Slashdot Mirror
How Police Fight To Keep Use of Stingrays Secret
v3rgEz writes: The NY Times looks at how local police are fighting to keep their use of cell phone surveillance secret, including signing NDAs with Stingray manufacturer Harris Corp and claiming the documents have been lost. It's part of a broader trend of local agencies adopting the tactics of covert intelligence groups as they seek to adopt new technology in the digital era. "The nondisclosure agreements for the cell site simulators are overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and typically involve the Harris Corporation, a multibillion-dollar defense contractor and a maker of the technology. What has opponents particularly concerned about StingRay is that the technology, unlike other phone surveillance methods, can also scan all the cellphones in the area where it is being used, not just the target phone. ... For instance, in Tucson, a journalist asking the Police Department about its StingRay use was given a copy of a nondisclosure agreement. 'The City of Tucson shall not discuss, publish, release or disclose any information pertaining to the product,' it read, and then noted: 'Without the prior written consent of Harris.'"
The only encryption worth using.
I am thinking that some sort of a white list for real towers, their signal and locations will need to be developed and actively maintained to stop this fucking abuse of power on the technology level.
On the individual rights level the fucking police state is completely destroying those with all of these unauthorised searches (which is what they are), the Constitution is used to wipe the fucking government officials asses.
(oh, and /. it's been 16 seconds since I pushed the 'reply' button, has it? I am a quick fucking typist, you morons).
MY OTHER COMMENTS
I think the solution would be to avoid freedom of information all together and get a court order. This might not work for a journalist but I'd bet it would for a defense attorney.
Remember them.
http://images.slashdot.org/hc/97/bafc62a4190f.jpg
Sworn, badged officers OF THE LAW are actively subverting the law to protect their interests.
SHUT IT DOWN.
Stingrays are just the latest in a long line of prosecutorial abuse.
The government classifies volumes of information to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing. They use secret tools like stingrays to gather secret evidence which they attempt to present in secret, sealed and off the record. And in the event that an "activist judge" calls them on it, they withdraw the evidence so as not to have it revealed, and then re-file charges a month later to go shopping for a different judge.
This month we found out they lock people up in secret detention facilities in Chicago, in America, without booking them, no Miranda rights, no access to a lawyer, such that no one but the police even knows where these people disappear to for days or weeks on end. This isn't Gitmo, this is happening in the USA. Police are shooting and killing people weekly if not daily, acting as judge jury and executioner, and they face zero consequences.
The police state isn't coming, it's here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
you have nothing to hide, right? What's good for the pig is good for the swine, no?
Mostly random stuff.
Why would their kind tell the truth. It is what they do.
I am surprised that one hasn't been stolen yet.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
why the ACLU hasn't filed suit yet to bring this to the SCOTUS.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Welcome to the new America, where license agreements can trump the Bill of Rights.
I don't see the point of this device. If you use a Stingray to catch a criminal, then can't the criminal simply request how the device works and once that is denied, the evidence used to catch the criminal is simply thrown out. The whole point is gather evidence but if that evidence is unusable, then the whole point of the device is gone.
Linux O Muerte!
It is not how they are doing it, but why -- what have they got to hide? If they are not doing anything wrong then they have nothing to fear by us knowing!
You use the Stingray to build evidence, you then construct a case so that what you find out via Stingray can be presented as having been discovered legally.
That way defense counsel has nothing to challenge and the secret/illegal intelligence gathering stays safely hidden.
The appropriate literary reference isn't some John Grisham novel, it's Franz Kafka.
Politicians use the expression "public-private partnership" like it is a good thing.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
A base station popping up in the middle of nowhere? Maybe a cheap handset and a bit of baseband hacking, or a nice software defined radio chip could create a nice monitoring network in your hometown. Sounds like a nice science fair project :-)
Freedom of Information Act
If they really could hide wholesale violation of millions of people's 4th Amendment rights behind a civil NDA contract it is seriously time for new federal felony laws with MANDATORY prison times for every government employee involved in the conspiracy to block FOIA releases. Of course obviously if it were something they wanted to do they would brush civil contracts aside just like they do criminal laws now.
