Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops To Deceive Judges About Surveillance Tech

Advocatus Diaboli sends this excerpt from Wired: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails (PDF). At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect's location from a 'confidential source' rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Comments

Signal

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I seem to remember an old jailbreak app for iPhones, called Signal I think, that triangulated positions of the cell towers you were connected to and plotted them on a map. I wonder if something like this could be used in an app, to warn people when a stingray was capturing their signal. If your app "remembers" the positions of towers, and it suddenly sees a new one, or it sees one that is not stationary, seems to me that'd be a good sign that something wasn't right. Is this possible, or am I misremembering?

Even better would be if the app connected with others to create a crowd-sourced database of where and when they are used.

Re:Signal

[turp182]

Here's more info regarding the link that NormalVisual provided.

Spidey is an Android app that tracks the cell towers available at a location and can supposedly notify you when new towers show up (or at least identify them by comparing against prior scans).

I've been trying to use it, but I can't get it to pick up more than one tower at a time, in downtown St. Louis (I would expect several towers to be visible).

Here's a presentation about the application:
https://docs.google.com/presen...

Here's the download link for the app:
https://rink.hockeyapp.net/app...