[Commotion-discuss] Seattle Police mesh network for surveillance?

[Dan Staples]

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/you-are-a-rogue-device/Content?oid=18143845

You Are a Rogue Device
A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has Been Installed Throughout
Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What It Is, and Officials Don’t
Want to Talk About It.

by Matt Fikse-Verkerk and Brendan Kiley

If you're walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You'll see off-white
boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to
utility poles. If you're walking around downtown while looking at a
smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or
three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: "4th&Seneca,"
"4th&Union," "4th&University," and so on. That is how you can see the
Seattle Police Department's new wireless mesh network, bought from a
California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include
the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining
interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.

The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?

How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone,
laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its "media
access control address"—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous
to a device's thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a
database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given
time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?

The SPD declined to answer more than a dozen questions from The
Stranger, including whether the network is operational, who has access
to its data, what it might be used for, and whether the SPD has used it
(or intends to use it) to geo-locate people's devices via their MAC
addresses or other identifiers.

Seattle Police detective Monty Moss, one of the leaders of the
mesh-network project—one part of a $2.7 million effort, paid for by the
Department of Homeland Security—wrote in an e-mail that the department
"is not comfortable answering policy questions when we do not yet have a
policy." But, Detective Moss added, the SPD "is actively collaborating
with the mayor's office, city council, law department, and the ACLU on a
use policy." The ACLU, at least, begs to differ: "Actively
collaborating" is not how they would put it. Jamela Debelak, technology
and liberty director of the Seattle office, says the ACLU submitted
policy-use suggestions months ago and has been waiting for a response.

Detective Moss also added that the mesh network would not be used for
"surveillance purposes... without City Council's approval and the
appropriate court authorization." Note that he didn't say the mesh
network couldn't be used for the surveillance functions we asked about,
only that it wouldn't—at least until certain people in power say it can.
That's the equivalent of a "trust us" and a handshake.

His answer is inadequate for other reasons as well. First, the city
council passed an ordinance earlier this year stating that any potential
surveillance equipment must submit protocols to the city council for
public review and approval within 30 days of its acquisition and
implementation. This mesh network has been around longer than that, as
confirmed by Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install it. Still, the
SPD says it doesn't have a policy for its use yet. Mayor McGinn's office
says it expects to see draft protocols sometime in December—nearly nine
months late, according to the new ordinance.

Second, and more importantly, this mesh network is part of a whole new
arsenal of surveillance technologies that are moving faster than the
laws that govern them are being written. As Stephanie K. Pell (former
counsel to the House Judiciary Committee) and Christopher Soghoian
(senior policy analyst at the ACLU) wrote in a 2012 essay for the
Berkeley Technology Law Journal:

    The use of location information by law enforcement agencies is
common and becoming more so as technological improvements enable
collection of more accurate and precise location data. The legal mystery
surrounding the proper law enforcement access standard for prospective
location data remains unsolved. This mystery, along with conflicting
rulings over the appropriate law enforcement access standards for both
prospective and historical location data, has created a messy,
inconsistent legal landscape where even judges in the same district may
require law enforcement to meet different standards to compel location
data.

In other words, law enforcement has new tools—powerful tools. We didn't
ask for them, but they're here. And nobody knows the rules for how they
should be used.

This isn't the first time the SPD has purchased surveillance equipment
(or, as they might put it, public-safety equipment that happens to have
powerful surveillance capabilities) without telling the rest of the
city. There was the drones controversy this past winter, when the public
and elected officials discovered that the SPD had bought two unmanned
aerial vehicles with the capacity to spy on citizens. There was an
uproar, and a few SPD officers embarked on a mea culpa tour of community
meetings where they answered questions and endured (sometimes raucous)
criticism. In February, Mayor Mike McGinn announced he was grounding the
drones, but a new mayor could change his mind. Those SPD drones are
sitting somewhere right now on SPD property.

