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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.'"
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.
Encryption... bah. ... bah
Snooping
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.
you have nothing to hide, right? What's good for the pig is good for the swine, no?
Mostly random stuff.
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.
Oh, I'm sorry. You must be mistaking this decade for previous ones when we actually upheld the law, and did not place lawmakers and enforcers above it at all times, with almost guaranteed impunity.
Good luck with your theory here. Let me know how that shit works out.
the problem is they use the stingray to gather evidence. After they have it all, they only use the evidence they can claim they collected the old fashioned way to avoid talking about the sting ray. its an end run around the constitution is all it is
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Welcome to parallel construction.
You're forgetting how good computers are at searching for stuff in big data sets, or in filtering crap from real data. 95% of my e-mails are spam, but the best filters manage to block them them out with incredible accuracy. Also, I take it you're volunteering YOUR bandwidth for generating all that extra data? Most of us don't have unlimited data plans.
Don't pooh-pooh encryption. That turns your data into actual white noise for them, which is why they're scared silly of people actually using it without mandatory government-approved back doors. Soon, privacy-savvy customers are going to demand end-to-end encryption for ALL communication all their devices, including messaging and normal phone calls. You can already see this happening in incremental steps. There's simply no other way to be assured that people aren't listening in on you.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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