Mar 22, 2019
It's Friday. Time for It's a Security Thing with Craig Peterson. Today, Craig discusses triggerfish, stngrays, and the Michael Cohen investigation.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 03/22/2019
Michael Cohen Investigation - Triggerfish - Stingrays - Were You Caught Up In The Net
Craig Peterson 0:04
Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. And we're going to talk
about a technology and security problem from a little bit of a
different angle today. You know that we've had police surveillance
for years. When they get a warrant, they can start to investigate a
little bit further delve in, get some of our records, maybe our
cell phone records, maybe even travel records and other things. And
of course, they've been casting a pretty wide net with the whole
NSA investigations and what they've been allegedly doing for many
years. And of course as you know, the good news is it looks like
those are coming rapidly to an end. Well, let's look at this
Michael Cohen story that came out this week. And you'll see it up.
This is on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com and this is from
CBS News. The FBI and this is by Graham Kate's, the FBI wanted
Michael Cohen cell phones, but they knew they couldn't be found at
his home. The problem was Cohen and his family moved into hotel
while renovating their apartment. So on April 8, 2018, they decided
that they would use something called triggerfish. And they wanted
to find his exact location which was a room on the 17th floor at
Lowes Regency Hotel. The FBI Special Agent wrote in an affidavit
that was unsealed last Tuesday, that federal agents quote sought
and obtained authority to employ electronic technique commonly
known as trigger fish. To determine the locations of Cohen's two
iPhones. The other federal agents ended up obtaining a warrant to
retrieve the phones from the room. And there was a court ordered
special master that later determined that the federal agents could
review the vast majority of nearly 300,000 files on the two phones
as well as an iPad, obtained in the search. Now, a special master's
someone who can look at the evidence and determine if it might be
client confidential, in the case of an attorney like Michael Cohen
was, and that the FBI really shouldn't have access to it, or that
the information is maybe something that might be pursuant to the
case, and legit for them to look at. Now, you might have heard
these triggerfishes called stingrays before. And what stingrays do
is mimics cell phone towers. So they can pinpoint a phone's
location, sometimes even before it makes a call or a text just
because of the unique identifier that the phone has.
Craig 2:50
And we're not sure what law enforcement was hoping to get from its
use of the stingrays that we're targeting Cohen, because these
devices can also collect them calls a text messages and even emails
that are sent to and from phones, because they're sitting in the
middle and you can do what's known as a man in the middle attack.
Now, because they're acting the cell towers, they not they don't
just get the data and information from one phone. But any other
cell phones a deer in the area are going to see it and try and
connect to it. So they can take in information from entire
neighborhoods, which is why civil liberties groups for years have
objected to the use of these things. They are absolutely crazy. Now
they're made by defense contractor Harris Corporation, and the
patents that it's filed indicate that they've been used for about
two decades, although law enforcement rarely even admits that they
have them. So now we found that they are using them, they have been
using them for a long time, and they were using them specifically
in the Michael Cohen investigation.
Craig 4:01
Now that really is a very big deal because Michael Cohen of course
with is the attorney who was involved with President Trump, in this
whole Russian collusion investigation.
Craig 4:16
I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here. But the
Congress did authorize what's called a pen register, which is a
process that records or decodes the dialing routing address, and
you're signaling information so they can figure out who's someone
called when they called it from. And a pen register is basically
referring referring to back in the day where someone would have a
pen and paper in the phone offices, right, the switching office and
track the switches and where call was being routed and would write
it all down. But there's some serious Fourth Amendment concerns.
The rights of citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In this case, obviously, for Michael Cohen, they did have a
warrant. But how about for everybody else that was caught up in
this thing? Yeah, it's a really good question, frankly. But these
are cell site simulators. You can make them. I've got the plans to
make something kind of similar to use cell phones on the ham radio
bands and basically it pretends it's a cell site is not intended to
do grab all of this data from all these people. But they are the
most interesting know they are out there. There's passive and
active ones. I am SI catchers, which are the passer ones as well as
the cell site simulators. There is a ton of information out there
you can find on it. Check out eff.org. To find out more the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. They've got a lot of really good
stuff on it. But it looks like the FBI was using some of this
latest technology to investigate Cohen and by doing so probably
ended up catching a lot of other data that they may or may not have
had legal access to as well. So keep that in mind next time you are
online. You know it's a Security Thing. And that's what we talked
about are right here on my podcast. And visit me online.
http://CraigPeterson.com. Make sure you subscribe so you get all of
these. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and hit the subscribe
button.
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