Meanwhile, the SPD was also dealing with the port-camera surveillance
scandal. That kicked off in late January, when people in West Seattle
began wondering aloud about the 30 cameras that had appeared unannounced
on utility poles along the waterfront. The West Seattle neighborhood
blog (westseattleblog.com) sent questions to city utility companies, and
the utilities in turn pointed at SPD, which eventually admitted that it
had purchased and installed 30 surveillance cameras with federal money
for "port security." That resulted in an additional uproar and another
mea culpa tour, much like they did with the drones, during which
officers repeated that they should have done a better job of educating
the public about what they were up to with the cameras on Alki.
(Strangely, the Port of Seattle and the US Coast Guard didn't seem very
involved in this "port security" project—their names only appear in a
few cursory places in the budgets and contracts. The SPD is clearly the
driving agency behind the project. For example, their early tests of
sample Aruba products—beginning with a temporary Aruba mesh network set
up in Pioneer Square for Mardi Gras in 2009—didn't have anything to do
with the port whatsoever.)

The cameras attracted the controversy, but they were only part of the
project. In fact, the 30 pole-mounted cameras on Alki that caused the
uproar cost $82,682—just 3 percent of the project's $2.7 million
Homeland Security–funded budget. The project's full title was "port
security video surveillance system with wireless mesh network." People
raised a fuss about the cameras. But what about the mesh network?

Detective Moss and Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh mentioned the downtown
mesh network during those surveillance-camera community meetings, saying
it would help cops and firefighters talk to each other by providing a
wireless network for their exclusive use, with the potential for others
to use overlaid networks handled by the same equipment. (Two-way radios
already allow police officers to talk to each other, but officers still
use wireless networks to access data, such as the information an officer
looks for by running your license plate number when you've been pulled
over.)

As Brian Magnuson of Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install the
Aruba system, explained the possible use of such a system: "A normal
cell-phone network is a beautiful thing right up until the time you
really need it—say you've just had an earthquake or a large storm, and
then what happens? Everybody picks up their phone and overloads the
system." The network is most vulnerable precisely when it's most needed.
A mesh network could be a powerful tool for streaming video from
surveillance cameras or squad car dash-cams across the network, allowing
officers "real-time situational awareness" even when other communication
systems have been overloaded, as Detective Moss explained in those
community meetings.

But the Aruba mesh network is not just for talking, it's also for tracking.

After reviewing Aruba's technical literature, as well as talking to IT
directors and systems administrators around the country who work with
Aruba products, it's clear that their networks are adept at seeing all
the devices that move through their coverage area and visually mapping
the locations of those devices in real time for the system
administrators' convenience. In fact, one of Aruba's major selling
points is its ability to locate "rogue" or "unassociated" devices—that
is, any device that hasn't been authorized by (and maybe hasn't even
asked to be part of) the network.

Which is to say, your device. The cell phone in your pocket, for instance.

The user's guide for one of Aruba's recent software products states:
"The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and
associated devices." That software includes "a location engine that
calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds
by default... The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each
MAC address."

For now, Seattle's mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area.
But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by
The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have "citywide deployment" of
the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the
SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new
meaning to the phrase "real-time situational awareness."

So how does Aruba's mesh network actually function?

Each of those off-white boxes you see downtown is a wireless access
point (AP) with four radios inside it that work to shove giant amounts
of data to, through, and around the network, easily handling
bandwidth-hog uses such as sending live, high-resolution video to or
from moving vehicles. Because this grid of APs forms a latticelike mesh,
it works like the internet itself, routing traffic around bottlenecks
and "self-healing" by sending traffic around components that fail.

As Brian Magnuson at Cascade Networks explains: "When you have 10 people
talking to an AP, no problem. If you have 50, that's a problem." Aruba's
mesh solution is innovative—instead of building a few high-powered,
herculean APs designed to withstand an immense amount of traffic, Aruba
sprinkles a broad area with lots of lower-powered APs and lets them
figure out the best way to route all the data by talking to each other.

Aruba's technology is considered cutting-edge because its systems are
easy to roll out, administer, and integrate with other systems, and its
operating system visualizes what's happening on the network in a simple,
user-friendly digital map. The company is one of many firms in the
networking business, but, according to the tech-ranking firm Gartner,
Aruba ranks second (just behind Cisco) in "completeness of vision" and
third in "ability to execute" for its clever ways of getting around
technical hurdles.

Take Candlestick Park, the San Francisco 49ers football stadium, which,
Magnuson says, is just finishing up an Aruba mesh network installation.
The stadium has high-intensity cellular service needs—70,000 people can
converge there for a single event in one of the most high-tech cities in
America, full of high-powered, newfangled devices. "Aruba's solution was
ingenious," Magnuson says. It put 640 low-power APs under the stadium's
seats to diffuse the data load. "If you're at the stadium and trying to
talk to an AP," Magnuson says, "you're probably sitting on it!"

