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Baltimore Police Used Stingrays For Phone Tracking Over 25,000 Times

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-don't-remember-that-episode-of-The-Wire dept.

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.

2 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Correction: 4,300 times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article states that the earlier figure was incorrect; the Baltimore police actually used it 4,300 times, not 25,000 times.

  2. Re:Found in small town, CA? by dougmc · · Score: 3, Informative

    1x is digital too.

    It does have longer range than 3G and 4G, and so it could very well be that you were simply getting a marginal signal and there was no Stingray involved at all -- your phone just used the best that was available, and that was 1x.

    And once you left, the 4G signal got strong enough again to use, and your phone switched back.