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FCC Complaint: Baltimore Police Breaking Law With Use of Stingray Phone Trackers (baltimoresun.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Baltimore Sun: Civil rights groups have complained to the FCC over the Baltimore Police Department's use of stingray phone tracking devices. They claim that "the way police use it interferes with emergency calls and is racially discriminatory." Baltimore Sun reports: "The complaint argues that the police department doesn't have a proper license to use the devices and is in violation of federal law. It calls on regulators at the Federal Communications Commission to step in and formally remind law enforcement agencies of the rules. 'The public is relying on the Commission to carry out its statutory obligation to do so, to fulfill its public commitment to do so, and to put an end to widespread network interference caused by rampant unlicensed transmissions made by BPD and other departments around the country,' the groups say in the complaint. Police in Baltimore acknowledged in court last year that they had used the devices thousands of times to investigate crimes ranging from violent attacks to the theft of cellphones. Investigators had been concealing the technology from judges and defense lawyers and after the revelations Maryland's second highest court ruled that police should get a warrant before using a Stingray. The groups argue that surveillance using the devices also undermines people's free speech rights and describe the use of Stingrays as an electronic form of the intrusive police practices described in the scathing Justice Department report on the police department's pattern of civil rights violations."
No, but police can deploy it where it will mostly interfere with minorities.
Stringray is used mostly in minority neighborhoods (at least according to the complaint) and doesn't just affect the criminal targeted. Everybody in the neighborhood loses data service and has calls blocked or dropped, including 911 calls.
Why is my phone connecting to random towers all the damned time?
My phone should come with a list of certificates it trusts and should only connect to trusted towers.
I should be able to edit this list as the owner of the phone.
I should be able to accept updates to this list from my carrier (or any carrier of my choice), either as automatically and insecurely as I want (leaving "Auto" checked on the phone, or as carefully as I want (walk into the carrier's HQ and ask for a paper list of cert fingerprints for their towers and the towers of their partners).
I should be alerted whenever a new tower claiming to be a tower of my chosen carrier(s) is detected with an unmatched cert before my phone connects to it. I could then decide to blacklist it, check for an update that includes it so I can confidently add it, or just add it blindly and roll the dice.
It occurs to me that if the authorities had been deploying Stingrays around Wall St and other financial districts, not only would they have found plenty of mostly-white criminals, they might have saved a grateful country from huge losses in money & jobs.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I would argue otherwise.
When the racecard is used, you get absurd things attributed to racism.
Eg, we can say that white people outnumber black people 10:1. (For the sake of this example, just pretend this is true.) This means that if the rate of incidence in desire for gourmet coffee is identical in both races, 10x as many white people will show up at the coffee shop as black people. that means the likelihood that the first person in line is at least 10x more likely to be white than black. It has nothing to do with preferential treatment, it is just how the odds line up. A black patron visits the shop, and is more likely to wait in line behind a white person, than a white person is to wait in line behind a black person, simply because there are more white people.
When the racecard is presented as an option, THEN there is real, defacto racism involved, because now you are introducing real preferential treatment for the black patron to shorten their waiting times, based only on their skin color, out of some misguided idea that the wait times should be equal.
That causes a grudge to happen, which causes race hatred.
Nearly all of the problem with racism, and perceptions of racism that really arent, can be solved through better understanding, and by that, I do not mean the touchy Feely kind.
If i take a vacation to zimbabwe, i expect that i will wait in line behind lots of people with dark colored skin, because there are more people with dark skin than light skin there, and they got there first. It does not mean the supermarket owners are racist against whites, and i do not feel obliged to cut in line so my wait times are different from the people behind me at the checkout, just because my skin color is different.
Arguments about how some minority ethnicity suffer so terribly because they statistically have to wait behind majority ethnicities, ignores the truth: there are just a bunch of people standing in the line, and the only way it matters what race they are, is when race is MADE into an issue. When a line is statistically N persons long, the average is that you be in the middle of the line somewhere. You wait just as long if the line is made of white people as black people.
The question is not about how terrible it is that black people are typically served after white people-- it is why the black patrons find this offensive, when it is not actually the consequence of racism, and why they feel entitled to being treated priority based solely on the color of thier skin.
The race card makes this peoblem worse, not better.
Just wait in fucking line, and wait your turn, like everyone else.
In regards to the story at hand, the presumption of racism comes from some simple features:
Incarceration rates for black males is vastly higher than for white males.
Predominantly black neighborhoods tend to be lower income than predominantly white neighborhoods.
Lower income populations tend towards higher rates of criminality and recidivism.
Lower incomes are strongly correllated with lower educational achievement.
And if I may, a subjective observation: there is a difference of opinion concerning the value of education between mainstream black culture, and mainstream white culture.
I would therefore conjecture that the income disparity is not defacto racism, but is instead cultural. (Take the same culture and apply it to a different race, you will get the same result.) The income disparity results from the attitude toward education, which adversely affects earning potential, which adversely affects crime rate.
Are these cops being racist, by putting stingrays in black neighborhoods, or are the cops putting stingrays where the highest incidence of crime is, and circumstances just so happen to be that such areas are mostly black?
To me, the line is drawn on motivation. Is the motive this?
Black people commit the most crimes, so we deploy stingrays in heavilh black populated areas.
Because that is racism-- it
Charge anyone who operated one of the devices with felony wiretapping. "Just following orders" has never been a valid excuse for breaking the law.
I say get rid of both.
Get rid of the race card.
Get rid of racist policing.
Keeping either one, as an excuse of the other, is absurd.