Stingray: The secretive device FBI used to hunt down Ghislaine Maxwell
The FBI used a secretive piece of technology to track down Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell to her hiding place last year.
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The FBI used a secretive piece of technology to track down Ghislaine Maxwell to her hiding place last year.
Maxwell, 59, was arrested on July 1, 2020 at a secluded New Hampshire estate nearly a year after her former lover and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, 66, died in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The British socialite, now on trial for similar charges stemming from her long association with Epstein, had “slithered away to a gorgeous property” which she purchased in December 2019 for $US1 million, the FBI said upon her arrest.
When agents entered the lavish, double-storey retreat, among other things they discovered a mobile phone wrapped in tinfoil.
At the time, media reported the FBI had obtained a warrant to use a device called a Stingray to track her down.
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Manufactured by US defence contractor Harris Corporation, a Stingray is effectively a mobile phone tower “simulator”.
“Basically it fools cellphones into locking onto that, so that it can determine the IP of the phone, where the phone’s at – it’s used by even hostile adversaries like Russia and China to intercept text messages and phone calls,” Morgan Wright, cybersecurity expert and chief security adviser at SentinelOne, told news.com.au’s I’ve Got News For You podcast.
“What it does is fools phones into connecting to it so it can get precise information and location without having to go through the service provider. It’s actually a great tool … but it has a lot of power so it has to come with a lot of rules as well.”
Mr Wright said while “they won’t officially say” how accurately a Stingray could pinpoint someone’s location, consumer apps like Lyft or Uber “can find me precisely within a couple of metres”.
“You can guess from there, so it’s pretty accurate in terms of narrowing down the signal,” he said.
“It may not get you to the exact spot but it can put you close enough to the area to where you eliminate everything else. It was the only house out there, so it’s the only signal within a couple hundred metres, it’s pretty obvious that’s where the signal is coming from.”
Mr Wright said Stingrays were highly regulated and only sold to the military, intelligence community and law enforcement.
“You have to have a legal reason to possess one of these normally, but that doesn’t mean they don’t show up in the [wrong] hands,” he said.
“There are some black market versions or people who have stolen them and repurposed them, or the other thing too is if you’ve got the money like Russia or China you can build your own version, which actually happened in the United States.”
In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security revealed surveillance devices for intercepting phone calls and texts had been discovered operating near the White House and other sensitive locations in Washington the previous year.
“They have found some of those sites they believe were put up by some hostile foreign intelligence agents attempting to intercept calls from the State Department, from the White House, things like that,” Mr Wright said.
While the existence of the device itself is not a secret, he said authorities “do keep the information about it as tightly controlled as possible because of legal issues and court proceedings”.
“What they do want to keep confidential is how it’s used, who’s using it, what are some of the specifications of it, because any time you put that information out there it means it’s easier for adversaries,” he said.
“I’m talking more than just nations, I’m talking about if you think about what we’re dealing with now with the cartels, with human trafficking, with the things that are going on between Mexico and places like that, it is a very real issue that somebody could lock in on this or understand how to defeat it.”
He added that Harris Corporation had “a select number of customers”, so “they don’t really need to advertise a lot”.
Originally published as Stingray: The secretive device FBI used to hunt down Ghislaine Maxwell
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