Fighting for personal privacy, New York legislators are calling out a secret deal between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and police departments that provided military-grade IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catchers – called “Stingrays” – to snoop on citizens’ cell phone locations – without a warrant.
Warrantless search is protected by the Fourth constitutional amendment yet the federal government has failed to outlaw the use of this illicit surveillance-state tool:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
StingRay use has been on the up and up throughout local and federal law enforcement with barely any – if any – protectionary oversight. States are taking issue with that problem. In California, the San Bernardino Police Department used its StingRay 300 times without a warrant in just over a year.
A shoebox-sized Stingray (the brand sold by Harris Corporation) collects information from cell phones by mimicking a wireless carrier cell tower and forcing all nearby WiFi cellular data devices to connect to it. The box gives police the power not only to collect your cell phone’s location as well as your incoming and outgoing calls but it can also intercept the content of voice conservations and text messages.
Law officers have abandoned law to go after what they call order – without your prior knowledge or consent and with no regard to the Law of the Land.
Seven years ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) submitted an amicus brief in United States v. Rigmaiden involving Fourth Amendment rights in the home and using cell phones which compared underhanded police evidence collection to the door-to-door searches with no probable cause or even suspicion of wrongdoing conducted by Pre-Revolutionary War British soldiers.
In Rigmaiden, the government asked a federal judge in Northern California to order Verizon to assist in locating the defendant (dubbed the “Hacker”), a suspected participant in a tax fraud scheme. After the judge granted an order directing Verizon to provide the location information on an Aircard thought to belong to the defendant, the government claimed this authorization somehow included using its own Stingray.
The culprit was caught based on the cell records gleaned by the Stingray – but personal data of every other innocent cell phone user within range of the eavesdropping device was also collected.
Richard Tynan, a technology expert with Privacy International, observed that “there really isn’t any place for innocent people to hide from a device such as this.”
The U.S. government was developing this surveillance technology around 1995. The first civilian law enforcement agency to use it illegally on civilians occurred in 2007, followed by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in 2008.
Today, Stingray-type devices are used by local and state law enforcement personnel across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The suite of StingRay devices can be mounted in vehicles, on airplanes, helicopters, and drones. Hand-carried versions are sold under the trade name KingFish.
The New York Civil Liberties Union came out in support of A.8055, a bill introduced by Assemblymember Sean Ryan in 2015 that required law enforcement to obtain a court-issued warrant before using stingray surveillance technology.
In 2017, The Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals reached a landmark pro-privacy decision that reversed the lower decision of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and overturned the conviction of a robbery and sexual assault suspect. The ruling said that using Stingrays “to locate a person through his or her cellphone invades the person’s actual, legitimate and reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her location information and is a search.”
A year later, in June 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued another landmark ruling in favor of citizen privacy. In Carpenter v. US, police had tracked the plaintiff’s cell site location data for several months. The decision banned the use of historical location information by law enforcement.
A second 2018 case in Massachusetts Commonwealth v. Almonor expanded the federal ruling to prohibit real time location blanket surveillance by police.
This past May 2019, Michigan legislators introduced a bill to ban warrantless searches by Stingray tech and the collection of electronic data stored by service providers. On May 22, GOP Senator Pete Lucido introduced Senate Bill 341 titled The Electronic Information and Data Privacy Act. This law has three requirements:
- A law enforcement agency must obtain a search warrant to access certain electronic information or data
- To prescribe the manner in which certain electronic information or data may be accessed or used
- To require notification to the owner or user of the electronic information, data, or electronic device that the electronic information, data, or electronic device has been accessed; and to provide remedies
As more people find out about the sneaky conspiracists at the FBI promoting illegal StingRay technology to the nation’s police, look for an increased in legislation crafted to protect personal privacy, to maintain public trust in law enforcement, and to hold the criminal justice system accountable for upholding the U.S. Constitution.
THAT OK THEY HAVE NO CASE FOR STEALING OR LISTENING IN ON OR CALL THERE F8CK UP ASS H8LE’S !!!!
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You CAN defend yourself from these evil entities. Take a very long roll of extra heavy aluminum foil and tear it off. Carefully fold it in half and in half again. Put your phone in the iddle and figure how much more (if any) you need to fold it again. Just fold it to fit, but cover your phone and use the foil as a “case” for your phone. Cia and others cannot “read” where you are and cannot eavesdrop into your conversations.
Read Battlefield America-THE WAR ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Like Ragu. It’s in there.
If they are listening to my conversations they must really be bored.😃
If your going to moderate it then it will no longer be MY comment
More violation of our Constitution!! Unlike our present administration some of us, Patriots believe in as trump puts it, phony Constitution, This guy who doesn’t believe in the Constitution of these United States of America, which he has tried and is still trying to divide needs to be held accountable for violating the oath he took to uphold the Constitution of the U S. This violation alone demands impeachment. It’s unheard of a representative of the US who calls the Constitution phony is a disgrace!!!
26 years ago when we first started the intranet we also included any wireless or network device to be controlled where no one was above the law in privacy and sticking their in where it didn’t belong. We also recommended that the internet had to be controlled where there would be no entity conducting crimes and illegal actions against innocent people and always the government had to screw up everything and no people are being robbed of their money, identity, false media and disturbing media. The government does not care what you want. This is why – now the government runs the people instead of the people run the government. The more people give up their rights to the government the more they are in control and will do anything they want to do. So the more idiots fall to their knees the more powerful the government we be. Remember, we the people must keep the government in check. Example: Red Flag is Marshall Law. The difference is: Marshall Law – the military takes over and you lose you rights. While Red Flag – the Law Enforcement are rulers-not the military. However under Red Flag we have our rights and we can exercise our rights. Also Red Flag opens the door to monitor your cell phones, telephone, video surveillance, satellite use to monitor everything and everyone anywhere in the world. So with Red Flag you gave the government more access to look into your business and hear your business. Open your eyes people. You have no more privacy. Even if you lived on the moon they will see you and hear you.
The New California State movement has cell phone protection in place that stingray cannot pierce. The DEAF technology protected the Trump team during the election cycle. Clinton and Pelosi sent Pelosi’s daughter in law up to Candid to meet with the developer of DEAF in order to purchase it for the Clinton campaign. The answer was “no”.
Maybe there bored.
There is nothing I say or do that requires protection from a Stingray device. My priotity would be catching criminals before they commit another crime.
Maybe they want to hear if someone is horny and stroking or fingering themselves, and climaxing, since they are perverts.
I cannot stress the importance of keeping the value[s] of or Constitution (emphasis on the Forth Amendment) in the forefront against power of the state. May it be local or state law enforcement; or the federal government. To not keep a knowingly suspicious-eye is inherently dangerous to our system of government.. Further, to allow these forces to run ramped without legislative checks and balance, could and would precipitate untold harm to those primarily without knowledge or financial means of protection, i.e. the poor…
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