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from the turning-tide-stranding-stingrays dept.
A group of defense attorneys, including a public defender, will review over 1,900 cases in which Stingray cellphone tracking technology was used secretly. They plan to ask judges to throw out "a large number" of criminal convictions based on Stingray evidence. From USA Today:
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.
[...] "This has really opened the floodgates," Baltimore defense lawyer Josh Insley said. He said he could start filing challenges to some of his clients' convictions by next week.
A spokeswoman for Baltimore's State's Attorney, Tammy Brown, said prosecutors will evaluate each challenge on its own merits. She agreed that prosecutors are required to tell defendants when the police use a stingray, but "we need to get that information first."
Overturning a criminal conviction is no small task. Before they can even ask judges to take that step, defense lawyers have to comb through the surveillance log to figure out which of their clients were targets of the phone tracking, then contact them in prison. "It's probably going to be a long process," ACLU attorney Nathan Wessler said. "But now at least you have defense lawyers who know what happened to their clients and can invoke the power of the courts to make sure that the Constitution was complied with."
Via The Register.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:47PM
mobile phones are meant to be tracked! they only work because of it.
somewhere / some place a computer (probably a rather big one) is tracking all the mobile phones so that signals can be routed correctly from one antenna tower (origin) to another (destination).
yes, yes the X-men professors cerrebro is a very good visual analogy!
i doubt that there is one huge monster antenna somewhere through which all mobile-signals flow : ]
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i think we need to drag this surveillance monster into broad daylight! it will survive, maybe even become visible so we can point fingers at it and take pictures.
trying to shoehorn some privacy law onto a scientific and technical fact that is located at the other end of the spectrum is plain stupid.
it's like trying to shoehorn "un-copiability" (DRM stuff) unto a device that is meant to be a universal copy machine (computer).
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i think this whole "privacy" debate is a false flag operation: it's like privacy to snoop! keep it in the dark. cover it with alot of legal document paperwork (which will, sooner or later, be automated).
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i say out with the monster and the facts!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:07PM
Apparently you didn't read AC comment #229479 above.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @08:52PM
Bank transactions, internet traffic, and snail mail are all also designed to be tracked, for your definition of tracked. Would it be okay for complete strangers to go through all of your records? Know all of your account details down to your banking passwords?
Just because something is tracked or trackable does not make it just to do so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @09:17PM
i assume this "all tracking" is happening : ]
who are you kidding?
the sad part is when people lose access to "coincidence" and incidents/happenings start to become "scripted": your life becomes non-genuine : (
people with access to this "all tracking" data are the only free people left in the world: "ueber-mensch"is watching game in the game park.
point is stop allowing the "uber-mensch" to hid and deny the facts!
if left in the dark, dark things happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:33AM
mobile phones are meant to be tracked! they only work because of it.
But the government doesn't need to do the tracking. Since the rest of your comment relies on this faulty reasoning (The technology requires tracking by the companies, so we should *also* allow the government to have our data.), it can safely be ignored.