American’s Cell Phone Data Being Collected By NSA, Some Of It May Be Yours

Securing the nation is fast becoming a reason to turn the security lens on Joe Citizen.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Justice Department is using specially-equipped Cessna airplanes to gather information on suspected drug dealers, or other criminals, from their cell phones to be used against them in criminal court cases.

The Cessna planes, holding what are known as “dirtboxes” (named such due to the initials Boeing’s division, Digital River Technologies, that makes them uses), which are essentially fake cell phone towers, would collect, or “scoop,” information from the phones in question by mimicking traditional cell phone towers and “convincing” cell phones to provide the cell phone’s unique registration information that the dirtboxes would collect.

The Justice Department prefers this method of information gathering to getting warrants to “bug” normal cell phone towers and get information — that way takes too much time and is not as accurate. The method is similar to the National Security Agency’s method of gathering information, which the NSA deemed “a minimally invasive way of searching for terrorists.”

However, when asked if search warrants are still used to get information through “dirtboxes,” and what is done with the information collected that is not related to a criminal case in any way, a Justice Department representative stated that the Justice Department, including the NSA, followed all legal procedures when collecting information, but would not confirm or deny the “dirtboxes” program even existed.

USA Today is reporting that a source “familiar with the operations,” the program involved Cessna planes equipped with the “dirtboxes” from at least five airports, but the program was big enough to cover the entire population of the United States.

Christopher Soghoian, chief technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union, calls the practice “a dragnet surveillance program. It is inexcusable and it’s likely – to the extent judges are authorizing it – [that] they have no idea of the scale of it.”

Also unknown is the amount of data that is being collected, or what is being done with it, except for that which is collected for a specific case or cases. The rest of the information, according to the Justice Department, is “let go,” since it had nothing to do with any cases that were being investigated. Such over-collection of such data has been ruled by a federal appeals court to be a violation of the Constitution.

The most frightening part is that any kind of encryption, even the kind offered on the new iPhone 6, does not stop this from happening.

[Image courtesy of Hot Hardware]