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.'"

Comments

Re:Whitelisting real mobile carrier towers

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption... bah.
Snooping ... bah

I say let them listen, but drown them out with noise.
Congest the networks with noise. Make an App that send packets of random data to random IP addresses, sprinkle other packets with "key words" randomly , hell even use older broken encryption schemes to "make their life easier".

Needle in a haystack, bugger that, make it like looking for a very specific grain of sand on a very very big beech and down them in worthless data.

Nothing new to see here. Move along...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.)