Slashdot Mirror
Bipartisan Bill Seeks Warrants For Police Use of 'Stingray' Cell Trackers (usatoday.com)
Tulsa_Time quotes a report from USA Today: A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers introduced legislation Wednesday requiring police agencies to get a search warrant before they can deploy powerful cellphone surveillance technology known as "stingrays" that sweep up information about the movements of innocent Americans while tracking suspected criminals. "Owning a smartphone or fitness tracker shouldn't give the government a blank check to track your movements," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who introduced the bill with Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and John Conyers, D-Mich. "Law enforcement should be able to use GPS data, but they need to get a warrant. This bill sets out clear rules to make sure our laws keep up with the times." The legislation introduced Wednesday, called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, would require a warrant for all domestic law enforcement agencies to track the location and movements of individual Americans through GPS technology without their knowledge. It also aims to combat high-tech stalking by creating criminal penalties for secretly using an electronic device to track someone's movements.
your a doosh
every LEO has a favorite judge on speed-dial and can get pretty much any warrant signed he/she wishes...
Techies, like everyday tech-minded people, need to completely and fully understand that Republicans are their enemies, by policy.
Almost completely down the line, any policy involving tech will have the Republicans pushing policies that are the worst.
Net Neutrality? It's the GOP who want to destroy it.
DRM of all kinds, always Republicans.
It goes on and on.
Why is it so important to grasp this fact? Why am I even posting this?
Because so many techies still support Republicans or 'Libertarians'...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Gay tomorrow
This bill sets out clear rules to make sure our laws keep up with the times.
Glad to hear we're implementing that new-fangled 4th amendment I keep hearing about.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
How about requiring a warrant for the actual identification of a particular device or discovery of it, while providing access to anonymized data for an area for justifiable reasons like public safety, and statistics for research and management?
DMCA: Clinton
CDA: Clinton
COPA: Clinton
DRM (criminalize breaking it): Clinton
IDIOT: globaljustin
Not only should convictions based on stingray data be tossed, legal fees should be reimbursed. There is no doubt these things were illegal, make the assholes who used them (under an NDA no less) pay for it.
// really sucks to be a law enforcement agency (HA!) that used the damned things
/// I'm old. I hope I live long enough to see 1984 fail
//// not holding my breath
///// /. formatting sucks balls. Why should I have to do a break line when a CRLF would do?
/ kinda sucks to be a Harris stockholder at the moment
Have gnu, will travel.
Before posting some idea that came from your ass, look it up.
What's the point of adding more laws when there's no enforcement? Especially when you're curtailing government power, when government agencies already shit all over the laws in place to restrain them without punishment?
What ever happened to that encryption idea, I wonder?
Mabu, I see that you are writing. Using proper English, even, capitalizing most of the proper names you use.
I assume you didn't come out of the womb writing Slashdot posts, you learned how to write. That proves to me that you are capable of learning new things. You can probably make a guess about something, then when you find out differently, you've learned. Your first guess was incorrect, you learn something, cool. You're smarter afterwards.
Multiple people have pointed out to you that your first guess was wrong. All the major "bad" tech laws, DMCA, CDA, COPA, etc were all originally sponsored by and/or signed into law by Democrats. (There *is* a reason the criticism of Dems is "big government Democrats). You are capable of learning something from these people, of ending today smarter than you were yesterday. Or you can put your fingers in your ears, whine "neh neh neh I can't hear you". The latter is called "willful ignorance", intentionally working to avoid learning anything new. Your choice, my friend.
It also aims to combat high-tech stalking by creating criminal penalties for secretly using an electronic device to track someone's movements.
I look forward to app store vendors being carted off to jail en masse.
This bill has been introduced a number of previous times (earliest is 2011) and has always gotten stuck in committee. This just seems like a bill that gets some press for the politicians, but isn't really meant to actually be enacted
One way to look at it is the pure reading of the 4th amendment. There's no "there" there about "third party rules" and "All writs act" in it. So at least those "exceptions" should require a warrant, but they don't get one in many cases. (Think NSA letters)
There's also nothing about allowing LEO to follow your every move without a warrant. Yet in many cases they don't bother. (Think cell phone tracking, power meter watching, thermal imaging in addition to plain old gum shoe detective work.)
I can't see how passing more laws will do anything other than get ignored even more often. I think the only thing that will work is changing the perception of a badge from one of "Oh, badge, they have more privileges" to "Oh, Badge, they have more responsibility to, you know, actually obey the law."
But changing that would entail folks realizing they are the power, not those entrusted to protect us.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Policy is what actually matters. Policy is the laws we actually enact and how they are enforced.
Go down the line, every instance, Republicans' policy positions are the worse of the options for tech.
If Republicans changed their policies, that would change the situation.
