Shortly after #AileenCannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee #Trump’s classified documents case, 2 more experienced #Florida#judges on the federal bench urged her to pass it up & hand it off to another jurist.
#AileenCannon has broken, acc/to lawyers who operate there, w/a general practice of federal #judges in the Southern District of #Florida of delegating some pretrial motions to a magistrate — in this instance, Judge #BruceReinhart. While he is [technically] subordinate to her, Judge Reinhart is an older & much more experienced jurist. In 2022, he was the one who signed off on an #FBI#warrant to search #Trump’s #MarALago …for highly sensitive govt files that Trump kept after leaving office.
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. 🌟
On the 1st day of #testimony in #HunterBiden’s federal #gun trial, #jurors heard his audio of his memoir, where he recounted his #drug use in graphic detail. A federal prosecutor told jurors “no one is above the #law,” & defense said the he did not “knowingly” lie when filling out forms to purchase a weapon.
#HunterBiden had reportedly dropped off the MacBookPro at a computer repair shop in 2019 & never reclaimed it.
The shop owner [for some reason] contacted #Republicanlawmakers & #politicians to review the hundreds of thousands of emails & msgs in the laptop.
An #FBI agent testified that investigators obtained a #warrant to search the laptop’s msgs & “found evidence of addiction.” duh, he’s been VERY open about his struggles w/ [#addiction]
The #UnitedStates should slap sanctions on ICC ofcls who seek an #arrest#warrant for PM Benjamin Netanyahu, a top foreign policy adviser to #Republican presidential #candidate Donald Trump said on Tues after meeting the Israeli leader.
#StefanieLambert, a #Michigan lawyer who has championed dubious claims of election fraud, was arrested Mon afternoon because of a bench warrant, acc/to a spox for the #USMarshals Service.
The #arrest ended an 11-day saga of uncertainty that played out after Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Jeffery Matis issued a #warrant because #StefanieLambert failed to appear for a hearing related to 4 #felony charges she's facing in #Michigan.
Lambert, who's gained prominence among supporters of Trump, refused to turn herself in & attempted to challenge the warrant in court filings. On Wed, Matis called on the attorney from South Lyon "to comply with that warrant."
An account using the name & photo of #Michigan#BarryCounty Sheriff lawbreaker & [#ConspiracyTheorist] #DarLeaf released >2,100 pages of emails from employees of Dominion; the company says Leaf improperly accessed internal msgs via breach of a #CourtOrder.
#StefanieLambert has been been charged w/ 4 #felonies for participating in a #conspiracy to obtain & analyze voting equipment used in #Michigan's 2020 election. Lambert is currently facing a bench #warrant for her #arrest after not showing up for a court hearing in Oakland County on March 7.
A hearing in #PatrickByrne's #defamation case is scheduled to take place Mon afternoon in DC. #Dominion's lawyers are expected to bring up Lambert's release of the discovery docs.