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OK, I'm confused.
Unless the information is encrypted, no warrant is needed for anything broadcast. Or have those laws changed?
Now if it's encrypted, where is your argument that public key is safe?
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants.
"When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
OK, I'm confused.
Unless the information is encrypted, no warrant is needed for anything broadcast. Or have those laws changed?
Now if it's encrypted, where is your argument that public key is safe?
Sure there is. Telephone call interception require a trap and trace court order:
https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm
Furthermore, warrants order the phone company to provide government with data, it doesn't grant the government any other rights.
In this case the warrant mandated Verizon to provide tap and tracing to the government on that account, but the government argues they can use a Stingray under the same warrant authority.
Don't particularly remember explicitly surrendering my 4th amendment rights when signing up for a cellphone. Can you highlight that part of a contract with a telecom?
Can't help you, EN. I had my sense of reason surgically removed so I could sign with ATT.
You probably also gave up rights to participate in class action suits against <mega-Corporate-American person>, and agreed exclusively to kangaroo court arbitration.
JINO SCOTUS agrees, by greatly limiting "commonality" in class action suits.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-27-2014 at 01:10 PM.
I hear you.Can't help you, EN. I had my sense of reason surgically removed so I could sign with ATT.
So nothing on the 4th amendment department...
nope, I post what I want, not what you want. GFY, stalker
Ooooo..EN is a stalker now.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co....html?spref=fbHint at possible litigation over Fort Worth PD's acquisition of 'KingFish' fake-cell-tower device
On their March 5 agenda, the Fort Worth City Council considered an item in closed, executive session described only as "Legal issues related to acquisition of KingFish software from Harris Corporation." Harris Corporation is the company that makes surveillance devices with the trade name "Stingray" (see here and here) of which the KingFish system is one model in that line. These are fake cell towers that trick nearby phones into sending their signal through a police surveillance system instead of the nearest, privately operated network. The Obama Administration claims their use should not require a probable cause warrant. Privacy advocates and some courts have so far disagreed. This is yet another situation where technology has leaped far ahead of the legal framework that theoretically constrains it.
What might the Fort Worth City Council be discussing behind closed doors? The only clue comes from boilerplate language on the agenda covering several distinct items which declares that the council will "Seek the advice of its attorneys concerning the following pending or contemplated litigation or other matters that are exempt from public disclosure under Article X, Section 9 of the Texas State Bar Rules, as authorized by Section 551.071 of the Texas Government Code." Does that mean there is litigation pending or contemplated related to the acquisition of the Fort Worth PD's KingFish system, or a settlement offer under Government Code 551.071? If so I'd be interested to know more detail about who is suing who over what! Lately some other jurisdictions have gotten into hot water for failing to disclose to judges that they were using Stingray/KingFish-type technology when they'd only received orders approving traditional pen register/trap and trace devices. Has Fort Worth found itself in a similar situation? ¿Quien sabe?
Florida officials cite non-disclosure agreements as a basis for secrecy:http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...tower-devices/For some time now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been on a quest to better understand the use and legality of “stingrays." These devices, which are also known as international mobile subscriber iden y (IMSI) catchers, or fake cell towers, can be used to track phones or, in some cases, intercept calls and text messages.
The “Stingray” itself is a trademarked product manufactured by a Florida-based company, the Harris Corporation. (It has since come to be used as a generic term, like Xerox or Kleenex.) Harris is notoriously secretive about the capabilities of its devices and generally won’t talk to the press about their capabilities or deployment.
Earlier in March, the ACLU filed a motion for public access request, requesting do ents and information related to stingray use by nearly 30 Florida police and sheriff's departments.
Among the responses published for the first time on Tuesday was the curious reply from the city of Sunrise, Florida, a town of about 88,000 people, just northwest of Miami.
Through its lawyers, Sunrise officially denied the request, noting that the city would neither confirm nor deny “whether any records responsive to the Request exist and, if any responsive records do exist, cannot and will not public disclose those records.” (In a footnote, the lawyers also cited this Ars story from September 2013 detailing stingrays and other related surveillance devices.) The ACLU published its response to the city's denial on Tuesday.
As the ACLU points out in a Tuesday blog post, the city of Sunrise has already published an invoice from Harris on its own website dated March 13, 2013, showing that the city paid over $65,000 for a stingray. That do ent clearly states, in all-caps on each page, that “disclosure of this do ent and the information it contains are strictly prohibited by Federal Law.”
Utah strikes back: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion...-data.html.csp
VICTORY: Judge Releases Information about Police Use of Stingray Cell Phone Trackers
A Florida judge has sided with the ACLU to order release of information about police use of “stingrays,” which are invasive surveillance devices that send out powerful signals to trick cell phones into transmitting their locations and identifying information.
The Tallahassee judge’s pro-transparency decision stands in contrast to extreme secrecy surrounding stingray records in another Florida court, which is at the center of an emergency motion filed by the ACLU today.
The ACLU learned several months ago about a case where Tallahassee police used a stingray to track a phone to a suspect’s apartment without getting a warrant. Although the detective responsible for the tracking testified in court about using a stingray, in deference to the government’s demand for secrecy the court closed the hearing to the public and sealed the transcript.
The ACLU filed a motion asking the judge to unseal the transcript, citing the public’s First Amendment right of access to court proceedings.
In response, the government tried to justify continued secrecy by invoking the federal Homeland Security Act and other federal laws. As the ACLU explained to the court, those laws have no bearing because this case involves state judicial records, and because the government has waived its ability to invoke broad secrecy arguments by already releasing significant information about its use of stingrays.
