Cell Site Simulators ( #CSS ), also known as #IMSI catchers,
are among law enforcement’s most closely-guarded secret surveillance tools.
They act like real cell phone towers,
🔸“tricking” mobile devices into connecting to them,
🔸designed to intercept the information that phones send and receive,
🔸like the location of the user and metadata for phone calls, text messages, and other app traffic.
CSS are highly invasive and are used covertly.
In the past, law enforcement used a technique called
“parallel construction”
—collecting evidence in a different way to reach an existing conclusion
💥in order to avoid disclosing how law enforcement originally collected it💥
—. 👉to circumvent public disclosure of location findings made through CSS. 👈
This technology is like a dragging fishing net, rather than a focused single hook in the water.
Every phone in the vicinity connects with the device;
🔥even people completely unrelated to an investigation get wrapped up in the surveillance. 🔥
CSS, like other surveillance technologies, subjects civilians to widespread data collection,
even those who have not been involved with a crime,
and has been used against protestors and other protected groups, undermining their civil liberties.
⭐️Their adoption should require public disclosure,
⭐️but this rarely occurs.
In Massachusetts, agencies are expected to get a #warrant before conducting any cell-based location tracking.
The City of Boston is known to own a CSS.
Dozens of policing agencies are currently using cell-site simulators (CSS) by #Jacobs#Technology and its Engineering Integration Group (EIG), according to newly-available documents on how that company provides CSS capabilities to local law enforcement.
A proposal document from Jacobs Technology,
provided to the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) and first spotted by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ),
outlines elements of the company’s CSS services, which include discreet integration of the CSS system into a Chevrolet Silverado and lifetime technical support .
The proposal document from Jacobs provides some of the most comprehensive information about modern CSS that the public has had access to in years.
It confirms that law enforcement has access to CSS
♦️capable of operating on 5G
♦️as well as older cellular standards.
It also gives us our first look at modern CSS hardware.
The Jacobs system runs on at least nine software-defined radios that simulate cellular network protocols on multiple frequencies
and can also gather #wifi intelligence.
As these documents describe, these CSS are meant to be concealed within a common vehicle.
Antennas are hidden under a false roof so nothing can be seen outside the vehicles,
which is a shift from the more visible antennas and cargo van-sized deployments we’ve seen before.
The system also comes with a TRACHEA2+ and JUGULAR2+ for 🔹direction finding and 🔹mobile direction finding.
Important to the MSP contract is the modification of a Chevrolet Silverado with the CSS system.
This includes both the surreptitious installment of the CSS hardware into the truck and the integration of its software user interface into the navigational system of the vehicle.
According to Jacobs, this is the kind of installation with which they have a lot of experience.
Jacobs has built its CSS project on military and intelligence community relationships,
which are now informing development of a tool used in domestic communities,
not foreign warzones.
#Harris#Corporation, later #L3Harris#Technologies, Inc.,
was the largest provider of CSS technology to domestic law enforcement
but stopped selling to non-federal agencies in 2020.
Once Harris stopped selling to local law enforcement the market was open to several competitors,
one of the largest of which was #KeyW#Corporation.
Following👉 Jacobs’s 2019 acquisition of The KeyW Corporation 👈and its Engineering Integration Group (EIG),
Jacobs is now a leading provider of CSS to police,
and it claims to have
🌟more than 300 current CSS deployments globally. 🌟