Another one of Aruba's selling points is its ability to detect rogue
devices—strangers to the system. Its promotional "case studies" trumpet
this capability, including one report about Cabela's hunting and
sporting goods chain, which is an Aruba client: "Because Cabela's stores
are in central shopping areas, the company captures huge quantities of
rogue data—as many as 20,000 events per day, mostly from neighboring
businesses." Aruba's network is identifying and distinguishing which
devices are allowed on the Cabela's network and which are within the
coverage area but are just passing through. The case study also
describes how Cabela's Aruba network was able to locate a lost
price-scanner gun in a large warehouse by mapping its location, as well
as track employees by the devices they were carrying.

It's one thing for a privately owned company to register devices it
already owns with a network. It's another for a local police department
to scale up that technology to blanket an entire downtown—or an entire city.

Aruba also sells a software product called "Analytics and Location
Engine 1.0." According to a document Aruba has created about the
product, ALE "calculates the location of associated and unassociated
wifi devices... even though a device has not associated to the network,
information about it is available. This includes the MAC address,
location, and RSSI information." ALE's default setting is anonymous,
which "allows for unique user tracking without knowing who the
individual user is." But, Aruba adds in the next sentence, "optionally
the anonymization can be disabled for richer analytics and user behavior
tracking." The network has the ability to see who you are—how deeply it
looks is up to whoever's using it. (The Aruba technology, as far as we
know, does not automatically associate a given MAC address with the name
on the device's account. But figuring out who owns the account—by asking
a cell-phone company, for example—would not be difficult for a
law-enforcement agency.)

Geo-location seems to be an area of intense interest for Aruba. Last
week, the Oregonian announced that Aruba had purchased a Portland
mapping startup called Meridian, which, according to the article, has
developed software that "pinpoints a smartphone's location inside a
venue, relying either on GPS technology or with localized wireless
networks." The technology, the article says, "helps people find their
way within large buildings, such as malls, stadiums, or airports and
enables marketing directed at a phone's precise location."

How does that geo-location work? Devices in the network's coverage area
are "heard" by more than one radio in those APs (the off-white boxes).
Once the network hears a device from multiple APs, it can compare the
strength and timing of the signal to locate where the device is. This is
classic triangulation, and users of Aruba's AirWave software—as in the
Cabela's example—report that their systems are able to locate devices to
within a few feet.

In the case of large, outdoor installations where APs are more spread
out, the ability to know what devices are passing through is
useful—especially, perhaps, to policing agencies, which could log that
data for long-term storage. As networking products and their uses
continue to evolve, they will only compound the "legal mystery" around
how this technology could and should be used that Pell and Soghoian
described in their Berkeley Technology Law Journal piece. Aruba's mesh
network is state-of-the-art, but something significantly smarter and
more sensitive will surely be on the market this time next year. And who
knows how much better the software will get.

An official spokesperson for Aruba wrote in an e-mail that the company
could not answer The Stranger's questions because they pertained "to a
new product announcement" that would not happen until Thanksgiving.
"Aruba's technology," the spokesperson added, "is designed for indoor
(not outdoor) usage and is for consumer apps where they opt in." This is
in direct contradiction to Aruba's own user's manuals, as well as the
fact that the Seattle Police Department installed an outdoor Aruba mesh
network earlier this year.

One engineer familiar with Aruba products and similar systems—who
requested anonymity—confirmed that the mesh network and its software are
powerful tools. "But like anything," the engineer said, it "can be used
inappropriately... You can easily see how a user might abuse this
ability (network admin has a crush on user X, monitors user X's location
specifically)." As was widely reported earlier this year, such alleged
abuses within the NSA have included a man who spied on nine women over a
five-year period, a woman who spied on prospective boyfriends, a man who
spied on his girlfriend, a husband who spied on his wife, and even a man
who spied on his ex-girlfriend "on his first day of access to the NSA's
surveillance system," according to the Washington Post. The practice was
so common within the NSA, it got its own classification: "LOVEINT."

Other Aruba clients—such as a university IT director, a university vice
president, and systems administrators—around the country confirmed it
wouldn't be difficult to use the mesh network to track the movement of
devices by their MAC addresses, and that building a historical database
of their movements would be relatively trivial from a data-storage
perspective.

