It was a hot and dusty day in the small central Washington town of Ephrata. I was a young TV reporter in the middle of doing interviews when a man approached me with what he called a “hot tip.”
The FBI, he told me, was tracking him and they had his apartment bugged.
I engaged him for a few minutes to see if this might possibly seem true.
As far as evidence, he didn’t seem to have anything to back up his claim that I could lay my hands on, and I was under deadline. So I completed my original story and drove out of town, thinking the man being “tracked” by the FBI likely suffered from delusions I could not help him with.
Anyone who has worked in a newsroom has taken calls and received emails from many people about government surveillance, including collect calls from prisoners in jail with a story to tell. Most of these get written off as "crazy" as you might expect.
Software engineer and convicted hacker Daniel Rigmaiden was probably labeled that way.
He was in jail when he tried to convince the world that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies secretly tracked him with a mysterious technology, now known as a stingray device. He believed he was too careful to be tracked in any other way.
No one listened at first.
But privacy experts, and U.S. senators such as Ron Wyden, are listening now, because the hacker found proof. And since then, these stingray boxes have been discovered around the country, including in the Washington D.C. area.
Now privacy advocates are asking questions about these stingrays being used by law enforcement.
The boxes intercept calls and allow investigators to pinpoint a user’s location and possibly more.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Daniel Rigmaiden, who was charged with filing hundreds of federal tax returns on behalf of dead people in the United States to collect $500,000 in refunds.
But his story has raised the antenna of privacy groups, and Politico has done a great job telling the complete story.
It will leave you wondering: Is it possible I am being tracked by the government without knowing it?
“This tracking technology is even more invasive than law enforcement presenting a court order for location data to a mobile phone provider, because rather than have the government provide a court order to hand over data, the stingray simply eliminates the middleman. The government, armed with its own stingray, can simply pluck the phones location (and possibly the contents of calls, text messages, or any other unencrypted data being transmitted at this time depending on the configuration) directly out of the air.”
