Slashdot Mirror
US Judge Throws Out Cell Phone 'Stingray' Evidence For The First Time (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: For the first time, a federal judge has suppressed evidence obtained without a warrant by U.S. law enforcement using a stingray, a surveillance device that can trick suspects' cell phones into revealing their locations. U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis' rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Washington Heights apartment. Stingrays, also known as "cell site simulators," mimic cell phone towers in order to force cell phones in the area to transmit "pings" back to the devices, enabling law enforcement to track a suspect's phone and pinpoint its location. The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis' apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so constituted an unreasonable search. The ruling marked the first time a federal judge had suppressed evidence obtained using a stingray, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which like other privacy advocacy groups has criticized law enforcement's use of such devices. "Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen's cell phone into a tracking device," Pauley wrote. FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin suggests in a report via Motherboard that decrypting encrypted data fundamentally alters it, therefore contaminating it as forensic evidence.
Bernard Seidler, Lambis' lawyer, noted that occurred a week after his client was charged. He said it was unclear if the drug case against Lambis would now be dismissed.
This "War on Drugs" has proven to be a failure. Just regulate it like alcohol. And instead of sending these folks to jail, send them to rehab - an evidence based rehab like the Western Europeans do.
Prosecutors like to say that some addicts need that "Come to Jesus" moment of getting arrested to get clean - and they have zero evidence to back that claim up. But the truth is that rehabilitation in the USA is a joke. It's not evidence based and when it fails, the program doesn't get blamed but the addict; when the opposite should be the case. I don't have to work for an antibiotic to work. It works or it doesn't. If someone has to "want" to change then you don't have an evidence based treatment but a placebo.
Poor Lindsey Lohan has been in and out of rehab and her character is blamed when in fact the rehab places she's gone to are pretty much garbage.
So, until we as a country grow up and stop this moralizing and hypocrisy about drug use, we are going to be pissing billions of dollars a year away on things that don't work.