14 DAY TRIAL // The Intercept has leaked a catalog from British firm Cobham that US law enforcement agencies used to buy surveillance technology, which they deployed against the US public during ongoing crime investigations.
The 120-page catalog is dated 2014 and includes a panoply of spying gadgets worthy of any James Bond movie.
The Intercept, an online news portal initially set up to release documents from the Snowden leak, claims the catalog came from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Catalog includes top-shelf spying gear
The catalog is split into seven sections: video surveillance products; IP mesh networks; cameras & sensors; audio surveillance; tagging, tracking, and locating (TTL) systems; command & control systems; and cellular surveillance technology.
The products listed in the audio and video surveillance sections are your regular microphones and video cameras, but there is also a section of mics and camera disguised as other products such as wall clocks, trash cans, street lights, birdhouses, bug zappers, smoke detectors, garden reels, roof vents, paint and tar buckets.
While this is the regular tech you'd expect police SWAT and surveillance teams to possess, there are some devices that are much powerful than your usual AV surveillance tech.
Cops are not satisfied with audio-video surveillance anymore
For example, a device called 3G-N can blackout cellular coverage in broad areas and collect data from users via a fake network it sets up in its place.
The Cobham catalog also includes powerful gadgets that can deny service to targeted cellular phones, or that can take control of phones for the purpose of intercepting calls or SMS messages.
There are also two "direction finders," devices that can track cellular devices in motion. These can be mounted in a backpack, underneath clothes, or on police cars, and used to track a suspect's whereabouts.
Devices vary in size and are available from portable gadgets that can fit under clothes to powerful workstations that police officers need to install in vans to power up and move around.
All devices come with a special piece of software called Mapplication, which plots out locations and surveilled areas on a screen using a map of the local terrain.
Privacy groups have been fighting against the US government for years trying to discover cases where small police stations have performed non-discriminatory blanket surveillance on innocent US citizens, all for the purpose of catching one single suspect.
According to numerous reports from US agencies, this practice is slowly becoming the day-to-day mode of operation for US police, who does not seem to respect user privacy anymore.
The problem is not that US law enforcement agencies use military-grade surveillance tech, but that they're using it without telling anyone, using a closed doors policy.
Last year, The Intercept leaked another catalog containing surveillance tech. The catalog included devices created by the NSA and was also sold to local US law enforcement agencies.
