Feds gather phone data from the sky with aircraft-mimicking cell towers

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/feds-gather-phone-data-from-the-sky-with-aircraft-mimicking-cell-towers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

On Thursday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that the US Marshals Service (USMS) was using small, fixed-wing Cessnas equipped with so-called “dirtboxes”—receivers that act like cellphone towers—to gather data from citizens' phones below. The purpose of such collection is to target and spy on criminal suspects, but the data from any citizen's phone is collected by such devices.