I have about decided that the magic wand of "National Security" should be rescinded as well. All this secrecy is doing FAR more harm to American citizens than the wholesale release of EVERY national secret ever possibly could.
Pick one cellular provider. Give them one month to tell the cops to get bent. If they don't do so, every customer (well, all the customers we can get to do so) switches to another provider. Or, if that's too drastic, a warning shot: no cell-phone week. We all leave our cell phones at home, turned off, with the threat to cancel service if Stingrays don't become extinct.
linquendum tondere
Sucks don't it!
Sounds like the kind of deals OCP would be making. The future is now and it's terrifying.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The privacy of the police is equally protected as the privacy of the individual.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Assuming you're the Super-Villain type, leave phone where they can find it with a Stingray. In the room with it, leave a gift for the SWAT team when they raid the location and force the door.
You could go the fun route and leave something fun tied to a motion sensor ( load up an air cannon full of feces and coat the entry team ).
The more serious version is a bit more permanent. ( and much louder ) Depends on your evil level I guess.
But the ideal would simply be to leave a copy of the Constitution on the table next to your phone. Just to be fun :)
The way to 'defeat' Stingray is to talk about it. Incessantly and to all the people you know who don't necessarily read Slashdot. If you use Facebook, link articles like the ones in the OP above to your Facebook page.
Everybody who pays taxes is entitled to know as much as possible about Stingray. We can help that process along.
As the dude in charge of enforcement, folks keep saying the NSA, FBI, CIA, border agents...Who do they ALL report to in common? Obama sees the Freedom of Information Act as a way for him to freely see all of your information. Get over your republican and democrat conception from yesteryear as this stuff is getting real. There HAS to be a name attached to it.
Parallels could perhaps also be drawn with the Enigma codebreaking project in WWII. The allies had to be very careful to ensure that some "other" method of discovering German state secrets was plausible to avoid giving the game away. For instance, they'd direct spotting planes over U-boat positions before attacking even though they already knew exactly where they were.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Make it illegal for all state agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements with private companies. This is nothing but the FEDs using a private company to do an end run around the constitution. This non-disclosure agreement was born via FBI policy; to this day they are evading the law like any conspirators would. If they (Feds and local law enforcement) started to go to prison for withholding or "losing" FOA content this would stop. They are hiding the data because they are afraid it will spark outrage. Find out who the judges are in your area that allow this and VOTE THEM OUT of office.
I want Bennett Haselton to have my babies.
I don't know how he'd propose that happens given I'm male, but I'm sure he could dissect the problem and provide a 47 page PowerPoint slide presentation with embedded 3D graphics and 97.6% vacuous text leading to an answer in the form of a question.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Because the ACLU always supports old rich white people. They hate poor people and want us to die.
Now now...
They got together with the NRA to defend people in Chicago public housing against warrantless searches for guns.
NRA over searches for guns and banning gun possession by the law-abiding-but-poor-and-mostly-off-color, ACLU over the warrantless searches, hand-in-hand. "Politics makes strange bedfellows." was certainly true there.
Or are you so brainwashed that you think having guns to defend themselves from gangsters would increase, rather than reduce, the death rate among the poor?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One of the things that I really hate about some journalism today is a failure to ask the obvious question. Could someone please explain under what legal theory an agency (state or local police) can sign an NDA and claim the NDA allows them to fail to meet a provision of law. I would think the law trumps the NDA and that it wouldn't be legal or perhaps unenforceable to sign such an NDA when you are required to release records under state or local law.
Sworn, badged officers OF THE LAW are actively subverting the law to protect their interests.
And they've been doing that since police forces were invented. And before that since government was invented.
Example: Decades ago the public ire was raised over crappy info in law enforcement data banks, leading to some innocent people being harrassed, wherever they went (nationwide), by cops who thought they were crooks. So governents at various levels passed things like the FOIA to allow people to find out what was in the databases about them and, if appropriate, get it expunged.
So how did the cops react?
