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Marc noted that, "I have never heard of the latter being done by U.S. authorities." But they certainly have the capability. Chicago and Los Angeles police have had dirtboxes for more than a decade. A number of U.S. police departments have purchased Stingrays in the past few years. Since these cell site simulators can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're often donated to local PDs by the FBI or the corporations that make them. A Stingray was most recently used by the Baltimore police to disrupt the protests after Freddie Gray's death. So it's not like John Law is averse to blocking people's data via techno-fuckery. And sometimes they do it with planes, because if you're going to do shit like this, you might as well do it in the scariest way possible.

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In 2014, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the U.S. Marshals Service had commissioned a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft with dirtboxes. And last year, we learned that the FBI also has their own fleet of dirtbox-equipped planes, mostly Cessnas, registered to a series of dummy corporations with names like "KQM Aviation." And no, this information isn't from some website with an Illuminati pyramid worked into the logo; the AP figured this out, and they've provided so much documentation that anyone who reads it will literally shit credibility.

Marc made sure to note that a number of things could have caused all this funky phone behavior. For example, rural cell towers aren't built to smoothly handle thousands of new people "checking in" on Facebook. Our stories were all anecdotal, and conspiratorial thinking is going to thrive at any given gathering of thousands of people who regularly contend with armed riot police. And while a handful of other sites have reported on rumors of digital eavesdropping at Standing Rock, and the ACLU has submitted a freedom of information request looking into the matter, solid evidence has been in short supply. Or it was, until we ran into this charming sign on the wall of the media tent: