The U.S. Marshals have found a way to use airplanes to collect data from people's cellphones on the ground.
The program involves the use of specialized boxes aboard planes called "dirtboxes" that people familiar with the operations say can mimic cellphone towers and collect data from tens of thousands of mobile phones on a single flight, according to The Wall Street Journal. Such information includes the owner's identity and their general location.
People with knowledge of the program said that the goal is to find information about criminals under investigation by the U.S. government, such as drug dealers and fugitives, but a lot of innocent Americans are caught in the targeting. Flights using this technology take place on a regular basis, though they didn't say how frequent or for how long they take place.
The program has been going on since 2007, and U.S. Marshals operate the planes out of at least five metropolitan airports, CNET reported. This operation gives the program the ability to cover the entire U.S. population.
The technology is designed to find a suspect's location to within nine feet, and it discards data that isn't connected to certain suspects.
The dirtboxes are also able to interrupt calls on certain phones for a short period of time, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, authorities have worked to make sure it doesn't interrupt certain calls, such as 911 calls for help during an emergency.
A Justice Department official, in addition to not confirming or denying the program's existence, said criminal suspects and foreign powers would be able to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. surveillance capabilities if the program was discussed. Justice Department agencies seek court approval for the program and comply with federal law.
Not everyone is convinced that the program is justified, such as Christopher Soghoian, chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties, who said the program is "A dragnet surveillance program."
"It's inexcusable and it's likely- to the extent judges are authorizing it- [that] they have no idea of the scale of it," Soghoian added.
The operations have also received criticism from numerous politicians, activists and advocacy groups arguing that the government doesn't have the legal right to collect data this way, CNET reported. The debate of whether the government should have this right is also taking place.
"The U.S. Marshalls should explain how this program works and what kind of court authorization, if any, they're obtaining," said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group fighting for civil rights on the internet.
The U.S. surveillance program is the latest to be revealed in recent years, following whistlebower Edward Snowden's reveal of the National Security Agency's collection of data on millions of Americans.
