When Aaron Swartz did this--spoofed his device's MAC address--the U.S. government considered it evidence of criminality.

MAC addresses are needed for any device connected to a standard internet network. Since they are used at the second layer of networking, anyone on the same LAN segment as yourself will be able to "track" your MAC address.

You can view current, local MAC addresses from a DOS prompt with the command: arp /a

Under lots of circumstances, collecting MAC addresses is trivial, and even required by 99% of networks. The Singray is interesting because it can obtain your MAC regardless of being on the same LAN segment or not.

Related:

Oops! Some of the nodes in SPD's wireless mesh surveillance network powered back on.

I'm researching use of IMSI catchers (a.k.a., Stingrays, cell site simulators, etc.) by law enforcement agencies in Washington. Tacoma PD are, I believe, the ones to watch on this.

MuckRock News have initiated a crowd-funded nationwide investigation, "The Spy in Your Pocket," into law enforcement agencies' use of mobile phone data in their investigations.

Well, as long as there's not an NSA back door, this sounds groovy.

Not holding my breath.

Good job, indeed.

This is the kind of reporting that brought me to the Stranger and the SLOG to begin with, not stupid fucking stories about racist grocery bag handles.

I think the difference is that Aaron Swartz was using the technique in an attempt to hide his criminal activity. In court this type of thing can be used to help prove that the defendant knew they were engaged in criminal activity since most of us wouldn't go to the bother of being that paranoid.

StingRay devices don't work that way. They're "IMSI catchers" that record the International Mobile Subscriber Identity of a cellular handset by pretending to be a cellular base station (aka. a tower).

There's an open feature request from 2009 for Android phones to show when call ciphering has been turned off by the cellular network, by the way; StingRay devices use this one weird trick to make the interception of phone calls trivially easy: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues…