 The story of the mobile spy SUVs purchased by the state of Texas for $4.5 million continues to unfold. According to Alex Barrientos of Gadget Review, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s purchase of four Chevy Tahoes includes an extra $3.9 million for a proprietary surveillance system from a company named Cognyte, Israel’s version of Palantir. Cognyte is the maker of the FalcoNet surveillance technology embedded in the SUVs. FalcoNet, writes Andrew Collins of The Drive, has already been deployed in Florida (as has similar stingray technology elsewhere). Its purpose is simple, if ominous: get between cellphone towers and any phones that happen to be near them, and then secretly intercept and capture everything that being transmitted. FalcoNet and its competitors do this by pretending to be ordinary cell towers, tricking every phone nearby into connecting (smartphones can't help themselves because they are programmed to respond to the strongest signal). Cognyte claims FalcoNet can be activated in under three minutes and can connect with thousands of devices at once as the surveillance vehicles roll through traffic and past pedestrians. Those intercepts are meant to catch the communications of bad actors being sought by authorities. But the software cannot filter out the private information of bystanders from that of suspects, which means that Texas and Florida are sweeping up the data of everyone who happens to be in the mobile system’s vicinity. The data of thousands of innocent persons can then be sifted through afterward. This presumes that only law enforcement will do the sifting – and not hackers, data brokers, or hostile state actors. Even so, that is cold comfort given what we know from the actual abuse and potential misuses of similar surveillance systems. The growing use of stingrays, whether installed on poles in busy parts of town, in mobile police units, or even mounted on drones, underscores the importance of commercial encryption services in protecting our everyday communications. We should be able to enjoy the same level of privacy in our texts and emails that we expect when having a private conversation with a friend. Equally important, the entire premise of such spy regimes – no matter what the official rationalization – flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment. Designed to protect against the invasive and indiscriminate mass searches of general warrants, the Fourth Amendment offers a simple calculus: probable cause + a court warrant + narrowly defined search criteria. In their current forms, programs like the aptly named FalcoNet – and it is a net – are functional dragnets, modern-day general warrants that thwart every aspect of the Constitution’s privacy safeguards. Not even outmoded interpretations of the third-party doctrine can (or should) be invoked to save them. The good news is that we now live in the Chatrie era. In that recent decision, the U.S. Supreme Court clearly articulated a fundamental right to certain forms of digital privacy, specifically regarding location tracking (including geofencing, the whole raison d'être for those shiny new Texas spy SUVs). In short, this practice of roving mass surveillance is ripe for a challenge in court. Comments are closed.
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