymore.

The panel of experts appointed by President Obama to review the Snowden revelations and the NSA’s actions had a peek into the issue of “legality” and promptly raised serious questions -- as did one of the two federal courts that recently ruled on some aspects of the issue. If the Obama administration and the Justice Department really believe that all the NSA's activities will be proven legal in a court of law, why not allow them to be tested openly and unambiguously in public? After all, if you've done nothing illegal, then there’s nothing to hide.

When Amnesty International first tried to bring such a question before the courts, the case was denied because that organization couldn’t prove that it had been subject to monitoring -- that was a secret, of course! -- and so was denied standing even to bring the suit. Snowden's revelations seem to have changed all that. The documents made public have given “standing” to a staggering array of individuals, organizations, and countries. For the first time in 12 years, they pave the way for the issue to come to its proper venue in front of the Supremes. Openly. Publicly.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175792/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_we_have_to_destroy_our_constitution_to_save_it/

Another great labor camp saving device, brought to you by the Prisons Without Walls Department at Homeland Security.

PS: Thank you for the heads-up, Ichingcarpenter! There's no stopping a good idea getting the scrutinizing it deserves these days.

[delta17]

6. Sounds like the definition of Fraud, Waste and Abuse. nt.

[Octafish]

11. One entity's fraud is another corporation's treasure.

Look who's making a buck off the War on Terror:

The Carlyle Group

excerpted from the book

The Exception to the Rulers

by Amy Goodman

The feeding frenzy began the morning of 9/11. As my neighbors and coworkers were choking on the debris of the World Trade Center, a windfall awaited a powerful group gathered at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. The secretive Carlyle Group was holding its annual investors' conference. The private investment company, named for the swank Manhattan hotel where the group was formed in 1987, has tentacles in both the Washington power elite and the Saudi ruling class. In town for the meetings was former President George H. W. Bush, then a senior adviser to Carlyle. He was joined by a cast of characters who have been fixtures in Bush regimes over the years.

There was Reagan's former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, then head of the Carlyle Group. James Baker III, secretary of state under Bush Sr. - better known as the choreographer of Bush Jr.'s theft of the 2000 election - was also there in his capacity as Carlyle's senior counsel. But it wasn't just Bush's inner circle gathering that day. They were joined by a man by the name of Shafiq bin Laden, brother of Osama bin Laden. It wasn't the first time a bin Laden had worked with Washington's power elite, and this particular bin Laden was a longtime friend and benefactor of the Bush clan. Bush Sr. left the meetings early, but the rest of the men were just finishing breakfast when Shafiq's brother's plot culminated in airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A bizarre coincidence? No, the meeting was just business as usual for the Bushes, whose family fortunes have been greased by Saudi oil money for decades. That helps explain why, when the United States grounded all aircraft on that terrible day, one exception was made: Top White House officials authorized planes to pick up 140 Saudis, including two dozen members of the bin Laden family, from ten cities and spirit them back to Saudi Arabia. Dale Watson, the former head of counterterrorism at the FBI, conceded in Vanity Fair that the departing Saudis "were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations. "

Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Boston's Logan Airport, was incredulous, according to Vanity Fair. With the airport still closed and reeling from the 9/11 attacks, Kinton received the order to allow the bin Ladens to fly. "We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history and here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens!" he exclaimed...

A month after the terror attacks, the Carlyle Group took its subsidiary, United Defense, public. It noted in its financial filings that "the Bush administration's recently published Quadrennial Defense Review calls for ... increasing investment ... to enable U.S. military forces to more effectively counter emerging threats."

Translation: We just got check-writing privileges at the U.S. Treasury.

Carlyle netted profits of $237 million in that one day, making three times as much on paper. The old adage has never been truer: It pays to have friends in high places.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bush_Gang/CarlyleGroup_TETTR.html

Speaking of promotions, Frank C. of the Carlyle Group would like to interest you in a floating city seaboard condominium, perfect for escaping revolutions, economic collapses and justice:

The Really Creepy People Behind the Libertarian-Inspired Billionaire Sea Castles

The stinking rich are planning billion-dollar luxury liners that keep the land-based Americans they've plundered at a safe distance.

AlterNet / By Mark Ames
June 1, 2010

What happens when Americans plunder America and leave it broken, destitute and seething mad? Where do these fabulously wealthy Americans go with their loot, if America isn't a safe, secure, or even desirable place to spend their riches? What if they lose faith in their gated communities, because those plush gated communities are surrounded by millions of pissed-off Americans stripped of their entitlements, and who now want in?