It *does* matter, there is a difference between policies Democrats enact and policies Republicans enact. Especially in Science and Tech. Republicans and Democrats policies are very, very different.
Thank you Dave Raggett
did any Republicans lead the charge against these?
NO
Republicans were falling over themselves to make the rules worse than what was enacted!
Go down the line, the Republican's policy was always much more draconian and foolish than what Democrats were proposing.
Just because a Democrat was president doesn't mean the Democrats weren't trying to force the policy to be better. It doesn't change either party's position on policy.
Look at the DCMA.
Everyone knew we needed new rules, it's *how* those rules were passed through an intractable Congress that matters. Republicans wanted to put things like website ratings like film ratings in the DCMA Typically, Democrats have to fight tooth and nail just to get some kind of comprimise that isn't abjectly destructive in order to pass needed updates to t-com laws.
Republicans are always advocating for worse policy, compared to what Democrats are proposing particularly in the area of science and tech.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I appreciate that this comment is asking that we consider the technical equivalent of "Puuting the Genie Back in the Bottle", but it seems to me that the fundamental issue with the current Stingray technology happens to be the "bulk data capture" nature of the way that it operates...
In one sense this is unavoidable - when you have a piece of technology that imitates a cellphone tower by giving the strongest local signal, it will sweep up multiple handsets each time it is activated.
On the other hand, would it be possible for a judge to declare that the *operator interface* to the stingray device must by law force the operator to enter the particulars of a specific mobile phone handset, thereby preventing the stingray operator for conducting blanket surveillance?
Quite obviously, I know nothing about the inner workings of stingray technology, but it is clear to me that the principle by which it operates is to deem that every cell phone user within range is guilty of a crime - since the technology indiscriminately targets them.
If one motorist breaks the speed limit on a particular road at a particular time, a Law Enforcement Officer is not entitled to stop every vehicle on the road and take details of the driver and their passengers... similarly there should be limits on what that same officer can do when tracking a suspected criminal using stingray technology.
As technologists we know that it would be possible to develop a stingray device that had to be pre-programmed with a cell phone ID before it could be activated. We know that it would also be possible to require that device to have a legally tamper-proof log, to require that to have a license to operate (it is a wireless device that surely needs FCC approval to be used) that there would be supervisory controls that could be enforce.
Law enforcement are quick to claim that the rapid advancement of technology is such that they need extra powers in order to be able to keep pace with the criminals in society. Well, OK, but that should not be grounds for permitting those same officers to bend or break the law in the process. That places the Law Enforcement Agencies in the same category as criminals: as far as honest citizens are concerned that makes LEOs just as dangerous, or perhaps even more so, since they have the implied authority of the state backing them up...
The Enforcement of the law must itself be legal, or it undermines any and all claims of authority it may have over the citizenry it was designed to protect.
" would require a warrant for all domestic law enforcement agencies to track the location and movements of individual Americans through GPS technology without their knowledge. It also aims to combat high-tech stalking by creating criminal penalties for secretly using an electronic device to track someone.."
Goody. Make sure those penalties apply to the cops too, per person tracked without a warrant.
Dialectician. Archology.
What about everyone else who is also entitled to constitutional protection of their civil rights while under the jurisdiction of the United States? Not everyone is an American, but every human being within the borders of the United States is entitled to their basic human rights.
I just read this bill and it is shocking. Absolutely shocking. The bill focuses mainly on imposing criminal penalties on citizens for tracking another person without their knowledge.
If this is the same GPS Act that filed in congress the last time it was introduced, it also has so many exemptions for law enforcement that even the "requirement" for a warrant is easily circumvented:
"Makes specified exceptions for interceptions involving: (1) information acquired by a provider of a covered service (electronic communication service, remote computing service, or geolocation information service) in the normal course of business; (2) federal officers, employees, or agents conducting foreign intelligence surveillance; (3) persons having given prior consent; (4) public information; (5) emergency information; (6) theft; and (7) a warrant."
It has a clear and concise exemption for "electronic communication services," in other words, cellular carriers. They can track you all day long, and simply hand that data over to law enforcement voluntarily, as they do today. There is nothing in this bill that prevents that.
This bill sets out clear rules to make sure our laws keep up with the times.
Laws do need to be changed to keep up with the times, this much is correct. But they should be laws of the form "this new thing, that is currently illegal for the government to use, is now legal", not "this new thing, which the government is using to violate our rights because it is not explicitly noted as illegal, is now illegal".
The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments make very clear that that is how it is supposed to work. Don't like it? There is a method to change it.
You're.
Your congress did something? I thought King Trump was the new law of the land.
The buck never stops, apparently.
we know where you are, and are coming to get you.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
http://softwareengineeringmca....