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Local Canadian Police Station Admits To Owning Stingray Surveillance Device (vice.com)
The Edmonton Police Service has admitted to Motherboard that it owns a Stingray and that it used the [surveillance] device in the past during investigations. After Vancouver cops admitted to using the phone tracker to investigate an abduction in 2007, Motherboard called up other local police stations in Canada to ask if they had also previously used one. As you can imagine, the other stations kept mum. In the US, Stingrays are a regular part of government and law enforcement agencies' surveillance arsenal. But Vancouver's and Edmonton's police services are the first law enforcement offices in Canada to confirm that they've used the device. Motherboard adds: According an emailed statement from police spokesperson Anna Batchelor, Edmonton's cops have "used the device in the past during investigations," but would not release any additional details in order to "to protect [Edmonton Police Service] operations." Until now, the only law enforcement in the country known to use the devices was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country's analogue to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. These suitcase-sized surveillance tools have been used in the past by the Vancouver and Toronto police, but the Vancouver police have said they borrowed the Stingray from the RCMP, and in Toronto an RCMP technician was on hand, at least in that incident. The Edmonton police's comment to Motherboard is the first time a local police department in Canada has publicly admitted to owning a Stingray device.
Repression of Native homeless?
Why the copy pasta?
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
RCMP act as local police in most of Canada; basically any city that doesn't run their own police force and isn't in Ontario or Quebec (which have their own provincial police). So the RCMP could have been using stingray devices all the way to the local level for quite some time now.
The article is wrong in its implication that this is the first time local police have had access to stingrays.
(Also, Canada does not have an FBI equivalent. The Government of Canada doesn't have enforcement agencies, the crown does. We like our policy makers separate from enforcement that you very much)
The police in Edmonton have been doing this to the press since the 90s when they wiretapped newspaper and TV reporters working on a story of police corruption with ties to organized crime. But that was just the old fashioned wire taps, and there have been many corruption scandals since. There is no press freedom in Edmonton and all communication should be considered compromised by the police there unless there is a cryptographically secure way with a Certificate Authority not controlled within Canadian or US borders.
Unlike the USA, Canada has a fairly recent Constitution which explicitly includes the Right of Privacy.
Which includes not having your info slurped up by police without a specific warrant on you as a person.
There are no exceptions.
It has been ruled so by the Canadian Supreme Court.
(caveat: I only wrote Canadian Army regs based on it, so IANAL just someone who had to implement it's provisions)
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Back in school I "heard" of ways to crack cell towers to intercept and prank outgoing calls (with hilarious results), and just owning a device that was capable of doing it was a huge no-no. Why the double standard for the fuzz and could owning one of those towers be illegal even on their level?
I would very much like to read over Canada's enumeration of privacy rights, and compare it against the US constitution for combining the best attributes of them towards a future constitutional document.
May I pet the stingrays?
...what have you done?
This wasn't the first and certainly not the last time they have used Stingray. The most worrying aspect is that they don't even keep records of its use! Nobody could ever tell when, where and how often it has been used.
-SR
There are no exceptions.
Well, if your security clearance is high enough, you will find that there is concept of "Double Secret Probation."
This is the exception to "there are no exceptions."
Personal note: my father grew up near Calgary (Rosebud) and studied at Edmonton. Later he built radar stations for RCA in northern Canada. I didn't learn of this until after he died. The American spooks required him to get a USA citizenship. When my father asked why that was necessary, the spooks said that if he spied for the Russians, they couldn't hang him, as a Canadian national.
From what my mom told me, when he was at the radar construction sites, they were under constant surveillance from Canadian spooks. All telephone calls were recorded. Hey, but that was during the Cold War.
So with these Stingrays, are we returning to old Cold War practices . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
are we returning to old Cold War practices?
Implying it ever stopped...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Canada has multiple times chosen to ignore rights in the charter "in service of the public good". Section 9 for the RIDE program (Legal to detain people arbitrarily for traffic stops, especially when searching for intoxication without a warrant), Section 2 for Loi 101 (Illegal to mostly promote English on commercial signage), and recently Section 11 to enforce ex post facto laws against child pornographers (Old convictions that didn't include a ban on the use of internet were re-opened and a ban instituted).
