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Baltimore Police Used Stingrays For Phone Tracking Over 25,000 Times
An anonymous reader writes The Baltimore Police Department is starting to come clean about its use of cell-phone signal interceptors — commonly known as Stingrays — and the numbers are alarming. According to recent court testimony reported by The Baltimore Sun, the city's police have used Stingray devices with a court order more than 25,000 times. It's a massive number, representing an average of nearly nine uses a day for eight years (the BPD acquired the technology in 2007), and it doesn't include any emergency uses of the device, which would have proceeded without a court order.
It sounds to me like not only the police is wrong by applying for too many uses of the device (of course they do - it's their job to gather as much information about potential criminals as possible), also the courts appear to be wrong by not doing much evaluation of the requests. Now having to handle nine requests a day is a huge number as well (that's before accounting for holidays and weekends), yet no excuse for not following proper procedures.
From the face of it, the courts should be more strict. Take more time to properly evaluate each one, possibly causing a backlog, but that in turn should force the police to lower their number of requests to only the ones they believe are valid - and arguably the courts should be hiring more people to get the work done in a timely manner.
The article states that the earlier figure was incorrect; the Baltimore police actually used it 4,300 times, not 25,000 times.
In the past a telco would have to see court paper work to set a number into their system to track and log.
The lack of any new court comment or even telco paperwork is telling. Local law enforcement have moved away from needing local telcos to just collecting it all.
It is now cheaper to log all calls in an area and sort them than to request paper work a person of interest at a city or sate law enforcement level.
A cell phone is now a gps, text, voice print, photo, numbers called and beacon carried around waiting to be logged by local law enforcement...
Parallel construction will now be the on the discovery list for any good legal team.
The other question is why cant local law enforcement officials trust the telcos? What have the telcos done to be bypassed with hardware that has to fake been a cell site?
A real telco could give all the information around the USA as requested and stand in any open court. Are the numbers and accounts under investigation leaking as the court orders are been activated at the telco level?
The final question is what is been sent down to each phone as it is used? State and national tracking malware for any phone is connected in an area of interest?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So, I went to the local Social Security office in smallsville, CA. While waiting, I used my phone, and noticed that (Verizon) I was getting a 1x signal.
There are *no* 1x signal towers in my local area, it's all 100% digital. There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of. And when I left, within a few hundred feet, I resumed seeing 4G signal,like normal.
Stingray much?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yah, makes sense to me. Nothing like using time, material, massive tax dollars and technology used to stop _a_ nasty homicidal maniac from murdering again. Well done! A truly Cadmean victory to brag about. Whoo hoo! Let's hear it for the Blatimore Policy mens!
What the actual fuck?! What did they do before Stingrays? Not catch anybody? Good fucking grief!
The above was my initial reaction, anyway. I checked the article; seems to have been updated to say 4300 times, which is not such a jaw-dropper. Also, I'd be interested to know whether that covers every time the device was used to intercept or track a mobile device (4300 is a number I could believe, if not like) or if that was the number of court-orders/warrants obtained (4300 still seems ridiculously over-used).
i understand the basics of how a stingray works - it puts out a stronger signal than the nearest tower, and the phones connect to it instead of the tower. but what is it capable of, and how does it do it?
First, location. obviously any phone that connects to the stingray must be in the vicinity of the stingray. But do phones ping the tower with their GPS coordinates? Cuz then the stingray would be receiving a whole bunch of imei numbers with attached gps coordinates.
what about call metadata and call content recording?
But how many of these were the result of McNulty and Lester?
It's you again??
I remember people blasting it for being inaccurate. I guess they're wrong.
IIRC, Prez and Freamon monitored the payphone wiretap, while McNulty and the rest of the task force watched the pay phones with binoculars.
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The Wire
Wiki
IMDb
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The article now says it was 4,300 times and that their earlier number was wrong. 4,300 is still a very big number.
Police outlined for the first time this month their usage of the stingray, pegging it at more than 4,300 times — a figure experts called a "huge number" compared to a trickle of disclosures in other cities.
