An imprisoned terrorist in India is using a contraband cell phone and a custom built encrypted VoIP network to secure his communications with his organization. The VoIP network runs on GPRS (mobile data service on 2G or 3G cellular communication system), and was created by the terrorist’s own tech team. The technical significance of this approach is the use of the data transmission capabilities of the cell phone to transmit encrypted voice conversations that cannot be monitored.

The increasing use by terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for communication, and its impenetrability, is proving frustrating for Indian intelligence. In fact, Lashkar supreme commander of operations, Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, who is in a Rawalpindi jail, has been networking using a private VoIP on his smart phone with Lashkar cadres.

“Lakhvi’s compound serves as Lashkar’s alternative headquarters,” a top intelligence source told TOI. It was his imprisonment, sources said, that stopped Lashkar cadres from using emails and phones and restrict communication to VoIP.

VoIP is a technology that delivers audio and video messages over the internet. It’s distinct from phone as it converts audio signals into binary data. VoIP also allows encryption of data, which makes it difficult to decode messages.

Senior intelligence sources in Kashmir told TOI that Muridke (Lahore) based Lashkar known for using technology more than any other terror group in Kashmir, has its own private VoIP, Ibotel, to communicate with its cadres in Pakistan and Kashmir.

Ibotel, Lashkar’s exclusive VoIP that runs on GPRS (mobile data service on 2G or 3G cellular communication system), was created by Lashkar’s own tech team. The group began recruiting technicians, engineers and information technology executives almost a decade ago to intensify its operations across India.

Lashkar, which is headed by Hafiz Saeed against whom the US recently announced a $10 million bounty for his alleged role in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, started using VoIP as soon as the technology became common in early 2000s. Lashkar’s handlers used VoIP during the Mumbai attacks, intelligence sources said.

“Earlier, we could intercept conversations on phone or locate Lashkar cadres based on their IP addresses through their emails. But now we’re finding it tough to gather intelligence because Lashkar men hold audio or video conferences using private VoIP,” said intelligence sources.

“It’s difficult to track their locations. And even if we know their IP addresses and the time and date of their audio or video calls, we remain technologically handicapped because we can’t intercept what transpired between them,” said a senior government official.

“There may not be more than 50-odd Lashkar men. Yet, they are a threat because they have the ability to strike in the Valley or other parts of the country. We need to catch up with the technology to hunt them down,” said a senior J&K police officer.

An intelligence officer in New Delhi said the problem was not India specific. “Other countries are also unable to intercept the contents of VoIP messages. The only way to do it is to gather basic intelligence, zero-in on suspected email addresses used for VoIP conversations, and get to the mother servers for a search under Mutual Legal Assistant Treaty (MLAT),” he said.

Source

The post Contraband Prison Cell Phones Using Encrypted VoIP appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

A video about an investigation into the contraband cell phone problem at Northern State prison in New Jersey. According to the report, “A former Northern State inmate says they’re easy to get on the inside, but not cheap. $1,500, $1,000, $1,550, it all depends. The cost all depends on whether you want just a regular cell phone or a smart phone which gives the inmate access to the internet, to its maps, directories and search engines, and to email.”

As in many other state and county jails, efforts to reduce contraband cell phone smuggling have only focused on cell phone supply reduction and deterrence. We believe prison administrators must also focus on the demand for smuggled cell phones. This can be reduced by co-opting the non-criminal use of the phones, calls to keep in touch with family and loved ones, by offering the meshDETECT secure prison cell phone solution.

The post Investigation Into Cell Phones In Prison appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

The website Gizmodo has a interesting article about smuggled cell phones in San Quentin. Its a pretty graphic article as you will see from the excerpt here. You can read the rest of the article here.

According to the article 10% of the population has a contraband cell phone. We believe addressing the demand for contraband cell phones by providing a secure prison cell phone solution should be part of the strategy to reduce contraband cell phone smuggling.

Smart phones are especially coveted in prison, not surprisingly. Aside from being able to more easily email, search the web and communicate, this is arguably the main way prisoners are getting their porn now. Porn, as you might imagine, is a very hot commodity in the big house.

Most of the phones that are discovered are of the pre-paid variety, which makes them extremely hard to trace. Most of the time, when phones are found they are locked and have had their SIM cards removed. In cases where they recover a phone with a SIM card they attempt to unlock it and scour it for data: phone numbers they called, text messages, emails, and any photos they may have taken.

