The Electronic Frontier Foundation has come to the conclusion that someone likely deployed a mobile phone surveillance system during the Democratic National Convention last summer, according to a new report from Wired. Evidence for that assertion comes from Cooper Quintin, a senior technologist at EFF, who has spent time investigating whether police technologies were deployed during the event from the event. Wired worked together with the EFF to conduct an analysis of wireless signal data. What they found was evidence that someone may have used a cell-site simulator to spy on devices.
Cell-site simulators are controversial police tools that can grab wireless signals out of the air and store them for later analysis. Cell-site simulators basically conduct Man-in-the-Middle style attacks, convincing mobile devices that they are cell towers and that they should send their signals to them. These attacks can reveal critical personal information, like 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 had been created by the EFF and was designed to pick up on data anomalies related to the devices. Wired describes their experiment thusly:
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 march routes and through 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 signs that could indicate the presence of a cell-site simulator.
After analyzing the data from those devices, Quinton told Wired that it appeared to show that someone may have been deploying a cell-site simulator in the area at the time of the convention. Wired writes that one of the devices the reporters were carrying “abruptly switched to a new tower.” That tower then “asked for 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 do not exhibit,” Quintin told Wired, of the analysis. “This is not 100 percent incontrovertible truth, but it’s strong evidence suggesting a cell-site simulator was deployed. We don’t know who was responsible—it could have been the US government, foreign actors, or another entity.”
Gizmodo reached out to the EFF for more information.
It’s unknown what might motivate someone to use a surveillance system at the Democratic National Convention, though there was one obvious reason why police would want to surveil local phones at the time. The convention was marred by ongoing protests over the Biden administration’s support of the Israeli assault on Gaza. At the time of the protests, over 40,000 Palestinians had reportedly been killed, the majority of which were women and children, according to one UN estimate. Thousands of protesters gathered outside the DNC in Chicago. In some cases, protesters were arrested for having breached a barricade outside the convention center.