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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has come to the conclusion that someone likely deployed a cell phone surveillance system during the Democratic National Convention last summer, according to a new report from Wired. The evidence for this assertion comes from Cooper Quintin, a senior technologist at EFF, who spent time investigating whether police technologies were implemented during the event from the event. Wired worked together with the EFF to conduct a data analysis of wireless signals. What they found was evidence that someone may have used a cell site simulator to spy on the devices.
Cell site simulators are controversial police tools that can capture wireless signals off the air and store them for later analysis. Cell site simulators drive deep Man-in-the-Middle style attacks, convincing mobile devices that they are cell towers and that they have to send their signals to them. These attacks can reveal critical personal information, such as location data, call metadata and app traffic, providing a critical window into mobile activity. A popular brand of cell site simulators is the Stingray.
Wired reporters traveled to the DNC last summer and used phones equipped with special software. That software was created by the EFF and was designed to capture data anomalies related to devices. Wired describes their experiment as follows:
WIRED attended protests across the city, events at the United Center (where the DNC took place), and social gatherings with lobbyists, political figures and influencers. We spent time walking the perimeter along the march routes and through the planned protest sites before, during and after these events.
In the process we captured Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals. We then analyzed those signals looking for specific hardware identifiers and other suspicious signals that could indicate the presence of a cell site simulator.
After analyzing the data from those devices, Quinton told Wired that it seemed to show that someone might have deployed a cell site simulator in the area at the time of the convention. Wired writes that one of the devices the journalists were carrying “suddenly switched to a new tower.” The tower then “requested the device’s IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) and then immediately disconnected – a sequence consistent with the operation of a cell site simulator.”
“This is extremely suspicious behavior that normal towers don’t show,” Quintin told Wired of the analysis. “This is not 100 percent incontrovertible truth, but it is strong evidence that suggests that a cell site simulator was implemented. We do not know who was responsible – it could be the United States government, foreign actors, or another entity.”
Gizmodo has reached out to the EFF for more information.
It is unknown what would motivate someone to use a surveillance system at the Democratic National Convention, although there was an obvious reason why the police wanted to monitor local phones at the time. The convention was marked by ongoing protests about the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. At the time of the protests, they are over 40,000 Palestinians had been killed, most of them they were women and childrenaccording to a UN estimate. Thousands of protesters gathered outside the DNC in Chicago. In some cases, protesters were arrested for breaching a barricade outside the convention center.