Sergeant McGraw said that while other prisons have a much bigger problem with phones being brought in (especially prisons in more rural areas), he’s noticed a huge jump at San Quentin just within the last year. He estimates that roughly 10-percent of the population in San Quentin have cell phones, which is a stark contradiction to the 1-percent estimate inmate Sam Johnson gave us just an hour earlier.

There are many different ways that phones come in. Officer Patao mentioned the inmate crews that work for Caltrans (the California Department of Transportation). The correctional officers have made it much more difficult for this to work by making sure that inmates have no idea where they’ll be working on any given day. But if they are on a larger, week-long assignment in one area, it still happens. He also talked about drop points within the San Quentin grounds.

Drops can work in a number of ways. For example, there’s a bathroom just outside one of the main San Quentin gates which is open to the public and is a big draw for tourists. Inmate work crews clean these bathrooms every day. An inmate’s associate on the outside will have taped a package (of phones, drugs, tobacco, etc.) to the back of the women’s toilet, for example. When the inmates come to clean, they toss it in with the rest of the trash, then sort through it later. Then, when when nobody’s looking, whoop, up the butt it goes. They are usually prepackaged in latex gloves or condoms for easier insertion. Ow.

Another drop scenario: San Quentin backs up to a main road in San Rafael, with only a chain-link fence separating its grounds from civilization. This is the outside perimeter, not the security perimeter. Inmates’ associates pull over to the side of the road at night and just throw over a distinctive bag such as one from McDonalds, or Burger King. When the work crew comes out in the morning to clean the grounds, they pick the bag up, hide it in the lawnmower bag and then get the contents later.

The last way stuff gets in, though nobody likes talking about it, is that people can be bribed. San Quentin has hundreds of volunteers who come in and out all the time. While the vast majority of them are on the level, there are always people willing to sneak something in for a price. This includes correctional officers as well, though prison officials like talking about that even less.

In all of these scenarios cell phones are used to coordinate these drops, which makes it even more critical for the officers to try to keep them out.

Phones go from $300 to $700. Most of the cash is handled outside of the institution. Usually someone on the street is responsible for smuggling in the phone, and then the inmate who received the phone will have a family member or associate on the outside pay him/her in cash or money order.

Once phones are within the system they are incredibly hard for the correctional officers to get a hold of. Officer Patao says, “It’s harder for our institution because we dont’ have the luxury of having cameras recording everything here, so we have to rely a lot on information we receive from our informants.”

Sergeant McGraw agrees. “In a dorm setting, once our officers hit the yard, there are lookouts. In each unit there are five dorms—they’re tipped off and the phones are gone before we can even enter the dorm. It’s hard to track these phones down and get them while they’re on them, and they’re passed around so much.”

The post Contraband Cell Phones In San Quentin appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

The Michigan DOC is changing prison pay phone vendors and increasing the price of a prison phone call. Some of the increased revenue generated by the new phone rates will be used to install cell phone jammers to thwart smuggled contraband cell phones.

The corrections department had contracted with Kansas-based EMBARQ. That contract expired in 2009 but the company agreed to continue service until the department found a new vendor, Cordell said. EMBARQ offered the department the fifth cheapest phone rate for prisons in the country. The new contract with PCS gives Michigan prisoners the 11th cheapest phone rate in the country.

The contract is a zero-dollar contract. The corrections department contracts with PCS for the service and the users pay for it. It does not generate a profit for the department, Cordell said.

The new rate is still much cheaper than collect calls placed outside of the prison system. According to rate information on AT&T’s website, collect calls using 800-CALL-ATT cost $1.49 per minute with a $5.99 to $8.50 service charge per call. It costs $3.99 per minute and a $9.99 connection fee to make a call using 800-COLLECT, according to rates on their website.

The rate increase will go toward providing more phones in prisons and upgrading existing technology. About 29 percent of the per minute rate goes into a fund to equip the prison to detect and jam cell phones within facilities, Cordell said.

Across the country, inmates using smuggled cell phones is becoming a growing problem. It has not gotten out of hand in Michigan, Cordell said, with about eight to 10 cell phones confiscated each year. Michigan law makes it a felony to bring in a cell phone as contraband. But the trend has prison officials concerned. They search for cell phones everyday, and the new technology will allow prisons to jam cell phone signals.

“They are a huge security issue — especially a smart phone. You can run your criminal empire. You can run and organize escapes. You can put hits out on people,” Cordell said. “We take them very, very seriously.”

