Which, of course, is the refrain of petty authoritarian bureaucrats.
(Another in a continuing series on public communications monitoring.)
Baltimore police have been using “cell phone trackers” or Stingrays for a
wide variety of criminal investigations; from murder to harassing phone
calls. Problem is, they didn’t disclose their use during trial to defense
attorneys nor the court; as Maryland law states. As a result, about 2000
convictions are now in jeopardy.
Some are pooh-poohing the revelations, others are taking them more
seriously, including the city prosecutor’s office which prosecuted those
cases and would have to retry if they are ruled “mistrials”.
” The city’s prosecutors took a different view. Brown, the spokeswoman for
the State’s Attorney, said Maryland court rules require the authorities to
tell defendants about stingrays in every case in which one was used. She
said the office is working with the police to make sure they inform judges
before they use a stingray, and inform prosecutors after they make an
arrest.
“It’s something we’re very committed to resolving,” Brown said.”…..
As a previous USA Today article makes clear, Baltimore is not the only PD
using this technology for non- War on Drugs/War on Terror activities.
Much more blow-
——————————-
“Baltimore is hardly alone. Police in Tallahassee used their stingray to
track a woman wanted for check forging, according to records provided to the
ACLU last year. Tacoma, Wash., police used theirs to try to find a stolen
city laptop, according to records released to the website Muckrock. Other
departments have acknowledged that they planned to use their stingrays for
solving street crimes.”…
“”The problem is you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have it be some
super-secret national security terrorist finder and then use it to solve
petty crimes,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Hanni Fakhoury said…
——————————-
However, even if they are used for serious crimes, the charges are often
dropped or reduced as the revelation of Stingray use can be considered a
security breach so severe that it can not be discussed in open court.
“In 2010, police used a stingray to track a man they suspected had kidnapped
his girlfriend’s two daughters, ages 3 and 5, and demanded half of her
$6,000 tax refund as a ransom “in exchange for her older daughter’s life.”
He threatened in text messages to throw the older daughter off a bridge if
he didn’t get the money, according to court records. Detectives quickly
recovered the children unharmed. Prosecutors quickly dropped the kidnapping
charges against the man, Kwame Oseitutu; he was convicted only of
misdemeanor misuse of a telephone. Prosecutors did not explain that
decision…….
That attitude is encouraged by the FBI and emphasized by the training PDs
get from elements of US law enforcement.
“Officers rely on reports from phone companies to track a suspect’s phone to
a particular neighborhood, then use their tracker, known as a Hailstorm, to
pinpoint his location. In one court filing in 2013, an officer said Advanced
Tactical Team detectives received 40 hours of training on using the tracker
and an additional eight hours of “cellular theory” training from the U.S.
Secret Service…”
In Baltimore, the USAToday logs showed that “barely” half ended in
convictions. Even when pressed in court by a judge, prosecutors have been
willing to dis-allow evidence rather than disclose Stingray use , citing the
FBI non-disclosure agreements.
So we have to consider, the FBI has made it easy for local PDs to purchase
this equipment, which is akin to wired telephone tapping. Several states
have discovery requirements that mandate if a suspect was under electronic
surveillance, it be disclosed to defense and in court. However, even in
heinous crimes, police and prosecutors (if made aware) are willing to drop
prosecutions rather than have this equipment’s capabilities be made public
in court. Plus their use is expanding from the supposed use in WoT/WoD to
more common, petty crimes. Even there, cases are dropped so as not to
compromise the secrecy surrounding this equipment.
Like everything else, the FBI-
-Wants to co-op local PDs with equipment; band new whizbangs, so as to have
them on hand if really needed. A Federal Law Enforcement auxiliary so to
speak. Same might be said about the Pentagon and the militarization of
local police.
-But you can’t put a toy like that in front of police and not have them use
it. Like asking a little girl not to open that Barbie Irish Princess doll
package as it may be valuable as a collector item sometime in the future.
So anything involving a cell phone gets a call to the Advanced technical
Team. But by trying to keeping the lid on its capabilities (in case we need
it sometime in the future), the FBI is forcing local law enforcement to toss
some serious criminal prosecutions. And they play along because if they
don’t, then they might not get the Next brand new whizbang coming down the
pike from the Feebeees.
So far, all that’s been disclosed is that the Stingrays are directional with limited
content monitoring, picking out one phone out of hundreds in its “cell”. As discussed elsewhere,
DRT (Dirtboxes) are much more capable and not only pick out and locate a
phone, but break the encryption of LTE 4G phones and monitor its content
in real time. This is NSA/Pentagon equipment used overseas and now available
to PDs in LA and Chicago (at least known publically)
Getting a chance at that is something to keep quiet about.
Its been obvious for sometime, but the symbiotic relationship between local
and Fed law enforcement has really corrupted the concept of “local” law
enforcement.
R
——————-excerpt—————
Defense lawyers in Baltimore are examining nearly 2,000 cases in which the
police secretly used powerful cellphone tracking devices, and they plan to
ask judges to throw out “a large number” of criminal convictions as a
result.
“This is a crisis, and to me it needs to be addressed very quickly,” said
Baltimore’s deputy public defender, Natalie Finegar, who is coordinating
those challenges. “No stone is going to be left unturned at this point.”
The move follows a USA TODAY investigation this week that revealed that
Baltimore police have used cellphone trackers, commonly known as stingrays,
to investigate crimes as minor as harassing phone calls, then concealed the
surveillance from suspects and their lawyers. Maryland law generally
requires that electronic surveillance be disclosed in court.
Finegar and others said they do not know how many criminal cases they
ultimately will seek to reopen because of the secret phone tracking, but she
expects it to be “a large number.” The public defender’s office is reviewing
a surveillance log published by USA TODAY that lists more than 1,900 cases
in which the police indicated they had used a stingray. It includes at least
200 public defender clients who were ultimately convicted of a crime.
Stingrays are suitcase-sized devices that allow the police to pinpoint a
cellphone’s location to within a few yards by posing as a cell tower. In the
process, they also can intercept information from the phones of nearly
everyone else who happens to be nearby.
At least 53 police departments from Miami to Los Angeles own one of the cell
trackers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But few have
revealed when or how the devices are used, in part because they signed
non-disclosure agreements with the FBI.
As a result, Baltimore’s surveillance log provides a rare window into the
secret surveillance. That log, matched with court records, showed that the
authorities had used stingrays to hunt everyone from killers to petty
thieves, usually did so without obtaining search warrants, and routinely
sought to hide that surveillance from the people they arrested.