Late yesterday, the judge ordered unsealing of the entire transcript. The portion that the government had sought to keep secret is here. It confirms key information about the invasiveness of stingray technology, including that:
- Stingrays “emulate a cellphone tower” and “force” cell phones to register their location and identifying information with the stingray instead of with real cell towers in the area.
- Stingrays can track cell phones whenever the phones are turned on, not just when they are making or receiving calls.
- Stingrays force cell phones in range to transmit information back “at full signal, consuming battery faster.” Is your phone losing battery power particularly quickly today? Maybe the cops are using a stingray nearby.
- When in use, stingrays are “evaluating all the [cell phone] handsets in the area” in order to search for the suspect’s phone. That means that large numbers of innocent bystanders’ location and phone information is captured.
- In this case, police used two versions of the stingray — one mounted on a police vehicle, and the other carried by hand. Police drove through the area using the vehicle-based device until they found the apartment complex in which the target phone was located, and then they walked around with the handheld device and stood “at every door and every window in that complex” until they figured out which apartment the phone was located in. In other words, police were lurking outside people’s windows and sending powerful electronic signals into their private homes in order to collect information from within.
- The Tallahassee detective testifying in the hearing estimated that, between spring of 2007 and August of 2010, the Tallahassee Police had used stingrays approximately “200 or more times.”
The judge’s decision to release the transcript demonstrates that the government’s attempts to hide basic information about stingray surveillance from the public are unreasonable.
The decision is also a rejection of the federal government’s attempts to meddle in state public records matters (in this case, the FBI had asked the local prosecutor to keep the transcript secret, even though this was purely a local investigation).
When police engage in invasive tracking of our locations and communications, it is crucial that the public have access to accurate information so it can participate in an informed debate. The release of this transcript serves that goal.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...out-police-use
public officials in Repug states leading the way
one did, one didn't, don't know if the 2 FL judges were elected or appointed. you could look it up
so then, the allergy to praising Republicans apparently does not extend to refusing to acknowledge good things that happen in RED states, but pretty damn near.
Consistency and hobgoblins......
a step in the right direction... now the question is how we stop this...
the NatSec/police/surveillance state is an unstoppable monster.
NSA is harvesting Bs of photos from facebook, instagram, etc.
Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created in One of the World's Freest Countries
In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of do ents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, "No Place to Hide."
The do ents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.
Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.
It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Cons ution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of their "persons, houses, papers and effects."
Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden do ents.
It is also well to remember that defense of the fundamental right to privacy helped to spark the American Revolution. In the 18th century, the tyrant was the British government, which claimed the right to intrude freely into the homes and personal lives of American colonists. Today it is American citizens' own government that abrogates to itself this authority.
Britain retains the stance that drove the colonists to rebellion, though on a more restricted scale, as power has shifted in world affairs. The British government has called on the NSA "to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, swept up by its dragnet," The Guardian reports, working from do ents provided by Snowden.
British citizens (like other international customers) will also doubtless be pleased to learn that the NSA routinely receives or intercepts routers, servers and other computer network devices exported from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools, as Greenwald reports in his book.
As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might be sent to President Obama's huge and expanding databases in Utah.
In other ways too, the cons utional lawyer in the White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties. The principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.
Recently The New York Times reported the "anguish" of a federal judge who had to decide whether to allow the force-feeding of a Syrian prisoner who is on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.
No "anguish" was expressed over the fact that he has been held without trial for 12 years in Guantanamo, one of many victims of the leader of the Free World, who claims the right to hold prisoners without charges and to subject them to torture.
These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.
The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.
Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.
It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, Obama has a series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.
To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two en ies must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.
The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."
Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.
Huntington's insight into state power and policy was both accurate and prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration was launching its war on terror - which quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, primarily in Central America, but extending well beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
From that day forward, in order to carry out violence and subversion abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is terrorists that we are fighting, though there are other options: drug lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be seeking to attack and destroy us.
Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.
In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...ted-one-freest
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...y-surveillanceAs the Associated Press reported this week, the Obama administration has been telling local cops to keep information on Stingrays secret from members of the news media, even when it seems like local public records laws would mandate their disclosure. The AP noted:
Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.Some of the government's tactics to hide Stingray from journalists and the public have been downright disturbing. After the ACLU had filed a records request for information on Stingrays, the local police force initially told them that, yes, they had the do ents and to come on down to the station to look at them. But just before an ACLU rep was due to arrive, US Marshals seized the records and hid them away at another location, in what Wessler describes as "a blatant violation of state open-records laws".
The federal government has used various other tactics around the country to prevent disclosure of similar information.
nasty business.
Corporations and govt can hide from citizens, conduct their business in secret, while both rape citizens' reasonable expectation of privacy.
SCOTUS unanimously agrees, at least when you are arrested beforehand:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...5f1_story.htmlThe Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching the cellphone of someone they arrest, saying it was applying to modern technology the same privacy rights that date back to the nation’s birth.
Modern cellphones “hold for many Americans the privacies of life,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, quoting an earlier Supreme Court decision.
“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
Roberts said that in most cases when police seize a cellphone from a suspect, the answer is simple: “Get a warrant.”
the unanimity is very surprising, I expected at least assholes Scalia and Thomas would dissent, if not the extremeist SCOTUS5 voting for cellphone searches.
your confusion is understandable. the world ain't like you think.
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