U.S. Marshals/DHS seize 'Stingray' surveillance documents before the ACLU can review them
A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
Should this move surprise anyone? When the head of the NSA James Clapper can lie about spying on Americans would we expect any less from the U.S. Marshals/DHS?
The surprise move by the U.S. Marshals Service stunned the American Civil Liberties Union, which earlier this year filed the public records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police department for information detailing its use of the controversial surveillance tool.
The ACLU had an appointment last Tuesday to review documents pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota police detective. But marshals swooped in at the last minute to grab the records, claiming they belong to the U.S. Marshals Service and barring the police from releasing them.
An assistant city attorney sent an email cancelling the meeting on the basis that the U.S. Marshals Service was claiming the records as their own and instructing the local cops not to release them. Their explanation: the Marshals Service had deputized the local officer, and therefore the records were actually the property of the federal government.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.
“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”
The obvious question here is why both of these agencies are so reluctant to turn over these documents. If they're willing to break state records laws (the local court being complicit in this activity), the information contained must be pretty damaging. What has been discovered already points to the department's deliberate avoidance of a paper trail, what with the single document requests and the misuse of the trap and trace statute to avoid filing warrant requests.
If you've got nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear, as the saying goes. The government expects us to live by that adage as it deploys warrantless surveillance, but it seems unable to hold itself to the same standard.
DHS doesn't want the public to know police are using 'Stingray" to spy on us illegally!
Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and record a device’s unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device’s location with greater precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower location.
The records sought by the ACLU are important because the organization has learned that a Florida police detective obtained permission to use a stingray simply by filing an application with the court under Florida’s “trap and trace” statute instead of obtaining a probable-cause warrant. Trap and trace orders generally are used to collect information from phone companies about telephone numbers received and called by a specific account. A stingray, however, can track the location of cell phones, including inside private spaces.
The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because the device doesn’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages, but instead operates like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace.
Better late than never, the Wall St. Journal filed legal motions to unseal surveillance documents.
The publisher of The Wall Street Journal filed legal motions in a Texas federal court Monday seeking to make public documents on electronic surveillance that have been kept under seal.
The documents, which outline the government’s legal justifications for surveillance in criminal cases, are part of a Wall Street Journal investigation into confidentiality of electronic-surveillance applications. Like thousands of similar judicial records across the country, they have remained sealed for years.
“This pervasive secrecy is particularly troubling given the widespread public interest in issues relating to government surveillance and the privacy of electronic communications,” according to the filings by Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher.
Among the proceedings the Journal is seeking to unseal are several related to controversial monitoring technology. One involves a government request to get a “cell tower dump,” a technique in which investigators can gather data on all the phones connecting to a given cellphone tower, without showing “probable cause.”
Another includes a government request and hearing transcript about the use of a device known as a “stingray,” which acts as a fake cellphone tower and can be used to pinpoint a suspect’s location.
Disturbing news out of New York, the NY Times wants more DHS/police surveillance cameras installed around the city.
The ACLU and EPIC have campaigned long and hard against surveillance cameras in public spaces.
This story, headlined “After Boy and Girl Are Stabbed, Anger Over a Lack of Cameras” is only surprising because it appears the New York Times wants increased spying at the expense of Americans privacy:
The 7-year-old girl is hospitalized in critical condition, the only witness to a crime that so far defies explanation: A man stabbed two young children in the elevator of a public-housing project and escaped into the late-spring evening. Her best friend, a 6-year-old boy, is dead. Though residents of the Brooklyn housing project saw a man fleeing through the development after the attack, he remained at large on Monday, the search made more difficult because the building has no surveillance cameras. Living in housing projects in East New York means living with the daily threat of violence, and Boulevard Houses is no exception. But until Sunday night, parents felt safe taking their children downstairs to play…. Not surprisingly, elected officials accused the New York City Housing Authority, which manages the building, of being slow to install surveillance cameras.
Corporate media's parroting of Big brother's song & dance is getting old! We don't need more surveillance to be safe!
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-seize-stingray-documents/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/03/the-new-york-times-makes-the-case-for-surveillance-cameras/
Irony: Florida judge releases info. about police use of Stingray
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.
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.”
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/victory-judge-releases-information-about-police-use
Judge says Supreme Court should overturn America's awful surveillance precedent:
Judge Lynn Winmill, in the Idaho district court, has said that Judge Leon's ruling should be the model for a Supreme Court ruling overturning Smith v. Maryland. However, since no such ruling has taken place, he has to reject the claim in this case:
Judge Leon's decision should serve as a template for a Supreme Court opinion. And it might yet. Justice Sotomayor is inclined to reconsider Smith, finding it “ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.” See U.S. v. Jones, 132 U.S. 945, 957 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring). The Fourth Amendment, in her view, should not “treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy.”
But Smith was not overruled, and it continues – along with the Circuit decisions discussed above – to bind this Court. This authority constrains the Court from joining Klayman. Accordingly, the Court will grant the defendants’ motion to dismiss and deny Smith's motion for injunctive relief.
5,000 years of history shows that mass spying is always aimed at crushing dissent.
Click here to read more.
Polish NGO to Obama: mass surveillance is not freedom.
The Polish president of Panoptykon Foundation, Katarzyna Szymielewicz, who is watching President Obama’s visit in Poland, said,
“It is rather difficult to celebrate the anniversary of first Polish free elections in the aftermath of the recent Snowden revelations—indicating that Poland cooperated with US intelligence and delivered vast amounts of telecommunication data (possibly about own citizens).
How is it possible that until now Polish citizens haven’t heard a word of explanation from their democratically elected representatives with regard to Snowden’s allegations? We still don't know answers to basic questions: what was the purpose of Polish-US cooperation; who was the target; what sort of data was intercepted and why? If President Obama leaves Poland on the 4th of June without touching on these questions, it will be the failure of Polish democracy. Without accountability and transparency, democracy becomes a facade.”
Click here to read more.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140603/14105727446/judge-says-supreme-court-should-overturn-awful-surveillance-precedent-until-it-does-she-has-to-reject-case-against-nsa.shtml
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/spying-dissent.html
Sharyl Attkisson discusses how our corporate media is failing to provide real news: