Ice bought vehicles equipped with false cell phone towers to spy on phones

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the United States has paid $ 825,000 earlier this year to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for police, including false cell phone towers known as “cellular sites”, which can be used to spy on phones nearby.

According to public archives, the price dated May 8 “provides Cell Simulator Site (CSS) vehicles to support the Technical Interior Security Program” and constitutes a modification for “additional CSS vehicles”.

The contract was signed with Techops Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), a company based in Maryland. TOSV also signed a similar contract with ICE in September 2024 for $ 818,000, which shows that the relationship between the agency and the company predates the Trump administration.

TOSV president Jon Brianas told Techcrunch in an email that he could not provide details on ICE contracts and vehicles, citing “commercial secrets”. But Brianas has confirmed that the company actually provides simulators of cellular sites, even if it does not make them.

“We do not manufacture electrical, communication and technological components, we integrate this product into the overall design of the vehicle,” said Brianas, who refused to say where Tosv gets in cellular sites simulators.

This is the last federal contract which reveals some of the technologies that feed the repression of expulsions from the Trump administration.

In early September, Forbes found a recently unveiled search warrant which showed that the ICE had used a cellular site simulator to find a person who would have been part of a criminal gang in the United States and who had been ordered to leave the country in 2023. In the article, Forbes said it also found a contract for “cellular site simulation vehicles”, but the article was not called the company that provides the vans.

The simulators of cellular sites also bear the name of “pastenagues” because some of the first types of these devices, manufactured by the defense entrepreneur Harris (now L3harris), bore this name. Since then, Pastenagues rays have become a catch-all name for this type of technology, also known as IMSI sensors. (IMSI means International Mobile Subscriber Identity, a unique number that identifies each mobile phone user worldwide.)

As their name suggests, the simulation tools for cellular sites can imitate a cell phone tower, encouraging each phone nearby to connect to the device and thus giving the police the possibility of better identifying the actual location of these phones and their owners.

Some simulators of cellular sites can also intercept regular calls, text messages and internet traffic.

Authorities can obtain data from traditional cell phone towers to find the current or past location of a suspect, but the location is generally not very precise.

Stingray type devices have been used by the police for more than a decade and have long been controversial because the authorities do not always obtain a mandate for their use, and the criticisms claim that these devices are defaulting innocent people by default. These devices are also surrounded by secret, as the police who use them are subject to strict non-disclosure agreements not to reveal their functioning.

Ice has long been using cellular sites simulators. In 2020, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that the ICE had deployed them at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019. The agency used these tools more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained at the time by Buzzfeed News.

Ice has taken note of the request for comments from Techcrunch, but did not answer a series of questions, in particular: why Ice uses these vehicles, if they have been recently deployed and where, and if the agency still gets a mandate when it uses simulators of cellular sites.

Bibliobus surveillance vans

Based just outside Washington DC, TOSV sells a wide range of customizable vehicles to the police, such as vans for armed intervention teams of the Swat, anti-bomb squadrons and so-called “mobile laboratory” and “coverage monitoring”.

Among these vehicles for police forces, TOSV lists several “projects”, including one qualified as DHS Mobile Forensic Labs, in reference to the Ministry of Internal Security.

According to the website, these mobile medical-legal vans are “equipped for on-site forensic analysis and documentation”, have “secure compartments for the preservation of evidence and survey tools” and allow “transparent files of files and a recording of evidence”.

Another project is the DHS Mobile Command Van “, which, according to TOSV, is” configurable for advanced monitoring and coordination of missions “.

It is not clear if these vans are the same vehicles which include simulators of cellular sites, as there is no mention of the telephone monitoring tool on the Tosv website.

Ice has other contracts with TOSV for mobile medico-legal laboratories, which do not specify which technologies are in the vans.

According to its website, Tosv also sells “bibliobus”, which look like libraries on wheels, as well as medical and firefighters.