The first such floating castle has been christened the " Utopia"--the South Korean firm Samsung has been contracted to build the $1.1 billion ship, due to be launched in 2013. Already orders are coming in to buy one of the Utopia's 200 or so mansions for sale- -which range in price from about $4 million for the smallest condos to over $26 million for 6,600 square-foot "estates." The largest mansion is a whopping 40,000 square feet, and sells for $160 million.

SNIP...

Both Thiel and Milton Friedman's grandson see democracy as the enemy--last year, Thiel wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" at about the same time that Milton Friedman's grandson proclaimed, "Democracy is not the answer." Both published their anti-democracy proclamations in the same billionaire-Koch-family-funded outlet, Cato Unbound, one of the oldest billionaire-fed libertarian welfare dispensaries. Friedman's answer for Thiel's democracy problem is to build offshore libertarian pod-fortresses where the libertarian way rules. It's probably better for everyone if Milton Friedman's grandson and Peter Thiel leave us forever for their libertarian ocean lair--Thiel believes that America went down the tubes ever since it gave women the right to vote, and he was outed as the sponsor of accused felon James O'Keefe's smear videos that brought ACORN to ruin.

SNIP...

While neither Bush nor the Bin Ladens are principals in the Frontier Group, its founding director, Frank Carlucci, is a name they know well, and you should too. Carlucci ran the Carlyle Group as its chairman from 1989 through 2005, right around the time that the wars started going undeniably bad, and floating castles started to look like a viable plan. But Carlucci's past is much weirder and scarier than most of us care to know: whether it's his strangely timed appearances in some of the ugliest assassinations and coups in modern history, or serving as Carter's number two man in the CIA, and Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, if Frank Carlucci (nicknamed "Creepy Carlucci" and "Spooky Frank&quot is the founding director of a firm that's building floating castles, it's a bad sign for those of us left behind.

I'll get into Carlucci's partners in the Frontier Group in a moment, but first, let's reacquaint ourselves with Frank Carlucci. From an early age, Carlucci learned the importance of getting to know the right people in the right places. He studied at Princeton in the mid-1950s, where as luck should have it, Carlucci roomed with Donald Rumsfeld. Both Carlucci and Rumsfeld shared a passion for Greco-Roman wrestling at Princeton, and both went on to serve in the Navy after Princeton. Their paths would split and merge several times over the next few decades, even as they remained close personal friends throughout their lives. In the late 1950s, Carlucci briefly served as an executive at a lingerie manufacturer, Jantzen (the Victoria's Secret of its day), but quickly left to join the State Department.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/147058/the_really_creepy_people_behind_the_libertarian-inspired_billionaire_sea_castles

I'm so old, delta17, I remember when traitors, gangsters and crooks actually got prosecuted instead of promoted.

[hack89]

9. It is not a secret military device

1. It is a civilian law enforcement device used by the military.

2. If it is an "upgrade of Stingray" than it is made by a foreign company and sold by Harris

Although manufactured by a Germany and Britain-based firm, the StingRay devices are sold in the US by the Harris Corporation, an international telecommunications equipment company. It gets between $60,000 and $175,000 for each Stingray it sells to US law enforcement agencies.

Good article here about Stingray and how it works.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-hi-tech-police-surveillance-the-stingray-cell-phone-spying-device/5331165

Law enforcement should not be using such devices without warrants.

[Octafish]

13. Right you are. Local Police Use Secret Technology to Spy in Secret.

I'll cc the copy editor at The News.

Thanks also for the heads-up on Global Research. The site is an outstanding resource for those interested in getting news, information and analysis without the corporate cough globalist spin.

The StingRay description there reminds me of days gone by in the newsroom. The police scanner enabled reporters and editors to know which ambulance to chase. Now, the tables have turned, enabling the public servants to listen to the public, without a warrant of course.

[hack89]

14. It is not secret technology

My only point.

[99Forever]

12. Move along... move along...

... nothing to see here.


You want the turrawrist to defeat gawd blessed 'Murica?

[silvershadow]

15. Is it fascism yet?

(Don't answer, I already know).

[Savannahmann]

16. If there was Justice in our system.

Any police department local or Federal that used it should have all cases thrown out no matter how minor. But no Justice in the system.

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. Those of you who watch Capt. America with shit like this in mind

will understand how the movie is taking swipes at this crap.