Exclusive: Fake cellphone tower likely surveilled protesters at Portland ICE facility

Watch Exclusive: Fake cellphone tower likely surveilled protesters at Portland ICE facility - Straight Arrow News on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00So I traveled to the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, which has been the site of ongoing

00:03protests since June in response to President Donald Trump's immigration policies. I used an

00:08academic research tool called Marlin to scan the cellular signals being sent from cell towers to

00:13cell phones in the vicinity of the ICE facility in order to look for a device called a cell site

00:18simulator. This is also called an MC catcher or a stingray. So cell site simulators basically mimic

00:25legitimate cell phone towers. And when they're brought into an area, they broadcast a stronger

00:30signal than real towers in the area, which forces your phone to connect to it. And then they use

00:35that to obtain your IMSI or your international mobile subscriber identity, which is a unique

00:3915 digit code tied to your SIM card that the network uses to identify you when you're using

00:44your cell phone. In multiple 24 hour long test scans, Marlin's researchers found a median of less

00:49than 3% of the messages being sent from a legitimate cell phone tower asked phones for this unique

00:54identifier. And in their multiple tests, the researchers found that spikes above 10% were

00:58rare and never exceeded 14%. In contrast, in just 14 hours of scanning, I saw over half a dozen spikes

01:05surpassed 10% and recorded three separate 18% spikes in just a one hour window. But when I started to walk

01:11away to a nearby hotel about 0.3 miles away, that percentage started to drop back down to what the

01:18normal baseline number is that you'd expect to see from a normal tower behaving normally. So when you see

01:23huge spikes of those type of IMSI exposing messages, that's indicative of a cell site simulator being

01:29used. So if one of these devices is running at a federal facility, for example, they can find out

01:34all the phones that were in that area at a certain time. In this instance, it's likely that there was

01:40a device attached to a building that was looking at the people in the area. The reason cell site simulators

01:45are so controversial is that even if you're looking for a specific device, you have to force all other

01:49devices in the area to connect to you. So even if you have a warrant to find a specific phone,

01:54you're essentially siphoning up other people's data in the process. And while warrants are required,

01:59cell site simulators can be deployed without warrants under certain emergency circumstances,

02:03such as issues related to national security. So that raises the question of whether that

02:07justification is being used to potentially surveil protesters. And given that there was an apartment

02:12building and other businesses directly across the street from the ICE facility, even people unrelated to

02:17the activity on the ground may have had their information swept up.