They took their (error-filled) files out of the police stations (and out of reach of these new laws), gave them to new private-enterprise criminal-information databank companies (started by retiring or moonlighting police officials), and subscribed to these companies "servces".
Same crummy data resulting in the same crummy screwups, but you couldn't use the new laws to get to it and get it purged. (Further, the various systems traded it around with flooding protocols. Manage to purge it from some of them and the others just put it back, on the electronic assumption that they just hand't gotten the news yet.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Fuck The Police!
The Secret Fight
1. to never get a mobile phone /winsock stack , go ahead ATTACK my 1024 k ram and plasma orange screen fools
2. not use wifi unless it's mesh
3. generate a lot data which wastes a lifetime of fucking man hours to decipher eitherway
4. to use Free radios, like the gmrs 2 mi, or CB/ham AM/FM/usb/lsb/cw are FINE.
5. talking around topics is FINE
6. I still use ol faithful pgp263i, and occasionally play with 16384 RSA keys
7. whonix runs pretty snappy on 8 cores and 16 GB ram, not to mention those 16384 keys don't take hours anymore like on thos old Pentium 233. heh
8 I run OLD shit still like DOS with a dos/tcpip
9. I clone so when they do get past my hard shells, into my mushy central nervious system, I can just roll the shit back. Or alternatively push the limits debug/upgrade/test/patch, or rollback
10. all the passwords are not managed in encrypted keypass. (encrypt inside of encrypt and hold on USB stick with WRITE LOCK switch)
11. Burn importants to CD/DVD
12. Visit face to face, and party more.
13. Unbanked.
14. Buy Silver/Gold
That's why law enforcement uses parallel construction to conceal how they actually got the evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
They also set up fake listening stations with real people in to be captured by the Germans in order to keep it secret. It was an awful sacrafice to have to make, but one that was probably necessary in order to win the war.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wish I had mod points. +1 for sure.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Bennett Haselton WILL have your babies because he's a CANNIBALISTIC PEDOCREEP!
They also use this garbage lying theory called Parallel Construction, which if they explained it to time machine transported Founding Fathers, they would fall upon them like a pack of ravening zombies, as they would see this for what it is: Tyranny.
What the world needs is a good $0.99 Stingray detector app.
That was acceptable because the government was spying on a foreign government. Spying on your own citizens is wrong because you're supposed to be protecting their right to privacy instead of violating it.
Step one: gain incriminating information by any means
Step two: use that information and some creative reasoning to come up with another way to get at that information
Step three: tell the judge you used 'step two' exclusively to get the incriminating information.
Since police departments have cited at trial that the NDA prohibits them from revealing information that would be beneficial to the defendants, and the device that the NDA covers is specifically designed to put the defendants in that position where they need the information it prevents, then clearly this NDA is evidence that it itself is a contract whose engagement explicitly leads directly to perverting the course of justice. It should be possible to sue Harris for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and use their NDA as evidence that this is what they're conspiring to do.
Don't misunderstand... I'm not trying to justify the current stingray use. I was just showing an example of how an organization can use secret information without revealing the origin of that secret information.
I'm not actually opposed to the technology in general... just the warrant-less and secretive nature of it, which seems like an obvious breach of current wiretapping laws and precedents to me. If there are criminal or terrorist elements that need monitoring, then the police should be able to get a warrant for the use of this technology.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Same crummy data resulting in the same crummy screwups, but you couldn't use the new laws to get to it and get it purged. (Further, the various systems traded it around with flooding protocols. Manage to purge it from some of them and the others just put it back, on the electronic assumption that they just hand't gotten the news yet.)
People need to start figuring out the 9th Amendment trumps the legislative authority of government, and the government can not hide behind 3rd party agents any more than private citizens can. Nothing in the 9th Amendment limits its applicability to government entities, and ALL legal professionals are sworn to uphold it. Long term public oversight over government DOES apply to records held by third party entities. The 9th Amendment also trumps non-disclosure agreements, indeed any attempt to write such an agreement by a legal professional in a circumstance where the public might want to assert a right to know, is a violation of the legal professional's oath to uphold the Bill of Rights.