As Bruce Burton, an information technology manager at the University of
Cincinnati (which uses an Aruba network), put it in an e-mail: "This
mesh network will have the capability to track devices (MAC addresses)
throughout the city."

Not that the SPD would do that—but we don't know. "We definitely feel
like the public doesn't have a handle on what the capabilities are,"
says Debelak of the ACLU. "We're not even sure the police department
does." It all depends on what the SPD says when it releases its
mesh-network protocols.

"They're long overdue," says Lee Colleton, a systems administrator at
Google who is also a member of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, a
grassroots group that formed in response to SPD's drone and
surveillance-camera controversies. "If we don't deal with this kind of
thing now, and establish norms and policies, we'll find ourselves in an
unpleasant situation down the road that will be harder to change."

The city is already full of surveillance equipment. The Seattle
Department of Transportation, for example, uses license-plate scanners,
sensors embedded in the pavement, and other mechanisms to monitor
individual vehicles and help estimate traffic volume and wait time. "But
as soon as that data is extrapolated," says Adiam Emery of SDOT, "it's
gone." They couldn't turn it over to a judge if they tried.

Not that license-plate scanners have always been so reliable. Doug Honig
of the ACLU remembers a story he heard from a former staffer a couple of
years ago about automatic license-plate readers on police cars in
Spokane. Automatic license-plate readers "will read a chain-link fence
as XXXXX," Honig says, "which at the time also matched the license plate
of a stolen car in Mississippi, resulting in a number of false alerts to
pull over the fence."

Seattle's mesh network is only one instance in a trend of Homeland
Security funding domestic surveillance equipment. Earlier this month,
the New York Times ran a story about a $7 million Homeland Security
grant earmarked for "port security"—just like the SPD's mesh-network
funding—in Oakland.

"But instead," the Times reports, "the money is going to a police
initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from
around town—from gunshot- detection sensors in the barrios of East
Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the
city's upscale hills."

The Oakland "port security" project, which the Times reports was
formerly known as the "Domain Awareness Center," will "electronically
gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases,
analyze that data, and display some of the information on a bank of
giant monitors." The Times doesn't detail what kind of "sensors and
databases" the federally funded "port security" project will pay for,
but perhaps it's something like Seattle's mesh network with its ability
to ping, log, and visually map the movement of devices in and out of its
coverage area.

Which brings up some corollary issues, ones with implications much
larger than the SPD's ability to call up a given time on a given day and
see whether you were at work, at home, at someone's else home, at a bar,
or at a political demonstration: What does it mean when money from a
federal agency like the Department of Homeland Security is being
funneled to local police departments like SPD to purchase and use
high-powered surveillance gear?

For federal surveillance projects, the NSA and other federal spying
organizations have at least some oversight—as flawed as it may be—from
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA
court) and the US Congress. But local law enforcement doesn't have that
kind of oversight and, in Seattle at least, has been buying and
installing DHS-funded surveillance equipment without explaining what
it's up to. The city council's surveillance ordinance earlier this year
was an attempt to provide local oversight on that kind of policing, but
it has proven toothless.

It's reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be
shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram
of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to
institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff's
Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.

Fusion centers, if you're unfamiliar with the term, are
information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security
as "focal points" for the "receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing" of
surveillance information.

If federally funded, locally built surveillance systems with little to
no oversight can dump their information in a fusion center—think of it
as a gun show for surveillance, where agencies freely swap information
with little restriction or oversight—that could allow federal agencies
such as the FBI and the NSA to do an end-run around any limitations set
by Congress or the FISA court.

If that's their strategy in Seattle, Oakland, and elsewhere, it's an
ingenious one—instead of maintaining a few high-powered, herculean
surveillance agencies designed to digest an immense amount of traffic
and political scrutiny, the federal government could sprinkle an entire
nation with lots of low-powered surveillance nodes and let them figure
out the best way to route the data by talking to each other. By
diffusing the way the information flows, they can make it flow more
efficiently.

It's an innovative solution—much like the Aruba mesh network itself.

The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to requests for
comment.

-- 
Dan Staples

Open Technology Institute
https://commotionwireless.net
OpenPGP key: http://disman.tl/pgp.asc
Fingerprint: 2480 095D 4B16 436F 35AB 7305 F670 74ED BD86 43A9