Lets do the math over. 4300/8/365= 1.5 times a day. Then there is the issue of duration and range. Is every day a different court order? Is every Stingray a different court order? One ongoing investigation that covers a home, a workplace and a meeting place would more than cause that many "uses".
Big numbers look big until you break them down.
Life imitating art.
Around 1969 the military operated what were called fixed syphoning stations. The idea was to secretly listen in on communications and to insert false commands at critical moments. Turn left in a foreign language could be changed to turn right for example. And it had to duplicate all of the intonations and accents of the sender's voice. And that was 1969 technology. One can only wonder just how signals can be altered these days and worse yet the altered conversations could be saved as evidence of wrong doing. It is sort of like being able to produce the smoking gun in a murder case even though the gun never existed.
./ nation note that it was used in conjunction with a court order.
It seems to me that with a warrant that Stingray is 100% unnecessary, thus this device entirely exists so that there are no inconvenient records being kept by the cell companies. Also, and probably more importantly, this is no doubt causing crappy cell service. Cell towers are very carefully engineered and to have a stingray system somehow playing man in the middle games of any sort would be causing poor reception.
So quite simply I hope that the various cell manufacturers are presently working on technology that won't allow a cellphone to connect with anything but the known towers. Plus I hope that the FCC is going to shut these down. If the police are allowed to use these without a warrant than why can't I use a stingray to gather interesting marketing data about my customers? Didn't google end up in a pile of trouble for mopping up wifi data with their streetview cars?
There are only about 50,000 TOTAL ARRESTS a year in Baltimore. So for every 16 arrests, there is one Stingray use?? They must be regularly tapping the phone of everyone even suspected of being a felon in the fucking city.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
What kinds of deals with the devil have been made or is everyone operating blissfully unaware of what's going one. Any cell tower technicians able to comment? Anyone in the cell industry able to clarify how someone can run an unlicensed third party device over their bands? If they don't care, then maybe people need to start using their spectrum for other purposes as well. 2.4GHz is too crowded as it is.
Yes, police use of stingrays are like cockroaches. For every use that gets a warrant there is probably fifty that don't.
The judges know x
the telcos know y
the FBI knows x, y and z
Easy - all the players know just enough to think they understand, but they don't quite know enough...
BTW - z is where the StingRay ( TM ) retransmits to a cell tower, twice, one to the regular telco,
the other to the FBI/NSA/CIA/DOJ/BATF/Hillary....
Tin Hats type theory? maybe, maybe not.....
Man, Lester Freamon has been busy.
I was wondering when a reference to The Wire would pop up.
Remember - they actually caught Stringer by using a cell tower snooper in Season 3.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Why can't these be locked down to a single IMEI or Sim or whatever? Anything else tries to connect just gets shunted on to the real tower. The court order should allow only one phone to be monitored, not anybody that happens to be in the neighborhood.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I've had very weird signal connections and data problems in certain areas of Baltimore. And have been convinced for a while that I've been encountering a stingray tower in certain areas.
Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 20, 2015 @09:11PM
from the i-don't-remember-that-episode-of-The-Wire dept.
I think the editor beat them to it.
That was a horrible show, and since they marked you as a troll, they agree that it and you are pieces of shit. There was nothing like this on the show. You should feel bad for being such a bitch liar.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The phone operating system could also prevent this from happening. The police are easy targets but Google and Apple do not change until the consumer does. The choice of mobile phone and operating system you get is: 1 device and 1 operating system. I purchased a Chinese Meizu MX6 with plans to change the OS for this reason. They are tracking you with the phone design you must buy and the keys are kept with the service providers. Take notice how the cell phone commercials say "Verizon service sucks" or "T-Mobile is great" but the phone you get is 100% identical and only comes out once a year. Look at how the illusion of choice is presented --> http://www.popisms.com/Televis... That commercial only provides the consumer with one choice of product!
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
Most likely the SSA office has a cell phone repeater system installed inside the building to provide decent service for the workers and clients. I have installed multiple systems inside office buildings when the local tower is not providing a decent signal.