New Emails Show That Feds Instructed Police To Lie About Using Stingray Mobile Phone Snooping

by Mike Masnick

We've been covering the increasingly widespread use of Stingray or similar mobile phone tower spoofing equipment by law enforcement. The stories have been getting increasingly bizarre lately, starting with the news that police were claiming that non-disclosure agreements prevented them from getting a warrant to use the technology. And then, there was the recent news that the federal government was regularly stepping in to claim ownership of documents related to the technology (even when it's used by local police) in order to block them from being obtained under Freedom of Information laws. Just this morning, we wrote about some new evidence that police are claiming they need these devices to stop "weapons of mass destruction," though they then just use them to spy on people suspected of everyday crimes instead.

Late last night, the ACLU came out with perhaps the most explosive information so far: a set of internal police emails showing that the US Marshals have been instructing police to lie to courts about the use of such devices. Specifically, rather than revealing the use of the tool, they're told to just tell the court they got the information from a "confidential source." While affidavits may initially note the use of such a device, the police are told to submit a new affidavit after the fact without mentioning the Stingray, and seal the old one, so that it never becomes public. The key parts of the email are highlighted below:

This is highly questionable. Just to repeat: this is the federal government loaning out equipment to spoof mobile phone towers to spy on people and then instructing (practically demanding) that the police hide or suppress this information by claiming that it came from a "confidential source" and by sealing any affidavits that accidentally mention the use of the equipment. As the ACLU notes this practice "deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance ." It also seems like a fairly straightforward due process violation. This even goes beyond "parallel construction" in which illegal surveillance is concealed by "recreating" it in other ways. In this case, you have illegally obtained evidence... and then police are just told to lie to the court about it.

This is stunningly bad.

As some legal experts are quick to note, this seems like an astoundingly stupid move by both the US Marshals and the local police who took them up on their request. That link, includes quotes from a number of legal experts interviewed by Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica, some of whom are actually supportive of the use of Stingrays, but who note that this effort could very well be fraud on the court.

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NYPD Arrest Man for Video Recording Cops during Traffic Stop, Claiming Phone Could have been Gun

by Carlos Miller

New York City police arrested a man for video recording them with an iPhone, using the laughable old lie that the phone could have been a gun, even going as far as claiming an NYPD cop had been shot by a kid with his phone.

Not only has there never been a single reported instance of a phone being used as a gun in the United States, the only evidence that it ever existed appears in a Youtube video out of Europe using a bulky, outdated phone large enough to contain four bullets.

Nevertheless, Will Paybarah ended up spending 13 hours in jail on charges of ?resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, and criminal mischief.

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South Florida Deputy on Trial for Stealing Phone From Citizen Recording Him

by Carlos Miller

Broward County sheriff?s deputy Paul Pletcher was off-duty when he got into road rage altercation with another woman, so he pulled her over, stormed up to her truck and began berating her.

Her passenger pulled out a cell phone and began video recording, clearly capturing him saying, ?give me the phone,? three times before reaching into the vehicle and snatching the phone.

Pletcher then drove off, smashing the phone in a nearby parking lot, where it was later retrieved by Plantation police officer, whom were responding to the woman?s call.

Pletcher was eventually arrested and charged with several felonies where he is facing 11 years in prison.

His trial began this week.

His defense: He thought the phone was a concealed weapon, which caused him to fear for his life.

That fear is evident from the recovered video, which captured the following exchange:

?Give me the phone!? he repeated, reaching into the car and toward the camera lens.

?No talking to me like that.?

?Give me the phone, Now!?

?Don?t touch me.?

?Give me the phone!?

?Wait! Wait!?

Despite the visual and audio evidence against him that he was committing strong-armed robbery, his attorney is still able to look the jury in the eye and state the following:

??Paul Pletcher saw somebody who was driving erratically ? Paul Pletcher took the position that when that cell phone was out and being used it could have been a concealed weapon.?

Pletcher has gotten away with stealing cameras from citizens before, so he is confident he will get away with this crime, especially considering it took authorities seven months to charge him after the 2011 incident and more than a year to fire him, which might explain his smirking mugshot and his celebratory Facebook page.

_
Carlos Miller runs the website Photography is not a Crime.

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Oh yea the tried and true bullshit excuse, but I am always in fear for my whinny life that, that phone looked like an anti tank weapon and I shit my pants in absolute fear. You worthless pos and that includes your sparkle pony bitch of a lawyer.

