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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.
, just the meta-data and signaling information between the tower and the phone.
That is actually not true. Stingray devices are capable of "active" attacks where they act as a man-in-the-middle between cell phones and legitimate towers, thereby decrypting and recording calls. As far as the metadata is concerned, there is a legal history of requiring warrants to get that information from phone companies. The fact that technologically it is possible to directly get it by snooping with a stingray doesn't make it clear cut that it is actually legal for the police to do so, as was demonstrated here. As an analogy, if the FBI developed a technology that allowed them to read minute EM leakage off phone wires from 100ft away, it wouldn't suddenly become legal for them to tap your land line with that.