97
ICE is stepping up its smartphone tracking, but Android 16 has a secret weapon
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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Android
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Time to tell on myself a bit, I was a 35N in the US army with experience adjacent to this subject. Stingrays are commercially available devices that pretty much anybody with big money can get their hands on and use. Private companies make various stingray-type devices and those private companies have salesmen who actively want to sell YOU on buying their equipment.
For law enforcement, getting a continuing agreement with telecommunication companies to have legal access to bulk USP data is a big nightmare with lots of red tape. Even if a police department were to get these agreements with the telecommunications company you're now introducing all of the inconvenience of dealing with AT&T customer support to get your data from them. This isn't a joke, pretty often you will still have to work with/through the telecommunications company you have an agreement with to get your data. And to be honest their techs and reps are dumb as bricks, they are so often a common pain point.
Setting up a stingray on the other hand gives the police department direct access to all the data themselves with no middle-men, and often they even have supplemental support from whichever company they bought their stingrays from. It's easier, faster, and more convenient data collection 99% of the time to not go through the genuine cell towers.
But we're talking about a federal agency here, not local law enforcement. It's been confirmed that systems they tried to keep secret exist for them to have direct access to traffic going through ISPs, so why wouldn't they have set up something similar for wireless networks, that would eliminate the need to go through any corporate bureaucracy? To me it seems reasonable to assume that such programs exist without being divulged because it would be basically similar to what else has been confirmed to exist, and there's a really obvious incentive.