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US Gov't Will Reveal More About Its Secret Cellphone Tracking Devices
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a major review of how law enforcement around the country uses cellphone tracking technology, and they will also begin sharing more information about how it works. So-called "Stingray" devices have been in the news a lot recently, as privacy activists try to piece together how they're used. Police and federal agencies have been notably resistant to sharing how they use this tool, even after we learned that they often don't bother with warrants and may have been drastically overusing it. Still, they're not going to reveal everything about the Stingrays: "Officials said they don't want to reveal so much that it gives criminals clues about how to defeat the devices. Law-enforcement officials also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used, according to officials involved in the discussions."
Secret precedents defined in secret courts covering secret laws on secret programs uncovering more secrets... Something's phishy here...
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"also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used" then they should have gotten an arrest warrant to begin with!!!
"that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used"
So they want to deny information to the defense attorneys that could exonerate their clients? Isn't that a little like a prosecutor withholding information regarding a witness that claims to have seen another person committing the crime? Call me crazy but isn't the justice system is supposed to be open and fair, not closed and selective?
If we reveal the extent to which we're actually breaking the law, the lawyers might be able to argue that by bypassing the law the shit we've done is in admissible in court.
And, once again, the police have decided it's far more convenient if they can simply lie or conceal what they actually do, so they don't have to be under scrutiny.
Sorry, but no. Either you use this technology legally, with warrants as legally required .. or you fuck the hell off and don't use it.
This is no better than the National Police Perjury Program best known as parallel construction -- in which we encourage law enforcement to lie about how they did things to deny you a valid legal defense.
If this is what the police want, fuck 'em. When the police no longer believe the law applies to them, they've become a whole new problem.
Complaining that defense lawyers being able to challenge an illegal wire tap means law enforcement is either corrupt or incompetent.
Lying bastards.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Law-enforcement officials also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used, according to officials involved in the discussions.
Un-fucking-believable - Or rather, sadly all too believable.
That one statement right there almost completely expresses everything wrong with modern American legal system.
Mr. Prosecutor, I would point out that if you would so willingly abandon the core principles of our legal system - The ideas of innocent until proven guilty and having the right to face your accuser in court - Why shouldn't we go back to vigilante mob justice and tar-and-feather your worthless ass for breach of public trust?
There technology behind these intercepts is not particularly complex, so I don't think there is a significant need to explain "how it works". The fact that they are trying to "share" information that is already quite clear to all interested parties, suggests that this is a PR effort for the public, rather than an attempt to modify law enforcement practices in earnest.
"Law-enforcement officials also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used, according to officials involved in the discussions."
Find those officials and indict them. Get them to roll on others involved, get them to roll, so on and so forth until you have everyone from prosecutors to judges to field agents to police officers to administrators to politicians; indict the lot of them for a criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of thousands - if not millions - of Americans. Indict the manufacturer too and open all of them to civil suits by everyone involved. In fact, just launch one on behalf of everyone affected.
Put a few thousand people in prison, bankrupt manufacturers, towns, cities, police departments, and individuals, and watch this kind of shit stop real quick. Such action would force everyone else to very careful examine how they treat the civil rights of both suspects and regular people who might get caught up in the dragnet. It would demonstrate real and lasting consequences for knowingly violating the legal rights of the people. It would bring us closer to a more just and perfect union.
Or we could just quietly sweep it under the rug and unwind the most untenable abuses while making some fairly innocuous details available to the public in the name of transparency. I'm sure that'll also work.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The right to face your accusers in court is irrelevant here. They don't present Stingray-obtained evidence in court, just the old-fashioned stuff it led them to.
As a member of the law enforcement community I believe i can shed light on exactly what stingray is, and why we use it. American citizens are awful, vile creatures and you dont truly understand what theyre capable of until youve dealt with their "freedoms." In the US we routinely deal with conditions where Americans have the horrible ability to speak out against their government without fear of any reprisal. Police are routinely restrained in their duty. Criminal americans (which is all of them really) will even stage massive protests against totally accidental deaths of horrible criminals. Law Enforcement is just here to protect and serve, and we do it with tazer tickles and freedom massages from our fun time riot batons.
