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US Marshals Seize Police Stingray Records To Keep Them From the ACLU
An anonymous reader writes 'A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them. "This is consistent with what we've seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information," Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. "The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public." ... "We've seen our fair share of federal government attempts to keep records about stingrays secret, but we've never seen an actual physical raid on state records in order to conceal them from public view," the ACLU wrote in a blog post today.'
Just another example of the "open administration"!
Orwell was just 30 years late on his predictions...
These kinds of shenanigans are going to continue until the American public puts a stop to it.
Note, I said the public. Not the government.
The government, and it's various tentacles, simply don't WANT it to stop. Even if diverse individuals composing said tentacles do.
It is simply one more way of maintaining some form of leverage against an increasingly interconnected population that can make it's own decisions and plans without a bunch of stuffed shirts and their ridiculous budgets.
It will continue until they are physically restricted from doing these things.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There could be a number of reasons why they don't want the info public
1) It doesn't work that well, or there is an obvious defense against it they don't want public.
2) They've been abusing their power some how by collecting info on people not really suspects, and don't want to be hit up by every divorce lawyer in the country. ( not sure if that's really illegal).
3) They're idiotic power tripping jerks that think its an ultra secret thing that will cause all law enforcement to lose its effectiveness if more people know about it.
4) It contains evidence of alien life forms visits to our planet, and their preference for blackberry cell phones.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.
Well, I don't know about you, but I feel safer knowing the NSA is keeping those filthy terrorists, the ACLU, away from information of high importance to national security. Why we don't jail anyone who even reads the Constitution is beyond me.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wonder if the Feds went all out like they do to us civilians when they performed the raid. Did they perform a typical 'no knock' raid, at like 3AM, and knock the doors in and smash the windows, and toss 'Flash Bangs' in the room and enter the premises with a small military unit in order to perform the records seizure?
That is how it's done with normal folks now days, for small stuff even.
It will continue until they are physically restricted from doing these things.
Get real. Putting the Green or Libertarian parties in charge of the presidency and both houses of congress, with an overwhelming mandate to fix these issues, would be much, much easier and more successful than waging a successful war of violence on the federal government. "Grab your rifles and rise up" only works when you have the public at large passionately on your side. When that is the case in a modern republic, there are better tools available.
So, I've been thinking of how could we prevent such a rogue device from operating on the cellular network? The way it is done is pretty easy actually:
* First you have to create a database of longitude / latitude coordinates of where we find cell tower sites at 100% signal strength.
* Next we allow Android's baseband processor to issue handoffs to cell towers that are within range of the GeoIP coordinate database
* So when a Stingray device pretends to be a cell tower, and it is not within range of the geoIP coordinates database, it will be rejected
This could be easily implemented in Android... and you could also add notifications when a cell tower was rejected due to being too far away from the known cell tower real location.
Putting the Green or Libertarian parties in charge of the presidency and both houses of congress, with an overwhelming mandate to fix these issues, would be much, much easier and more successful than waging a successful war of violence on the federal government
How do you know what the Green or Libertarians will do when they have that kind of power?
How do you know what the revolutionary army capable of defeating the US federal government will do when it seizes control? How is that any better? How is it not, in fact, far less predictable?
That Haliburton, Enron, Koch Industries lackey!
If only this country would have elected a constitutional scholar, like Barack Obama...
Oh wait...
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Government is a leaving, breathing thing. It subsists on liberties. The more liberties it consumes, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more liberties it needs. It has no sense of moderation and will consume liberties until there no more. Then it will die. Then, like the Phoenix, another will rise from the ashes and start the whole process again.
I would have a sig but I am too busy updating programs and restarting my computer
I wonder if the Feds went all out like they do to us civilians when they performed the raid. Did they perform a typical 'no knock' raid, at like 3AM, and knock the doors in and smash the windows, and toss 'Flash Bangs' in the room and enter the premises with a small military unit in order to perform the records seizure?
There was no "raid" - what they did was deputize the detective in charge of the records as a U.S. Marshal, and then instruct him to transfer the records in question to other U.S. Marshals.
Pretty questionable, legally (basically, they completely sidestepped state public records laws using this trick), but I'm not sure that "raid" is the correct word to describe the processes.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
A majority of people in society aren't deep philosophical thinkers. They want to do their 40 hours, and go have a beer and watch football. Police are a fair cross section of society, so most cops aren't going to stop and ask if what they are doing is a fundamental violation of a person's constitutional rights, unless it is a pretty sever deviation for normal behavior. (Ex: beheading perps caught in the act)
I don't think most cops think too much about it, they have plenty of more immediate problems to keep busy with.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
How do you know what the revolutionary army capable of defeating the US federal government will do when it seizes control? How is that any better? How is it not, in fact, far less predictable?