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Swedish Regime To Give Police, Customs, Tax Authorities Realtime Access to Citizens' Phone, Mail, More

by RICK FALKVINGE

The Swedish citizens will get all their phone calls and e-mail traffic wiretapped in real time not just by the Swedish NSA branch, but also by police, customs, the tax authority, and others. These plans were revealed today by the Ny Teknik magazine, sending shockwaves among civil rights activists. This follows a previous law change that gave the Swedish NSA branch, the FRA, realtime access to all Internet traffic that crossed the country borders ? effectively wiretapping everybody warrantlessly all the time.

Circumventing the entire legislative process and every democratic shred of oversight, the Swedish Police are demanding voluntary agreements from telecom operators to give the Police and other Swedish authorities direct and real-time access to phone call data, mail traffic, and much more. This is not just the slippery slope into an Orwellian society that civil rights activists have warned about: this is a slippery precipice.

We?re now officially past the point where ?national security? (and the the ever-present disgusting child porn/terrorism argument) is used to justify bulk warrantless wiretapping of everybody, all the time. We?ve arrived at the point where the Police justify the complete elimination of entire classes of civil liberties with nothing more than ?because it can be done, and we want it?.

The authorities that would get direct real-time access to most communications aren?t just the Police, but also the Customs Office, the Security Police, and the Tax Authority (!!).

A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don?t get everything they point at. While the border between the two is arguably a lot of gray area, and subject to a lot of polemic, it can no longer be reasonably stated that police powers are under checks and balances.

According to the Ny Teknik article, followed up by many others in Swedish oldmedia, it?s not just real-time data on phone calls and mail that the Police are demanding. A sample of other things included in the proposed mass surveillance package:

How telecom bills are paid ? cash, credit, direct deposit. If credit card, which one, and if direct deposit, from which bank account.The subscriber?s PUK code, enabling a police authority to activate the cellphone?s SIM card without the subscriber?s PIN code.There are hints in the article that many other items may be covered by the realtime wiretapping, referring to a wiretapping standard called ITS27.

The only telecom operator to say a blank never, this is completely unthinkable to the Police demands is the Swedish Tele 2.

The fact that the Swedish regime isn?t immediately firing everybody in the Police demanding this wholesale abolition of civil rights is practically an endorsement of the plans ? and one that goes hand in hand with the much-criticized Swedish FRA Law that legalized warrantless bulk wiretapping in the first place.

UPDATE ? a followup article in Ny Teknik reveals that the wiretapping standard ITS27 mentioned above was developed by the British spy agency GCHQ.
_
Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.

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Police Once Again Mistake Cell Phone for Gun - But This Time, They Open Fire

By Carlos Miller

Las Vegas police responded to a call of a suicidal man who pulled out a cell phone and pointed it at them, perhaps to record them, prompting an officer to shoot at him.

The officer missed but the man fell to the ground anyway where police arrested him.

?The individual reached into his pocket, he pulled out a dark object, pointed it at the sergeant in a manner like he would be firing a pistol,? explained Deputy Chief Al Salinas of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in the above video.

The incident took place Sunday at 2 p.m., so darkness of the night did not contribute to the officer seeing the cell phone as a ?dark object.?

The man, who has not been identified, will most likely be charged with assault with a deadly weapon as well as battery with a deadly weapon because prior to the shooting, he had been throwing landscaping rocks at the officers, according to Salinas.

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ICE Starts Raiding Mobile Phone Repair Shops To Stop Repairs With Aftermarket Parts

by Mike Masnick

Apparently Homeland Security's Immigration & Custom's Enforcement (ICE) team has found a new tech issue to overreact to and overhype. shutslar points us to a story of ICE agents raiding 25 smartphone repair shops in South Florida for daring to repair phones with aftermarket parts, rather than original products from Apple. As seems standard for ICE these days, rather than actually understanding the details at hand, they're taking orders from a corporate entity, in this case, Apple:

Apple is working with the government to shut down those who mislead consumers.

This seems like a massive overreaction to a mere case of "misleading" consumers. They paint this as if it's some massive danger to make use of an aftermarket/non-Apple parts in doing the repair, but it's not. In many cases, such aftermarket parts are a good way to fix a phone at a more reasonable price. If Apple feels some of the shops are misleading customers, then it can sue for trademark infringement and deal with it that way.

Having over-aggressive, amped up ICE agents pretending this is a drug raid and that they need to "shut down" these shops is a massive overreaction which only serves to help prop up Apple's bottom line by taking aftermarket competitive parts out of the market, so that Apple can keep the margins on its parts extra high. Either way, there's simply no reason for treating the whole thing like a drug raid:

"When they came in it almost looked like a drug raid," Said Abella.

