Someone Likely Used a Sophisticated Phone-Spying Device at the 2024 DNC

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has concluded that someone likely installed a mobile phone surveillance system during the Democratic National Convention last summer, according to a New report from wired. Evidence for that claim comes from Cooper Quintin, a senior technologist at the EFF, who spent time investigating whether police technology was deployed from event to event. Wired worked closely with the EFF to analyze wireless signal data. What they found proved that someone had used a cell-site simulator to spy on the device.

Cell-site simulators are controversial police equipment that can capture wireless signals from the air and store them for later analysis. The cell-site simulator essentially handles Man-in-the-middle Style attacks, convincing mobile devices that they are cell towers and that they should send their signal to them. These attacks can reveal important 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 Stingray

Wired journalist DNC trip Last summer and used phones equipped with special software. This software was developed by EFF and is designed to fix data inconsistencies 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 before, during and after these events walking the perimeter along the march route and through the planned protest sites.

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 might indicate the presence of a cell-site simulator.

After analyzing the data from those devices, Quinton told Wired that it showed someone placed a cell-site simulator in the area during the conference. Wired wrote that one of the devices the reporters were carrying “suddenly moved 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.”

“It’s very suspicious behavior that normal towers don’t exhibit,” Quintin told Wired about the analysis. “It’s not 100 percent overwhelmingly true, but it’s strong evidence to suggest that a cell-site simulator was deployed. We don’t know who was responsible — it could be the U.S. government, foreign actors or some other entity.”

Gizmodo has reached out to the EFF for more information.

What might have motivated someone to use surveillance at the Democratic National Convention is unknown, although there was an obvious reason why police would want to monitor local phones at the time. The convention was interrupted Ongoing protests On the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli attack on Gaza. Protest time, over 40,000 Palestinians Most of them are said to have been killed There were women and childrenAccording to a United Nations estimate. Thousands of protesters gathered outside the DNC in Chicago. In some cases, protesters were arrested for breaching a barricade outside the convention center.