But, as for Section 8 and how it applies here, we already have ignored your rights and will likely do so again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_Eight_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms
"The use of wiretapping technology is also considered a "search" for the purpose of Section 8. Warrantless wiretapping can sometimes be justified under section 1 of the Charter'' in cases where exigent circumstances exist; however the Supreme Court of Canada found in R. v. Tse, 2012 SCC 16 that when police use such tactics, they must promptly notify the individual whose reasonable expectation of privacy has been infringed."
"In R v Fearon (2014), the Supreme Court of Canada held in a 4–3 vote that searching for cell phones without a warrant during an arrest does not violate the Charter. However, the Court also ruled that police must follow the several search guidelines.[15][16]"
So I would not trust that rag to protect me with a 40 foot barge pole.
Please encourage any and all Edmontonions to file FOIP requests to find out what EPS has stored on them.
http://www.edmontonpolice.ca/A...
Hit them where it hurts, in the budget!
Technicallly you are correct. We have been spying on our own citizens for a long long time.
But that doesn't mean it's legal. Or Constitutional.
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So I would not trust that rag to protect me with a 40 foot barge pole.
12 meter barge pole.
Canada is metric.
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What part of "no exceptions" don't they understand? Secret exceptions are illegal no matter how you try to paint it.
During the Cold War, their aim was to assess, contain, and otherwise mitigate the signals capability of our Russian counterparts.
Now the aim is to assess, contain, and otherwise mitigate the signals capability of our own citizenry.
We never left.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about all the crimes our police, judges and politicians are committing and getting off with no repercussions.
As a police officer you are held to a higher standard and these criminals are acting worse than many of the people currently in jail.
Even our premier has admitted to criminal negligence on public record. She is still in office.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Unlike the USA, Canada has a fairly recent Constitution which explicitly includes the Right of Privacy.
Which includes not having your info slurped up by police without a specific warrant on you as a person.
There are no exceptions.
It has been ruled so by the Canadian Supreme Court.
(caveat: I only wrote Canadian Army regs based on it, so IANAL just someone who had to implement it's provisions)
I don't give 2 shits about privacy and civil rights if the stingray device allows the police to find a kidnap victim. You have no rights once you violate another's humans rights.
The Bill of Rights has nothing about privacy: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-12.3/FullText.html
The privacy commissioner herself had her cellphone records sold to a reporter because there were no such protections in law.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/cf-dc/2007/372_20070709_e.asp
It's my understanding that postal services and landlines have protections in law, but there is no such thing for "new" mediums. I.e., you need a warrant to open mail or wiretap a landline, but before the privacy act, you could sell somebody's cellphone records to whomever you wanted without telling them.
You're probably also talking about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, not the Bill of Rights. But neither contain anything about privacy other than protections against search and seizure.
Details on the current state of privacy law in Canada can be found on the Privacy Commissioner's website... https://www.priv.gc.ca/resource/fs-fi/02_05_d_15_e.asp
Please., please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to see this Supreme Court decision.
We're gonna totally spy on everyone but just THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
It seems to me an admission comes after an allegation. It sounds here like the police responded to an inquiry.
Wow just really? Like damn canadian police have surveillance really? Does slashdot also have surveillance? really?
RE: ... Until now, the only law enforcement in the country known to use the devices was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country's analogue to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. ..."
"
The RCMP are far more than a simple "analogue" to the US FBI. They are, first of all, a Military Police. The can and have organized into military units and participated in combat both within and outside Canada. They are a national cross-provincial police force, like the FBI, but they are also a Provincial Police like State Troopers, and a local police like any municipal police force (a city or rural municipality can either create their own police force, or contract with the RCMP to provide local policing). Up until the 1980's, they were also the International and Domestic Spy Agency; the creation of CSIS removed some, but not all, of those powers. If you must, the RCMP are an analogue of the FBI, CIA, all 50 State Police combined, Local Police, Crime Labs, and a few other US Law Enforcement agencies, rolled into one. There is no "jurisdictional ego" such as what is often cited when, say, the FBI is called into a local investigation. They are one and the same.
If you can't trust the CA because government authorities have compromised the root cert, then the whole chain of trust is broken. That was the point, and it has happened before with DIginotar and others.
We are always bitching about what Govt. Agency is using Stingray, but there is zero mention of the Stingray creator company... financed by our own tax dollars. I won't spell out the Co name, but perhaps you can figure it out from the following: It starts with a Q and kinda sounds like a concatenation quality and communication. If that isn't enough of a hint, perhaps you should not be on slashdot.
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