Exciting potential here for government officials to use civil rights laws to attack their enemies
I guess we're raiding the homes of Congress members we simply disagree with, so Constitutional rights don't carry as much weight anymore.
> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
"a cell-site simulators"?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-ope...
GrapheneOS has "2G Network Protection" which prevents your phone from connecting to 2G networks and it also can notify you if your cellular identifiers were accessed.
https://www.cape.co seemed suspicious to me but apparently they actually do manage to make decent security improvements on the cellular stack. They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS [1] which is cool.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You should realistically be changing to it to "5G or LTE only", even better "5G only". The latter should provide complete protection from IMSI/IMEI sniffing by rogue base stations.
Almost everyone needs a solution that allows them to send and receive communication, including using the Internet, at arbitrary places and times.
> (Cape)
Cape is cofounded by Palantir alums; national security agencies are their main market. That doesn't condemn them - and it may speak to technical chops and requirements - though people should be informed so they can make their own decisions.
> They also donate 100k/year to GrapheneOS
Their valuation, as of this past March, is $900M [0]. GrapheneOS is mostly silent about donors and any arrangments with them, afaict.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/03/19/ex-pa...
The EFF has the Rayhunter project at https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter - it is basically an IMSI catcher catcher. You install it on a pocket router and it detects typical signatures that IMSI catchers use, for example telling your mobile to downgrade from LTE to 2G making it easy for them to tell your device to join THEIR network and read the IMSI / IMEI for your device and possibly route your traffic through their network.
The device with Rayhunter installed will notify you when these signatures are being detected and you get a pcap file that you can dissect using Wireshark.
There are other tools that you can install on Android devices but Rayhunter certainly is a good start if you want to detect the use of IMSI catchers.
One caveat: IMSI-catching is a cat-and-mouse game, so no promises can be made that the Rayhunter heuristics catch all attacks.
They also consistently lose in court once these charges are subjected to scrutiny. The point seems to be to merely manufacture bad headlines to smear the targets.
Prior to this administration, the feds had a 93% conviction rate. With so many frivolous cases falling apart in court, I'd be curious to know where that percentage is now.
So who is going down for perjury?
But it occurred to me the other day - pardons aren't some ineffable thing, but rely on the discretionary power of the executive (plus some dubious ability to bind future executives). But if we actually get the rule of law back at some point (ie no more sparkling autocracy aka "unitary executive theory"), then Congress should be able to make a law declaring that all those prosecutions need to be pursued. And it wouldn't be an ex-post-facto law because the illegal actions had already been illegal when they were performed, rather the only legal effect would be declaring that the executive (or ideally an independent agency) must perform the prosecution.
(edit: pardon power is mentioned in the Constitution - "[the President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment". But that would seem to apply to only some of the crimes. And one would hope that if we were at the point where there was a political mandate to take these traitors to task, an impeachment and conviction could be quite swift - there needs to be impeachments and criminal convictions for most of the Supreme Council as well)