8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight

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Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at awiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

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Multi Channel Beeper Buster System

Single Channel Beeper Buster^TM System

 

If the bad guys in your jurisdiction use pagers to conduct their business, you need The Beeper Buster^TM. With The Beeper Buster^TM, you can sit in the privacy of your own office and monitor every message sent to any pager. You do not need the cooperation of the paging system operator, nor will the user of the pager know you are monitoring all his messages. The Beeper Buster^TM can capture all messages sent to a target pager, capture all messages containing a particular “search string” (such as the phone number of a suspect location, pay phone), or any combination of the above. Special techniques are used to determine the unique address (the “capcode”) of the pager, meaning you do not need access to the target pager to capture its messages. It’s very simple. And, the The Beeper Buster^TM is affordable. Unlike rival units, The Beeper Buster^TMactually operates faster than the paging system. This means no missed pages, for any format at any speed. Persons using other less capable pager intercept systems are well aware of the problems of missed pages. The high speed and perfect accuracy of The Beeper Buster^TM is due to our extensive use of custom designed high speed hardware. If you need to use captured messages as evidence in court, the specially designed features of The Beeper Buster^TMguarantee the integrity of the data.

Interceptor – Pager Interception System

Interceptor is a system used to log pager message traffic over Pocsag or Flexpaging networks directly to a PC or computer network. The software is available in single PC or networked client/server versions.

Interceptor consists a 4 channel receiver unit and a Windows based application which together are able to monitor up to 4 paging frequencies within up to 4 pre-selected frequency bands. Pocsag and Flex pagers may be monitored on separate channels.
(For single channel logging see LogPage)

 

Interceptor is equipped with powerful filtering and reporting tools that enable the user to automatically search through received pager messages using different criteria and output the filtered results to the screen, resend it to apager or other messaging device such as a cellphone or forward it via email.

Gold Lock Intercept Video (English)

 

Cops’ wiretap tech frayed

CALGARY — Alberta’s top cop says antiquated wiretap technology in the modern-day crime-fighting realm is hampering police investigations.

Western provincial solicitor generals and justice ministers recently met in Saskatoon and joined forces to pressure the feds to bolster laws to remove technological barriers which often give organized criminals an upper hand.

“The technological infrastructure is there, it is just a matter of getting the legislation in place — we believe we can be more effective,” Alberta Solicitor General Fred Lindsay told Sun Media.

“If (criminals) have a communication device and we can’t wiretap, it puts us at a disadvantage.”

Among a list of demands by the ministers is upgrading Criminal Code lawful access provisions to improve police access to information, be it on computer or cellphone — technology which post-dates the creation of current laws.

One recurrent issue is an inability for police to quickly and adequately investigate criminals by tapping into their use of cellphones.

As it is, criminals can buy prepaid, non-traceable cellphones to use in drug deals or other nefarious activities and register them under any name they want, leaving no identifiers which could help police investigations.

There is also no legislation to deal with encryption technology on cellphones.

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Public spied on 1,500 times a day in UK, study finds

LONDON (Reuters) – Police, councils and the intelligence services made more than 500,000 requests to access private emails and telephone records in the UK last year, according to an annual surveillance report.

The figures, compiled by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Paul Kennedy, found that about 1,500 surveillance requests were made every day in Britain.

That is the annual equivalent to one in every 78 people being targeted. It included 1,500 approved applications from local councils.

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Building in Surveillance

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But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown — a rival political party? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

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Gold Lock video on YouTube

 

Police can snoop on every email and eavesdrop on Internet phone calls under new plan

Police and security chiefs will be able to scour the contents of every email sent in Britain under a £12billion plan to be unveiled tomorrow.

The programme, known as Deep Packet Inspection, will also give them the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls made over the internet.

The proposals, which will be revealed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, come amid increasing evidence that terror groups such as those in the Mumbai attacks are using internet telephones to avoid telephone taps on landline and mobile phones.

Deep Packet Inspection: Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will reveal details of the proposal to allow police and security chiefs to scour every email and listen to phone calls made online tomorrow

Internet firms and telephone providers are already required to store details of communications using their networks for at least a year.

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Report: NSA tried to eavesdrop on Congress member

 

The National Security Agency tried to wiretap a member of the U.S. Congress without a warrant, and has engaged in “significant and systemic” illegal surveillance activities in the last few months including e-mail and telephone call interceptions, according to a report this week.

The article in Wednesday’s New York Times said the Obama administration acknowledged there had been abuses but said they had been resolved. The attempted eavesdropping on a congressman came about because he or she was part of a delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006, and was ultimately blocked.

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