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

*gasp*

[jargonburn]

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).

Update

[jklovanc]

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.

Re:Update

[chasm22]

Let's do some more math. All cell calls within a mile are intercepted and rerouted. I really don't give a hoot about this particular case, but how about giving us an educated guess as to how many 'innocent' cell phone calls are intercepted each and every day in each and every major city(and undoubtedly many mid and small sized cities as well) by not only the local PD but also any number of state and federal agencies.

Sorry, you can make this seem small with your math, but in reality this is probably a bigger threat to your privacy than anything the NSA does. Why? Because these individual machines(stingrays) are each given personal service. This isn't a vacumn cleaner approach, but something far more intrusive.

I've seen too many instances where local judges make decisions that run contrary(IMHO) to our Constitution. I remember a local case where the police stopped a vehicle, found 25lbs of pot and had the brilliant idea of using the vehicles GPS to try and figure out where the purchase was made. Hmm. It turns out that they raided the last stop made by the car with a search warrant issued by a local judge. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the location wasn't where the bad guys had made their purchase. Big problem? Not really. You see the judge had decided to issue a blanket search warrant for all the locations on the GPS. And that is the problem with the stingray. A search warrant for one cell phone is really a warrant for thousands of cell phones.

Re:Found in small town, CA?

[bill_mcgonigle]

There aren't even any 3G towers that I know of.

Seriously? A good chunk of the existing phone base can't even do 4G - prepaid is still largely 3G-only phones, which are still sold new today. It would be very rare to have 4G-only coverage areas in a town.

However, if you never go anywhere and have really good 4G coverage, setting your phone to 4G-only may well be a good workaround to reduce your chance of an intercept.