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.

Comments

Loose procedures

[wvmarle]

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.

Re:Loose procedures

[TWX]

I don't think that regular rank-and-file police should be in the business of intercepting cell phone traffic in the first place. They should have to submit warrants to the carriers and those carriers should present them with only the data that the warrant calls for.

A pipe dream, I know, but what the hey.

Re:Loose procedures

[TWX]

The thing is, in a real wiretap, they're only tapping the one call. In this thing's case they're intercepting all calls for everyone in the area whose phones end up using it, not just the one call. That's why I think they need to go through the carrier, so the carrier can tape the one line or the series of lines that they have a legitimate claim through the courts to gain access to.

Re:Loose procedures

[DerekLyons]

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.

What's interesting is that you make an assertion... and then act as though that assertion was a fact.
 

From the face of it, the courts should be more strict. Take more time to properly evaluate each one

One of the things you've failed to account for, there are probably hundreds of judges in a city of a half million - thus it's quite possible to be strict and evaluate each one and still come up with this number. It's a distributed parallel system - what sound like scary huge numbers arise quite easily from a relatively modest number of actors, especially considering the length of time involved.

But the ill-educated (or deeply biased, or prejudiced towards panic*) won't stop and think about these things. Thinking Is Hard.

And, to those moderating, yes - I know the actual number is 4,300. I'm just so damn tired of the level of ignorance so prevalent on Slashdot.

* Actually there's considerable overlap in these categories.