by Nathan Freed WesslerFor years, state and local police departments across the country have been using Stingrays to track and locate phones in the absence of effective oversight from federal agencies. That may soon end. Today, the ACLU and ACLU affiliates in Northern California, New York, and Maryland, joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are urging the Federal Communications Commission to order local police to stop using Stingrays, at least until the FCC can create rules to protect against excessive secrecy and abuse.
Stingrays, also known as cell site simulators, track phones by mimicking cell towers and tricking phones in the area into broadcasting their unique identifying information. In the course of communicating with those phones, Stingrays can interfere with their ability to make and receive calls. Last month, three civil rights groups—the Center for Media Justice, Color of Change, and New America’s Open Technology Institute—filed a complaint with the FCC pointing out that state and local law enforcement agencies are violating the Federal Communications Act by using Stingrays without the required FCC broadcast licenses and in a way that interferes with cellular communications. Focusing on the staggeringly frequent use of Stingrays by the Baltimore Police Department, the complaint also pointed out their disparate impact on communities of color.
Our submission to the FCC supports these arguments, and provides the FCC with additional information about the widespread use of Stingrays by dozens of law enforcement agencies across the country and the ways in which police have intentionally hidden information about the technology from local lawmakers, judges, and the public. As we tell the FCC, any system for providing Stingray use licenses to police departments “must be predicated on strong protections to minimize interference with cellular communications, to facilitate proper oversight from local elected lawmakers and from courts, and to ensure transparency to the public.”
Before local police should be allowed to use a Stingray, they should be required to obtain explicit approval from the local elected legislative body (like the city council) after fully disclosing the impact of Stingrays on bystanders’ cellular communications and privacy, and allowing for public debate. The communities affected by surveillance technologies need to be intimately involved in deciding if and how they should be used. The FCC should also require that police departments:
- Disclose information about how Stingrays work and their impacts on third parties to judges before obtaining warrants;
- Comply with federal Department of Justice guidelines for Stingray use and adopt additional procedures to minimize the impact on bystanders’ communications; and
- Publicly report information about acquisition and use of the technology.
Only through strict oversight and transparency rules can we hope to curb illegal and discriminatory uses of surveillance technology. Many of the state and local police departments that use Stingrays have a documented history of racial bias in their policing activities, making it incredibly important that local communities have sufficient information to decide whether and how police should be permitted to engage in invasive surveillance.
Nathan Freed Wessler is a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
I like the graphic of the laser beam destroying houses.
But only the houses that belong to people of color.
BP wrote:
> But only the houses that belong to people of color.
I’m anti-government surveillance and I know that saying “All lives matter” is “racist” in the eyes of many. I may have missed it but is it now also “racist” to say “everyone deserves to be free from illegal government surveillance” (when I read the headline I was wondering how the surveillance of “mostly” white people is “Discriminatory”)?
P.S. When there are over a half million articles about something on the web it is a stretch to call it “Top Secret”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/12/31/snoopsnitch_is_an_app_by_the_german_srlabs_that_detects_imsi_catchers_stingrays.html
Is this the first Vanguard article you have ever read? By noon the proposed hotel in South Davis will be considered racist for some reason or another.
Too late, the V already went there, remember the “strangers” controversy?
Fortunately, for the motivated and tech savvy, there are countermeasures available that enable tracking and blocking of stingrays. When the government screws with the People, some of the People will screw with the government, whatever the law says be damned.
Discriminatory or not, this needs to stop. In fact, how the F— does it even exist in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Alan – Very important question!
Oink!
Alan wrote:
> In fact, how the F— does it even exist in the land
> of the free and the home of the brave?
You must be talking about the formerly land of the free and the brave where the government didn’t monitor every phone call and guys stormed beaches dodging bullets. Just 75 years later we have a government that tracks every phone call and e-mail and guys demanding “safe spaces” so they can hide from the risk of hearing something they perceive as a “microagression”…
Yeah, yeah, that’ the one.
Wish they’d use the technology to monitor and trace all the scammers, fraudulent folk, and solar panel folk who end up making ~75% of all the calls to my home #.
Spoofed #’s, folk saying from they represent Microsoft (an they want to help me with the virus they detected), IRS calls saying we’ll be arrested within the hour, free Carribean cruises, they can reduce my credit card interest rates, “call centers”, robo-calls, etc. And we’ve registered on all the DNC lists…
If they could focus on that, I’d go for it… [as I was writing that, got another one…]
hpierce wrote:
> Wish they’d use the technology to monitor
> and trace all the scammers,
Caller ID is your friend. It has been almost 10 years since I have talked to a telemarketer or political call center…
Yes… use that… I don’t answer… but they keep calling… have even use call blocking (limit, ~ 30 #’s)… they choose another spoofed # and they keep calling… often caller ID just comes up with “private caller”…
At least the Watchers are being watched:
http://www.databreachtoday.com/blogs/numerous-cisco-devices-still-vulnerable-to-extrabacon-p-2238
By the way, when is Edward Snowden going to receive his Medal of Freedom from Congress? Oink!
Anytime he wants to though he has to pick it up in person..
Geez, where have you guys been? This ship sailed in the 1960s. Since ECHELON was launched, no electronic communication on the planet has been “secure.” It is now backed up by multiple governmental and private operations and generations of improvement in technology. You can’t put it back in the bottle. I have been telling folks for all these years, you may act as though you are ashamed and embarrassed or you may just not give a damn. I choose the latter.
There are other battles we can win.
Biddlin,
Of course, you’re right. But, some of the Vanguard’s younger readers might not be aware of just how advanced Big Brother has become, how extensive his aspirations are, nor how interesting some of the countermeasure technology is getting for anyone forced to fight an asymmetrical battle. New laws and political action are only one way to constrain or defeat Big Brother and his ilk.
Interesting link from around a year ago. This deals only with detecting. There are other approaches for blocking and maybe even a few for inactivating. I’m sure the countermeasures technology is only getting better. . .
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.srlabs.snoopsnitch&hl=en
Sometimes it’s not necessary to sit around waiting and waiting for politicians and courts to get off their sofas to achieve justice -or at least partial relief from tyranny. Oink!
I have a device that I carry in my wallet, with a mate in my valise to protect my credit cards and ID from being remotely scanned. When I get to the first airport checkpoint, I hand them all over to be scanned into the worlds biggest and least secure networks. I am never surprised when my bank calls at 3 am to ask if I just bought a coat in Chelsea boutique or ordered 30 pizzas for a dorm at Christs College, Cambridge.