Abella claims there were 20 ICE agents and two people from Apple in his small Bird Road store.

Abella says he began fixing Apple Products because everyone else was.

"We got the parts from a company in California. To this day that vendor is still selling parts," Said Abella.

"Why did the come after me?? he added.

They came after you because you weren't paying the toll to Apple, and Apple doesn't like competition. Why our taxpayer money is being used to support such a massive overreaction, shutting down small businesses who provide a useful service repairing phones, is beyond me. Honestly, ICE's propensity to act as private cops (with guns) doing favors for giant businesses is really sickening. ICE has been out of control for a long time, and shutting down small businesses because Apple doesn't want to compete? That's just crazy.

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Fuck the ice boyz and fuck apple and fuck this jackhole cuntry for allowing those ass clown corporations to mandate law where they have no fucking authority. MOLAN LABE bitches. That is total bull shit. Now I guess that anybody that fixes their car with aftermarkets parts is going to get raided by ICE. I know government is stupid but why does this not suprise me.

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New Results From Our Nationwide Cell Phone Tracking Records Requests

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By Allie Bohm

It?s been over a year since 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies seeking information about their policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones. And 13 months later (and in the wake of this front page article in the New York Times), we?re still handling responses. We?ve posted the latest batch of documents received on our interactive webmap; here are highlights:

Some law enforcement agencies are trying to avoid letting the public know what they?re doing. The law enforcement guide for police in Irvine, Calif., specifically states, ?Do not disclose this information in court any more than is absolutely necessary to make your case. Never disclose to the media these techniques?especially cell tower tracking.? We saw the same attitude in training materials from the Iowa Fusion Center, which instructs law enforcement, ?Do not mention to the public or media the use of cell phone technology or equipment to locate the targeted subject.? Read: ?We would hate for the public to know how easy it is for us to obtain their personal information. It would be inconvenient if they asked for privacy protections.? Law enforcement could most likely solve more crimes more expediently if they could break down a suspect?s front door or open his/her postal mail without a warrant, but as my colleague Catherine Crump points out, while that may be convenient, it is not okay. Warrantless cell phone location tracking shouldn?t be either.

Fortunately, Irvine?s isn?t the only word on advice to law enforcement agents. Santa Ana, Calif., provides its agents with much more civil liberties-friendly training than its neighbor to the south, and its warnings should serve any law enforcement agency: ?Without a warrant . . . cell phone location data are released only in exigent situations. Exigent circumstances are best described as immediate danger of death or serious bodily injury to any person. Keep in mind that even if you convince a provider that the circumstances warrant release of the information, a district attorney and defense attorney will at some point be reviewing the case.?

More importantly, some of the law enforcement agencies in California, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, reported that, like their counterparts in parts of Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, and New Jersey, they always obtain probable cause warrants in order to track cell phone location information. And then there?s the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, which does not currently track cell phone location information, but which promised that if it starts sometime in the future, it will definitely require probable cause warrants in order to do so. We hope other law enforcement agencies will make similar commitments. Location information is too sensitive for law enforcement agencies to be accessing it in criminal investigations without a warrant, and these agencies show that in every geographic region in the country, a warrant requirement is a completely reasonable and workable policy. And by the way, the law enforcement agency in Nevada that reports obtaining warrants? Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. If Sin City police get warrants, can?t everyone?

The new documents also touch on one of the most common questions we?ve been asked about cell phone location tracking: in what sorts of investigations are law enforcement agencies using cell phone location tracking? It?s a question that 5,509 pages later we still wish we had a better answer to and that, despite our records requests, the public is still largely in the dark about. San Bernadino County, Calif., sent us a ton of invoices from a one year period. (Any number-crunchers out there want to figure out how much money they spent to track cell phones that year? The documents are here.) ?Okay to pay narcotics? was scrawled on some of the invoices. Others were marked ?Okay to pay [redacted].? From this, we can surmise that cell phone location tracking is used in drug cases (no surprise to anyone who has been following the few location tracking cases to make it to the courts). Either they redacted ?narcotics? on some invoices and not others, or they redacted other types of investigations where cell phone tracking was used, and someone out there does not want us to know what all they?re using cell phone location tracking for.

Overall, these new documents provide even more reason for Congress to pass the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, which would require law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant in order to access location information and, in the interim, for state legislatures to pass similar legislation at the state level. That way, we?ll know that law enforcement is only tracking cell phone location in legitimate investigations and with proper court oversight. And, you can help! Head to our action center and tell your members of Congress to support the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act right now.