The new phone system will be phased into Michigan’s prisons throughout the month.

Source

The post Michigan DOC Using Pay Phone Revenue For Jammers appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.

At $1000 per smuggled cell phone, more laws aren’t going to stop the contraband cell phones from being smuggled into jails. Only reducing the value of the contraband cell phone will reduce the efforts to sneak them in for prisoners. meshDETECT provides a secure prison cell phone service that manages and controls the use of cell phones in prison.

Put criminals in prison, and we’re all safer, right? Not so fast. Here’s the problem. Cell phones go for about a $1,000 a pop in prison and keeps the crime biz booming.

Recently, the Center for Investigative Action went to work, with law enforcement, inside the walls of Salinas Valley State Prison to find out how the phones are getting in and why these inmates aren’t getting more than a slap on the wrist, if they’re caught.

Inside the barbed wire and electrical fence, outside A-block in the yard with 1,000 maximum level security inmates.

Soccer, basketball, workouts. This will be the most activity prisoners see all day.

And so far it seems like a calm day.

But Lt. Michael Nilsson says it’s the activity inside inmate cells, usually after dinner, that has them most worried.

“Now they have internet access, you’ve got your smart phone, basically inmates have a laptop computer in their possession,” said Nilsson.

Phone calls are allowed. Those calls are recorded and the inmates every move monitored by this guard, assault rifle in hand.

But after the games are done in the common area, back in their cells they access the outside world with those smart phones.

“They’re setting up facebook accounts, their using twitter, using accounts online,” Nilsson says a lot of gang violence and drug trafficking is orchestrated online.

For prisoners who only have time on their hands, calling up phone directories and checking in on what homies are doing, is a breeze.

And it gets worse, “We have victims of crime contacting us at times, telling us they’ve been contacted by the prison that committed the crime against their family member.”

You heard right. That’s not all, for prison guards keeping peace inside these walls is getting harder because of smartphones, “If we have an inmate in one facility calling an inmate in another facility we could have a problem spread and spread quickly.”

So how do the inmates get their hands on the phones?

When a visitor comes to see an inmate in prison they’ve got to go through a whole screening process themselves, that includes leaving all their belongings behind then going through a metal detector. So, it’s hard for cell phones to even get inside prison in the first place.

The visiting room isn’t any easier to smuggle one in.

“Tables are built lower than the chairs, so they can’t pass things under the table.”

But that doesn’t stop people from trying.

“We find them in packages, we find them in mail…In the binding of books, they’re inside hollowed out pieces of soap…Inside Top Ramen soup bags…This one is covered in tape, it’s something they can hide in their cell, on the bottom side of their bunk,” explained Nilsson.

In fact last year, just this prison confiscated nearly 600 phones, that’s about 50 phones per month.

“We find them outside the institution on institutional property that a family member may drop off in hopes of having someone smuggle them in.”

And who helps do that? Just last August former correctional officer Timothy Rodriguez made big news for when he was sentenced to life for hiring a hitman to kill an ex-girlfriend and smuggling drugs and cell phones to inmates.

“Unfortunately, when 1 or 2 people do something bad and it makes the news, it puts a bad light on all of us. Most of our employees are here to do their job well.”

Taser, is part of the K-9 search team through the Department of Corrections; just recently cell phones were added to the list of things he can find when he goes right into inmate cells, every single day.

The program is new but so far Taser has uncovered 30 cell phones in four months.

So what happens to the inmate who had the phone, or the person who smuggles it?

Right now, they get, “A slap on the wrist at best. Why CA hasn’t done it, given were the largest state and home to the largest problem is beyond me,” said Senator Alex Padilla.

For four years senator Alex Padilla from southern California has been trying to change that.

“Unfortunately, if you’re a visitor caught with cellphone, worst they can do is take it away. If you’re an employee smuggling, worse they can do is fire you, but there are no real consequences today and that has to change,” said Padilla.

Right now, Padilla’s bill is in the senate awaiting vote.

If approved, that slap would change to an inmate getting six month good behavior credits taken away.

And for someone who helps get one in, it would be a misdemeanor with a $5,000 fine.

The question remains, is that tough enough?

We checked with our local lawmakers on the Central Coast and all of them: Assemblymen Luis Alejo and Bill Monning, Senators Anthony Canella and Sam Blakeslee, and Congressman Farr are all supporting the bill and want to see it passed.

Source

The post Cell Phones Smuggled Into Prisons appeared first on meshDETECT® Blog.