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No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting To Being Tracked By Police (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment. The trial had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray -- the first time any court in the nation had done so. Last April, a Baltimore police detective testified that the department has used Stingrays 4,300 times since 2007, usually without notifying judges or defendants. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking nearby phones into connecting and revealing users' locations. Stingrays sweep up data on every phone nearby -- collecting information on dozens or potentially hundreds of people. The ruling has the potential to set a strong precedent about warrantless location tracking.
They've been watching The Wire a tad too much.
Unless they are morons, the state will only appeal if they think this is a good test case for them. So this is unlikely to set particularly meaningful precedent.
...remaining alive is deemed to give consent for any branch of government to do what the hell it likes....
More like broadcasting my position does not give carte blanche for the police to do what amounts to a warrantless wiretap of everyone in the vicinity. IMO
Just like having a landline attached to the phone company's network doesn't grant them permission. That wire is up there on the pole, where pretty much anyone who's willing to climb up there can get to it. Just because it's easy to do doesn't make it okay. As the court has ruled on many occasions.
All those "It's the Constitution Dummy" Republicans seem to be missing in action for anything that's not about gun control or confirming court nominations.
Do you have a problem with that?
4,300 times since 2007
That's a lot of founding father grave spinning.
I live near a city whose police department is currently operating under a DoJ consent decree (Seatle). At this point, the DoJ is operating under the assumption that a cop turning on his cell phone is consent to being tracked by the FBI.
Have gnu, will travel.
IMSI-catchers, like the infamous Harris Stingray, operate in two different modes, passive and active.
In passive mode it just listens to the cellular frequencies and records the IMSI of any device in range. This is similar to WiFi war driving and listening passively for SSIDs. While there are some preventative measures you can take, at some point you just have to broadcast the ID in the clear for things to work. Not a lot can be done to securely protect against this.
However, in active mode the IMSI-catcher spoofs credentials and claims to be a valid cell tower, tricking the cell phone to actually connect to it. This allows everything from text messages, to DTMF tones to the contents of a voice call to be captured.
Here is where there is room for end-user security improvements. One step would be to whitelist the known towers in your area, refusing to let your phone connect to any tower not on your list -- such as claimed NEW towers.
Net stumbler applications like Wigle include lists of cellular networks in their scans and databases. A crowd-sourced or crowd-validated list of known, real towers could serve as an initial load or verification.
The trick is getting your phone to connect only to the whitelisted towers. I believe that function lies in the baseband processor and access to that is normally locked down tight.
This could be a nice addition to something like Silent Circle's Blackphone.
If nothing else, it should be possible to have your phone alert you when it connects to a non-whitelisted cell tower. After all, Android has the ability to display what tower you're connected to. Apps like Network Signal Info Pro certainly give enough details.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
All those "It's the Constitution Dummy" Republicans seem to be missing in action for anything that's not about gun control or confirming court nominations.
No, most of those dummies believe national security is more important that personal security and/or privacy.
Now if it involves guns, then NRA will step in an smack the dummies upside the head. Unfortunately, there isn't an organization as big, powerful and well funded as the NRA for violations of the 4th Amendment.
Court rules that broadcasting your position is not broadcasting your position. Remember, judges are people who couldn't make a living as lawyers.
Court rules that broadcasting your position to your phone company is not equivalent to broadcasting your position to the police.
The police should not be legally allowed to operate Stingrays, since everything they collect from a Stringray is also available through a subpoena to the phone company, with more controls to ensure that they are only monitoring those who they are legally allowed to monitor.
One could argue that using any public service or utility could give consent to some authoritarian add-on. Instead of letting the police continuously nibble at our rights, we need some solid laws that block any further attempts. If they gather data without a warrant then they have broken laws with mandatory minimum sentencing.
This is what Trump supporters think.
We need an NPA (national privacy association).
Why are terminal-base station connections not autenticated each other?
It's time already we start demanding proper infrastructures/protocols when the solution have been available for decades.
Does it hurt all the time when you try to think, or only some of the time? My guess is that it hurts all the time, since you (obviously) haven't done a great deal of it.
This is a state trial court, it means nothing. It does not make a state or federal constitutional argument, it's just what some mid-level judge thinks in one specific case. It has zero value as a precedent, even inside the state itself, and is merely an anecdote for anyone located outside of that state.
The whole story amounts to mere clickbaiting.
lucm, indeed.
I'm not a fan of stingrays, but they do seem similar to the police using radar. They use radar indiscriminately to test driver's speeds to see if they are violating the law. The police also uses cameras in public areas to check for law violations. You are being recorded if you violate the law or not and consent is never given.
How are stingrays much different?
Turing on your phone is consent.... Who thought up that silly idea?
Everyone knows the consent is given by choosing to live in a "safe" country.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
and everybody else. Particularly everybody else since for reasonable suspicions of terrorism and child molestation, a warrant should be easy to attain. Of course, a warrant is easy to attain for pretty much anything else, but the current amount of wiretapping would still be hard to maintain because the judges would get writing cramps signing all those warrants.
It's hard enough to get a judge to rule that the cops need to follow the law. It's practically impossible to punish the police for violating the law and willfully disobeying a judge's decision.
There is absolutely no oversight on law enforcement. They routinely break the law and are routinely found to be on the wrong side of the law by the courts. What happens then is some cops shrug and go back to doing what they're doing because there are no consequences for lawless cop behavior.
When cops start getting fired (and losing their pensions and benefits) and/or being thrown in jail for their criminal offenses, things might start to change.
Yes i would like to use a homebrew implementation of this. Run it on my android. Just tunnel an intercom like /bin/wall or freenet meshnet shit. Call the program Guitarfish or Sandshark.
Make it happen please. And if they come at you then do like vhf radio back in the 80's.
The NPA already exists, unfortunately nobody knows how to join or who the members are
One already exists.
Local thug cops have zero to do with national security despite the fawning media portraying them as combat heroes taking on terrorism all by themselves. Yet those same Republicans support them unquestioningly.
IS STALKING!
The fundamental question here is this: When is it OK for the Police to do what an individual cannot?
Vigilanteism, obviously.
Surveillance? No.
Tracking? No.
How many children have been tracked?
Have the Police used the Stingray in their internal affairs investigations?
How many times has it been used because some cop has a personal gripe against someone?
They can charge as much as they like for gay buttsecks! Maybe some people LIKE loose buttsecks! This is 'Murika, where you charge what the market will bear. FREEDOM!