This law enforcement tactic dates back to the days when almost all phone communication occurred via landlines. These orders can now be used to grab email metadata and cell phone communication data, including metadata on SMS texts.
It’s also a handy way to hide Stingray deployments, something I’m sure the Marshals Service has never done.
Some services are capable of providing this metadata in near-real time, which leverages the Third Party Doctrine to create ad hoc tracking devices — something that would seem to run afoul of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision
US Marshals’ Secretive Surveillance Wing Still Trying To Recover After Being Hit By Ransomware More Than Two Months Ago
from the inadvertently-open-secrets-operations-group dept
"Money can’t buy you everything. Not even the kind of money that’s apparently infinite, if our current federal deficit is any indication.
The US Marshals Service was hit with ransomware in February. And, despite drastic measures being taken by the USMS, the breached system still has yet to return to service.
And it wasn’t just any part of the Marshals Service. It was its innermost sanctum, as Devlin Barrett reports for the Washington Post. Here’s what the hackers targeted:
The computer network was operated by the Marshals’ Technical Operations Group (TOG), a secretive arm within the agency that uses technically sophisticated law enforcement methods to track criminal suspects through their cellphones, emails and web usage. Its techniques are kept secret to prolong their usefulness, and exactly what members of the unit do and how they do it is a mystery even to some of their fellow Marshals personnel.
Sounds bad! Sounds like the sort of thing you’d want to keep ultra-protected to ensure the sort of thing that happened doesn’t happen. That’s where it gets even worse. This super-secret group (one not previously acknowledged or reported) had a bunch of its stuff left out in the open, an apparent oversight by the Marshals Service and one that went unnoticed until someone from the outside noticed it and decided to ransom the TOG’s data stash.
Rather than negotiate with computerrorists, the Marshals Service deployed the nuclear option, much to the surprise of many of TOG’s members.
To limit the potential spread of infected devices and systems, officials decided to wipe the cellphones of those who worked in the hacked system — clearing out their contacts and emails. The action was taken with little advance notice on a Friday night, meaning some employees were caught by surprise, these people said.
The exposed-then-ransomed-then-nuked system was apparently an essential part of the Marshals Service’s fugitive apprehension program. But the Service remains (perhaps a bit too) optimistic that 10 weeks without it (and no resurrection date in sight), it can still go about the business of rounding up bad guys. The statements provided to the Washington Post infer the Service still has plenty of fugitive-hunting options, which is, of course, the sort of thing people in the fugitive-hunting business would say when an apparent crippling of their offensive weaponry is made public.
But for it being so secretive and so high tech, a lot of the fugitive tracking work is still being done the old fashioned way: by grabbing third party records without warrants. . ."
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