Earlier this month, news of mysterious devices sprinkled across America mimicking cellphone towers and sucking up your information permeated the Internet. Now 15 of these “interceptors,” as they are sometimes called, have been found in Washington, D.C.—many allegedly near landmark buildings such as the White House, the Supreme Court and Senate office buildings—but also a few near the Russian Embassy.
These interceptors were identified by the CryptoPhone 500, an ultra-secure cellphone that came on the scene after the Edward Snowden leaks. The phone is essentially a decked-out Samsung Galaxy S3 that costs around $3,500. ESD America, the group marketing the phone, had a few people drive around the nation’s capital and plot on a map every time the phone connected to a fake cellphone tower and when they received a notification that their phone’s encryption had been turned off, allowing their messages to be read.
Interceptor technology is being used by government agencies (such as the National Security Agency), local police and foreign governments, and it can be purchased by individuals in simpler forms. Though experts agree that law enforcement officials most commonly use interceptor technology, ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith thinks these D.C. interceptors belong to foreign governments—and he may be right.
In a previous discussion with Newsweek, former FBI deputy director Tim Murphy said, “This type of technology has been used in the past by foreign intelligence agencies here and abroad to target Americans, both [in the] U.S. government and corporations. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re using it.” In their book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady write that the FBI “has quietly removed from several Washington, D.C.- area cell phone towers transmitters that fed all data to wire rooms at foreign embassies.”
President Barack Obama has somewhat acknowledged these claims, saying, “We know that the intelligence services of other countries are constantly probing our government and private sector networks and accelerating programs to listen to our conversations.” That is why, he continued, “BlackBerrys and iPhones are not allowed in the White House Situation Room.”
But some security experts question Goldsmith’s claims regarding the CryptoPhone 500’s ability to so precisely locate interceptors. Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, toldThe Washington Post, “I would bet money that there are governments that are spying in D.C. Whether you can detect that with a $3,000 device, I don’t know.”
ESD America denied Newsweek’s request to test the phone.
Cellphones can reportedly reach interceptors up to a mile away. Yet Goldsmith definitively states that the interceptors are “at the White House” or “at the Russian Embassy.” If you’ve ever been to D.C., you’ve noticed it isn’t very big—many important buildings can be found within a one-mile radius. Assuming the CryptoPhone 500 works as advertised, Goldsmith may just be saying that the interceptor’s location is the nearest prominent building at the time a notification is received.
This picture shows a one-mile radius around the Russian Embassy, one of the purported locations of interceptors. It contains a police station, dozens of embassies, multiple schools and universities and the Naval Observatory.
But Goldsmith doesn’t think these Washington, D.C., interceptors belong to U.S. government agencies. He said, “Long-term surveillance operations are much easier [for government agencies] to do through the networks than to put a surveillance team and resources out there.… They were located in areas where the U.S. government already knows what is going on [in their buildings].” As for belonging to local police, that number of interceptors would be “overkill,” Goldsmith says, implying that some could belong to local police but not all.
He also discounts the idea that the interceptors belong to individuals, saying, “They aren’t going to get an effective range with an interceptor they can afford. They are going to have to be very close to their target—less than 100 yards, realistically.” Foreign governments, he says, “can more easily go and buy it and bring it into the country. At the same time, if you bring it in a briefcase no one is going to know what it is. You can walk right through airport security, or they could bring it in as a diplomatic item, or, even, these days they could probably walk it over the U.S.-Mexico border.”
But, as Soghoian writes, “if cellular interception technology were still prohibitively expensive and exclusively available to governments engaged in foreign and domestic surveillance, the communications of the average law-abiding American would rarely be targeted.”
The equipment’s usefulness surpasses political usage. Interceptors can be used to gain insider knowledge from corporations and businesses— which explains why interceptors were found in Silicon Valley. In China, another manufacturer of the technology, interceptors are being used on a grand scale to make money. Once connected to a cellphone, scammers can send the phone texts from any number. More than 13 million messages are being sent daily through interceptors, according to Qihoo 360, China’s largest mobile security firm. Of those messages, more than half are advertisements, a third are promoting illegal services, and around 15 percent are fraudulent—fake invoices or credit card statements, for example. There are endless possibilities in terms of the party responsible for the interceptors, as well as countless reasons for intercepting.
Goldsmith concedes that he is simply hypothesizing about who is behind the D.C. interceptors. Assuming the CryptoPhone 500 works as advertised, he is interpreting the data to support his theory. But he can’t be blamed for searching for answers. “I think the only way we’d get more information is if we obtained it ourselves,” he told Newsweek. “I know the government wouldn’t share it.”
NoYesYesare, foreign, governments, intercepting, us, callsWebWhitelistEMEAUS