I never said it was better. There are more than those two options.
And this will end up in front of a judge, I'd be really, really, pissed.
I'd be throwing the book at everybody, the officers doing the seizing, their superiors for ordering it, everyone up the chain who even saw this happening. Anything and everything I think that applied I'd throw at them. Those documents were already subject to legal proceedings, I'd start with Obstruction and move up from there, finishing off with determining that their removal of these documents and irrational unwillingness to have them see the light of day in a court house demonstrates they prove criminal activity. After all, if you are the Department of Justice, but scared of your actions being examined in court something has gone very wrong.
If there really was a good reason to withhold them you file it with the Court and the Court orders them sealed, Law enforcement over stepping their authority and messing with Legal proceedings is something that would royally piss me off as a judge.
The NSA might get to hide behind National Security and their Classified Courts, but the DoJ just plain inst in that line of work, and that kind of 11th hour bullshit just doesn't fly.
A Mississippi Judge just did that. The local paper tried to get some records from a state agency and they first denied them, then after an order to produce was issued they had a federal prosecutor take them under cover of darkness to a different part of the state. Eventually a federal judge ordered their return to the state court, where the state judge fined several people for contempt of court and open records law violations. The state attorney general was in on it along with several federal officers and prosecutors, the attorney general even went so far as to say "think of how this will look on your permanent record after you are reversed." I say through the bums in JAIL for 30 days at the time for each individual charge of contempt of court, especially when under color of law.
Yeah. No.
I'm a Realist.
There's a political monoculture in Washington. Everyone largely agrees about the big stuff. So they wrangle, endlessly, over the small stuff, inflating the appearance of importance in an attempt to differentiate themselves. In the end, the net difference is still zip.
There's also the fact that these agencies are USED to lying to and misleading anyone with authority over them. Heads will nod, and people will scurry around, appearing to "do something". In the end, nothing will actually change. Or the people giving the orders will have a "sudden change of heart".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
He himself retired from the redacted state police after 12 years, some spent undercover. He said that for the most part the idealists who want to save the world get washed out by the corruption by 5 years and anyone who's stayed longer than that is getting more out of it than their salary.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"rights" are individual
What does that mean?
EXCEPT for the Second Amendment.....
The ACLU protecting the Second Amendment would be a waste of their resources. Why? Oh, I don't know, ever hear of a little group called the NRA?
Heck, even if the ACLU opposed the Second Amendment, that is ok, even though I myself am a strong supporter of it. What would not be ok, would be the ACLU trying to circumvent the constitution to push their anti-Second Amendment agenda.
Please note that I know nothing about the ACLU's position regarding the Second Amendment.
I want a revolution.
I love what used to be my country, the old USA. I want the freedoms and privacy we once had, back.
I'm not a christian, I'm a total non-believer in any religion.
I'm not a gun nut, don't own guns, don't want to.
but I still see the need for a reboot of our government. it would be nice if it could be non-violent. however, my xtal ball says that won't happen since the bad guys in power are not going to give back power willingly.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I agree this may be a fundamental principle...
...however in practice in more recent times, police are a tier, or class, of people above citizens and below the political elite. Almost like a buffer between those who wield all the power, and those who don't like what the power brokers are doing. The police are there in the middle to make sure to quell the populace and keep them in check, when they don't fall in line with the decisions of the elite--and in turn they get special powers and protections beyond that of the average person.
This is just an observation of course, and not the way it's supposed to be, but more so what it has turned into.
Really I view this sort of thing as just another aspect of militarization of law enforcement. This sort of thing is wartime SIGINT gear. It should require judicial oversight and warrants for use in civilian populations. The fact that it's use is treated like a state secret is a big fat warning that the law enforcement agencies are trying to protect something that they realize would create a serious public outcry if people realized it's capabilities.
That's a BS excuse. Obama could fire the people responsible for this, or just order them to release the records. There ARE jbts in the US government, and as head of the government, Obama is head of the jack booted thugs.
Unfortunately, the ACLU takes the incomprehensible position that somehow the Bill of Rights has an amendment to protect the government's right to keep and bear arms while ALL the rest are for individuals. Bizarre.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.