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Judge says it's OK to use your seized phone to impersonate you and entrap your friends

By Cory Doctorow

A federal judge has upheld the practice of police using seized phones to impersonate their owners, reading messages and sending sending entrapping replies to contacts in the phone's memory, without a warrant. The judge reasoned that constitutional privacy rights don't apply to messages if they appear on a seized device -- even if the messages originated with someone who has not been arrested or is under suspicion of any crime:

A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is "nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers," akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner.

Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police. He claimed that the same rule applied to letters and e-mail. (Police would still need to seize or search a phone or computer legally, and phones are much easier for cops to seize than computers, which generally require a warrant.)

"On his own iPhone, on his own computer, or in the process of electronic transit, Hinton's communications are shielded by our constitutions," he wrote, referring to both the state and federal constitutions. "But after their arrival, Hinton's text messages on Lee's iPhone were no longer private or deserving of constitutional protection." Penoyar rejected Roden's privacy arguments on similar grounds.

It's legal: cops seize cell phone, impersonate owner

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Police Arrest Woman For Filming Them, Take Phone Out Of Her Bra, Claim That It Must Be Kept As 'Evidence'

by Mike Masnick

In the comments to our story last week about false arrests for filming police, someone pointed to yet another such story of a woman who was arrested for filming the police. Even worst, the police confiscated her phone -- which she had shoved into her bra -- and then have refused to return it, claiming that it's now "evidence" of a crime.

If there's any "good" news in this story, it's that the police chief immediately ordered an investigation into the officer who did this, and noted that it's legal to film police. Still, the details of what happened seem pretty crazy. As reported by the New Haven Independent (linked above):

?Stop filming right now!? Rubino ordered her.

?No this is my civil right,? she recalled saying. Gondola said she?s ?always on all these news sites? reading about recent cases in which cops got in trouble for snatching cameras from citizens.

?Well, I have to right to review it,? Rubino allegedly told her.

Gondola claimed she remained ?very quiet and calm? and ?pressed play? to show him the video. ?But I didn?t let him touch my phone.?

Rubino?s response, according to Gondola: ?It?s evidence of a crime. You need to give it to me right now.?

Her response to his response: ?I?m not giving you the phone.?

His next response: ?If you don?t give me the phone, you?re getting arrested.?

So Gondola slipped the phone into her bra. Rubino ?twisted my hand hard behind me and put the cuffs on me. Really tight. My wrists are black and blue,? she said.

Rubino next ordered a female officer to pat her down and commanded, ?I want that phone out of her bra.? The woman removed the phone. Rubino ?put it in his pocket,? Gondola said.

The article, written a few days later, notes that later on she demanded the phone back, and was once again told that it was "evidence" and that the only way she can get her phone back is to wait until she goes to court, and asks the judge to return the phone. At the very least, it sounds like she will be without her phone for well over a week. In these days, when phones are pretty central to a lot of people's lives, that can be a pretty big hardship... all for doing something perfectly legal: filming the police on duty.

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Memphis Police Delete Photographer's Cell Phone Pictures

by Jeni DiPrizio

MEMPHIS, TN (abc24.com) - If you are on a public street and take pictures or video of Memphis Police with your cell phone, you could end up in the back of a squad car and your pictures could be deleted.

ABC 24 News photographer Casey Monroe said that's what happened to him Sunday morning. Police never charged Monroe with a crime, but this could happen to anyone with a cell phone camera.

Monroe said police went too far outside Thai Bistro Restaurant in downtown Memphis that morning, and that they violated his rights.

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Patriot Act Debate: Is the FBI Collecting Your Phone Data?

By Mark Benjamin Friday

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is weighing fresh concerns about the sweeping nature of domestic spying using one controversial section of the Patriot Act. This particular part of that law is notable because it has been divisive for years ? and because during those years President Obama has quietly moved from being a Senator skeptical of the provisions to being an enthusiastic spy chief whose Administration embraces them.

Last Tuesday the committee met to consider the worries of some members, mostly Democrats, who say the Justice Department has drafted a breathtakingly broad interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

That section allows the FBI to seize without a warrant "any tangible things," like documents, so long as they are part of an effort to protect the country against international terrorism. The FBI can order a private company to turn over data as long as the bureau can convince a special national-security court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that the information is "relevant" to antiterrorism work.

Obama Administration officials emphasize that this review by the intelligence court is an important step in protecting privacy. Privacy advocates, however, consider it little more than a rubber stamp. " 'Relevant' means some noncrazy reason for asking for it," said the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, who believes the government is using that authority to sweep up huge amounts of communications data.

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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
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