Feds Got Warrants to Use Fake Cell Towers to Hunt Down Don Lemon's Producer
wired.com94 points by rndsignals 3 hours ago
94 points by rndsignals 3 hours ago
> charged with conspiring to violate worshippers’ civil rights and interfering with religious worship at ... its pastors, David Easterwood, also led ICE’s St. Paul field office
Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
It's illegal in the United States to form or participate in a mob that interrupts worship service. It doesn't matter how right you think you are.
Some people are wondering if the government has to prove it is a mob, or can just say that, and then do a bunch of illegal things once they assert it. And, whether if that turns out to be a lie, if there are consequences for lying. It would be nice to have clarity there.
That narrative is what the Justice Dept alleges, but it’s far from settled. Don’t be disingenuous.
You're just thumping the table. It's illegal to discriminate against Jewish university students, too, but that doesn't mean that Trump's treatment of Columbia et al was justified. What do you think it means for an official to use the law as a weapon against his enemies?
First Amendment, anyone? The right to protest and have a free press?
I guess we're raiding the homes of Congress members we simply disagree with, so Constitutional rights don't carry as much weight anymore.
The right to protest and peacefully assemble doesnt give you the right to do it in private property. The church is church property its open to its members and generally the public but that doesnt make it a public place or public property. If you want to protest a store, you are free to do so on public property outside the store. You are not free to do so inside the store disrupting the purpose of the establishment. The store is private property they are within their rights to refuse your business as long as it isnt based on a protected class.
A church really isnt any different, their business is worship and offering a peaceful place for contemplation, reflaction and prayer. If you disrupt that they can and should ask you to leave and should you refuse that becomes the crime of tresspass.
If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
Exceptional irony in that somewhere within that church might be printed the line "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who tresspass against us". Probably within some book that isn't very important.
What is the appropriate punishment for "tresspass?" How does it involve a federal law enforcement agency, and not local law enforcement instead?
> If you want to be empowered by your rights then you should first take the necessary time to understand them.
I’m asking questions to better understand.
You have rights to assemble and protest, they have rights to assemble and worship. It’s all about trying to strike a reasonable balance between your competing rights.
It is also illegal for ICE agents to execute a nurse and veteran in the street by shooting him in the back after taking away his gun but that doesn't seem to matter.
Because it's so difficult to avoid protesting in a church huh? I get that you're partisan, but come on, have some common sense.
There are many churches that have needed protesting.
That’s how you end up with Nazis protesting in synagogues.
You have a right to assemble and so do they, what you don’t have is a right to trespass. Use your head.
What will Stingrays do if a mobile device uses Starlink? There's no way the Feds are going to lose this ability to deploy Stingrays once Starlink Mobile comes around.
Stingrays don't care where the provider's towers are, they work by pretending to be their own, and (ideally for you if you are the person wielding one) causing your target's phone to connect to or through your antenna. The only way Starlink would help a target is if your phone rejects tower signals that are not mostly above you, or if Starlink Mobile would utilize something other than the 3GPP standards, both of which are unlikely unless they want to sell their own fully proprietary phones.
Probably the feds will just ask Starlink for the triangulated coordinates of their person of interest.
Exactly, it's not like Elon has been shy about using his toys for this admin.
Why wouldn't they do that in the case of other providers?
What if Starlink refuses?
Do you think that Musk wants to become the dominate global cell provider and does NOT plan to use that information collection capability to enable his friends and hurt his enemies?
Curious if there are counter measures for devices like Stingrays or IMSI catchers
You can build an IMSI-catcher-catcher out of an Orbic RC400L cellular hotspot and the Rayhunter software published by the EFF.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
Literally just airplane mode. It's ended up being a rather excellent privacy toggle that operating systems have to implement well.
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
>GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
Yow, $70 a month is rather harsh. Honestly I'd rather just stick to Signal and avoid traditional calling/SMS and use HTTPS for everything over mobile data instead.
> Literally just airplane mode.
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/03/19/ex-pa...
Yes there absolutely are!
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
The subtitle doesn't make sense:
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
"a cell-site simulators"?
Imagine if they went after the child predators listed in the Epstein files with the same amount of force they are going after journalists and critics of ICE.
They do, but it's more of a "join our new sex trafficking club" dynamic than a prosecution.
Imagine if the child predators listed in the Epstein files were illegal aliens! Mind blown!
Being an illegal alien is not actually the problem though. It’s being poor and/or a minority while also being an illegal alien
Yes, times are good if you are a hot escort, you can qualify for the einstein visa like our First Lady.
Should we introduce change to add [paywall] or something to paywalled links?
Should just ban paywalled links. Although it works fine for me.
Banning all paywalls seems harsh. Some paywalls are perfectly readable in Reader Mode.
Careful you don't get busted for "hacking" the site with the reader mode button!
The affidavits supporting the applications to track Richardson claimed video showed Fort, Lemon, Richardson, and others “chanting with agitators.” Prosecutors have since conceded that Lemon and Fort did not chant. According to her lawyers, the government acknowledged that the false claim appeared in at least 15 warrant affidavits.
This administration has an impressive record of lying in order to manufacture charges against critics.
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
Judges are now no longer giving the DoJ the benefit of the doubt and actually scrutinizing the charges.
> The affidavits ... Prosecutors have since conceded
So who is going down for perjury?
Presumably they're relying on mass pardons, like for the profligate self-enrichment, the open treachery of deliberately alienating our allies, the domestic terrorist gangs killing protestors, etc.
But it occurred to me the other day - pardons aren't some ineffable thing, but rely on the discretionary power of the executive (plus some dubious ability to bind future executives). But if we actually get the rule of law back at some point (ie no more sparkling autocracy aka "unitary executive theory"), then Congress should be able to make a law declaring that all those prosecutions need to be pursued. And it wouldn't be an ex-post-facto law because the illegal actions had already been illegal when they were performed, rather the only legal effect would be declaring that the executive (or ideally an independent agency) must perform the prosecution.
(edit: pardon power is mentioned in the Constitution - "[the President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment". But that would seem to apply to only some of the crimes. And one would hope that if we were at the point where there was a political mandate to take these traitors to task, an impeachment and conviction could be quite swift - there needs to be impeachments and criminal convictions for most of the Supreme Council as well)
Federal persecutors have always been biased towards the expedient viewpoints of corpos and other let-them-eat-cake perspectives (eg their snuffing of aaronsw). But this new regime is at the next level of not even giving a single flying fuck about operating in good faith. Truly a "hackers mindset" of putting whatever value is needed in a box to make the desired effect happen, which might be laudable except the only thing being hacked (off) is our Constitutional rights.