prompt 16 channel dvr foreign

Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt 16 channel dvr foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.The recent revelations surrounding the bugging of the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) has raised a number of important questions about the use of surveillance technologies in Ireland, including whether fake base stations were deployed in order to monitor mobile networks near GSOC's office.

First, some background. The Garda Siochana are the Irish police force and are overseen by GSOC, who have investigated members of the police force on a number of occasions. Approximately a year ago, GSOC decided to conduct a security sweep of their office and brought in Verrimus, a UK-based counter-surveillance company. During the course of their investigation, they uncovered 3 anomalies that gave rise to suspicion that the GSOC office had been subjected network camera to surveillance. Two of the potential breaches related to surveillance of specific internal telephone equipment, and a third breach which revealed the presence of a UK mobile network in the vicinity of the GSOC office that purported to be from a UK network operator that does not operate in Ireland.

Possibly, a misconfigured base station hastily rolled out by an Irish mobile operator could have caused this. However, if one of the Irish mobile telcos deployed such a misconfigured device then one would hope the firm would have come forward by now.

Yet, no one has. The only remaining possibility, then, is that a device used to conduct surveillance was intentionally security camera system deployed that purported to be a legitimate mobile phone tower. In surveillance circles, such a device is called an IMSI Catcher (aka IMSI Grabber or Stingray).