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US IRS bought Stingray, Stingray II, and Hailstorm IMSI-cathcers
The Guardian reports [theguardian.com] about the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) buying and upgrading Harris Corporation [wikipedia.org] Stingray [wikipedia.org] IMSI-catchers [wikipedia.org] in 2009 (PDF (21 MB) and text (10.2 KB) versions of 2009 invoce [documentcloud.org]) and 2012 (upgrading Stingray II to a HailStorm, see quote below) and that they're now the 13th US federal agency confirmed to use the technology which pretends to be legitimate cell towers in order to eavesdrop on mobile communication. IMSI-catchers are not restricted to "only" catching metadata; they can catch all communications and also perform any kind of addition MITM attack like malware insertion. No warrants are said to be required, only PEN register [wikipedia.org] orders. The invoices was obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Quote from the Guardian article:
The 2009 IRS/Harris Corp invoice is mostly redacted under section B(4) of the Freedom of Information Act, which is intended to protect trade secrets and privileged information. However, an invoice from 2012, which is also partially redacted, reports that the agency spent $65,652 on upgrading a Stingray II to a HailStorm, a more powerful version of the same device, as well as $6,000 on training from Harris Corporation.
The CEO of Harris Corporation is William M. Brown [harris.com] (PDF 54.8 KB) who according to Forbes was number 279 [forbes.com] in CEO compensation in 2012. Here's the rest of the Harris Corporation management [harris.com].
