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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has concluded that someone planted a cell phone surveillance system during the Democratic National Convention last summer. new report From Wired. Evidence for this claim comes from Cooper Quintin, the EFF’s chief technologist, who spent time investigating whether police technology was deployed at the time of the incident. Wired worked with EFF to conduct an analysis of wireless signal data. What they found was evidence that someone could use a mobile site simulator to spy on devices.
Cell site simulators are controversial police tools that can pick up wireless signals from the air and store them for later analysis. The cell site mainly carries simulators Man-in-the-Middle style attacks, tricking mobile devices into believing they are cell towers and should send their signals to them. These attacks can reveal critical personal data such as location data, call metadata, and application traffic, providing a critical window into mobile activity. A popular brand of mobile site simulators Stingray.
Wire reporters He went to the DNC Last summer and used phones were equipped with special software. That software was created by EFF and is designed to study data anomalies related to devices. Wired describes their experience this way:
WIRED covered protests across the city, events at the United Center (home of the DNC), and public gatherings with lobbyists, politicians and influencers. We spent time before, during and after these events walking the perimeter along the march routes and planned protest sites.
We captured Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular signals in the process. We then analyzed these signals looking for specific hardware identifiers and other suspicious signs that might indicate the presence of a mobile site simulator.
After analyzing the data from these devices, Quinton told Wired that it indicated someone had placed a mobile site simulator in the area during the convention. Wired writes that one of the devices carried by the reporters “suddenly moved to a new tower.” That tower then “asked for the device’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) code and then immediately disconnected – in a sequence consistent with the operation of a cell site simulator.”
“It’s a very suspicious behavior that normal towers don’t exhibit,” Quintin told Wired in an analysis. “This is not 100 percent irrefutable truth, but it is strong evidence that a mobile site simulator has been deployed. We don’t know who was responsible – it could have been the US government, foreign actors, or some other entity.
Gizmodo contacted the EFF for more information.
It’s unclear what would have prompted someone to use a surveillance system at the Democratic National Convention, although at the time there was an obvious reason why the police would want to monitor local phones. The convention was broken ongoing protests On the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s attack on Gaza. It’s over during the protests 40,000 Palestinians most of them are said to have been killed were women and childrenAccording to UN estimates. Thousands of protesters Gathered in front of the DNC in Chicago. In some cases, protesters were arrested for breaking the barricade in front of the convention center.
