Report: Government planes scoop up cell phone data

Larry Copeland | USA TODAY

Using devices mounted on aircraft flying high overhead, the federal government is gathering data from the mobile phones of thousands of innocent Americans in "a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects," according to a new report.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the program run by the Justice Department's U.S. Marshals Service since about 2007 operates Cessna aircraft equipped with devices that mimic the cell phone towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cell phones into reporting their unique registration information.

Citing "people familiar with the operations," the newspaper reports that the program operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, and that the flying range of the planes covers most of the USA's population.

The technology used in the planes are two-foot-square devices that can scoop the identifying information and general location from tens of thousands of cell phones in a single flight, the newspaper was told. The paper's sources wouldn't discuss the frequency or duration of the flights but said they occur on a regular basis.

A Justice Department official would not confirm or deny the existence of the program, telling the newspaper that discussion of such matters would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine U.S. surveillance capabilities. The official said that Justice Department agencies comply with federal law, including by seeking court approval.

The program is similar to a National Security Agency program that collects millions of Americans' phone records, in that it scoops up large volumes of data in order to find a single person or a few people, The Journal reports. The U.S. government has justified the NSA phone-records collection program as a minimally invasive way to hunt terrorists.

The American Civil Liberties Union's chief technologist, Christopher Soghoian, called the cell phone program "a dragnet surveillance program. It is inexcusable and it's likely – to the extent judges are authorizing it – [that] they have no idea of the scale of it."

Some of the devices on the Cessnas are known to law enforcement officials as "dirtboxes" because of the initials of the Boeing Co. subsidiary that produces them – Digital Receiver Technology Inc., according to the newspaper.

Cell phones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device used by the U.S. Marshals Service falsely identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, thus forcing all phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Having encryption on a phone, such as that on Apple Inc.'s iPhone 6, doesn't defeat the process, The Wall Street Journal says.

The technology is aimed at locating cell phones linked to people under investigation by the government, including fugitives and drug dealers, but it collects information on cellphones belonging to individuals who are not criminal suspects, people familiar with the program said. They said the device determines which phones belong to suspects and "lets go" of the non-suspect phone, the newspaper reports.