The stingray helps us learn what horrors the evil american has in store for us, so that we can dial in the proper caliber on our learning pistols and protect all that is good and wholesome about starbucks and jesus. We have to use super secret courts because evil americans sometimes demand to know all our plans to protect freedom (which they hate.)
Good people go to bed earlier.
The right to face your accusers in court is irrelevant here. They don't present Stingray-obtained evidence in court, just the old-fashioned stuff it led them to.
"Your accuser" doesn't just mean the testimony and evidence against you - How and Why they collected evidence can matter more than that evidence itself.
Just think how much easier it would make police work if they could randomly barge into your house and search for criminal activity without a warrant... Or if they could "find" your DNA at a crime scene by bringing you there after-the-fact to "ask some questions" and you "just happen" to trip and bleed on the scene (but don't worry, an anonymous phonecall assured them you did it).
We have rules in place for a reason. We either always follow them, or they mean nothing.
What I'm hearing when I read this, is that cell phone technology has some kind of weakness so severe, that just a whiff of the exploit will set experts on the obvious path to uncovering it... thus to leak any information at all will provide security researchers with everything they need to figure it out and fix it. Once that is done, the value of stingray devices will be moot. Or in other words... c'mon security researchers, you're so damn close the government can taste it!
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Do we have a rule against collecting publicly-transmitted radio waves without a warrant?
"Mr. Prosecutor, I would point out that if you would so willingly abandon the core principles of our legal system - The ideas of innocent until proven guilty and having the right to face your accuser in court - Why shouldn't we go back to vigilante mob justice and tar-and-feather your worthless ass for breach of public trust?"
I'm going to use this one next time I'm writing up a trial brief.
If there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, then yes, we do. Federal ones, in fact.
It seems to me that in todays society shooting a cop, judge, or anybody involved in the political system is no more wrong than shooting a person whose about to murder you in self-defense. They are all corrupt and abusing the authority we supposedly gave them. I'm not some right-wing nut job either suggesting this. I do not even own a firearm. I'm against the death penalty and senseless violence. That said thoughtful selective organized non-violent but aggressive politic action may make more sense anyway.
However at what point are we suppose to say no more and take up arms against our oppressors?
The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government"
And just to make clear this isn't talking about a non-violent overthrow of government here.
We, a local police department, have a machine that will randomly tap cell phones in our area, and we don't want you to know how it works, becuase otherwise you may be able to defend yourself against our illegal use of this expensive machine we purchased to spy on you. The same has applied to speed traps in the past, I mean if we released the source code to those machines, someone might find a bug and invalidate all the tickets we ever issued.
"...sharing more information..." is keyword for blowing hot air up your skirt.
more like: "welcome to total infringement of your constitutional rights. we've actually been watching you without due cause and without warrant since the late 90s. you're welcome..." (true story).
Not to mention that, in the US, over 90% of cases are settled by plea bargaining, in which case there is no court.
Hey Newsflash guys .... if you carry around a transmitting device that broadcasts a unique id, isn't it a bit unrealistic to expect total privacy??!
Period.
Same thing goes for GPS tracking.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Which renders the 4th amendment meaningless because its normal enforcement mechanism is exclusion of evidence. If law enforcement does a search and/or seizure but does not introduce anything found in court, does the 4th amendment cover it or not? Apparently it does not.
While parallel construction may have been intended to protect national security, now it is used to avoid 4th amendment requirements.
Will defense also have access to the raw data? It is all to possible for the defense to use that data to show other people who also had the opportunity to do the crime. When you listen to a recording or view a video you get the whole, unaltered content. Law enforcement should be required to produce the raw data and demonstrate their process for analyzing the data to ensure those processes are not flawed. Otherwise just showing a Stingray report is like showing a single cropped frame from a video in court without introducing the whole video as evidence.