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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

Stingray use requires a warrant and every case should be dismissed where one was used without a warrant. I'm sure that's the main reason they want to hide the use of stingrays, they know they're doing something wrong.

Police having the ability to spy on everyone with little to no oversight is nightmarish authoritarianism, it's completely against the spirit of American democracy, not to mention in violation of The Constitution.

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As part of some volunteer work I'm doing with Lucy Parsons Labs, I submitted a FOIA request to every single state's largest city, asking for search warrant records that would likely exist on complaints for search warrants, the warrants themselves, or from any audit. About 100 requests in total.

After two months, only two cities have sent me their search warrant records. All other states have given me rejections saying:

1. The records are on paper and never transcribed.

2. The records are digital, but there's no way to query from a frontend.

3. The records are digital and queryable, but the agency considers the use of queries "creating reports", where tons of states have case law backing this up.

4. Nothing, because they haven't responded yet.

So far I've received three enormous fee estimations of ~500k, ~400k and ~150k. Obviously not affordable.

Chicago is one of the few cities that sent records (though, it took a year). They've sent three separately sized files for the same timeframe - 11k rows, 9k rows, and 20k rows. The data is messy, and there is some very important info missing from their records. Can't speak too much about it yet, since I'm still confirming the reasons. It's been blindingly frustrating trying to get a consistent message about whether the data is even accurate.

All this goes to show that police agencies don't make records on search warrants even remotely easily available to the public, and we have no way of gauging whether our constitutional rights are being upheld throughout the US. It's honestly very sad.

If you want to support this work and our other projects, please consider a donation to Lucy Parsons Labs: https://lucyparsonslabs.com/support/

Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a useful project.

> don't make records on search warrants even remotely easily available to the public,

It seems like the right reform would be for all approved search warrants to be automatically posted online one year after issuance.

If an innocent person had a warrant issued for them, and they were cleared, I bet employers would still routinely query those records if they were able to. It could affect people’s lives if it was too public

This is a non-issue within the context of these requests. The only names that I am requesting are the names of the officers and judges involved. The requests are not seeking any names of anyone the search warrants are meant for.

> If an innocent person had a warrant issued for them, and they were cleared, I bet employers would still routinely query those records if they were able to. It could affect people’s lives if it was too public

I know it is unlawful to ask about arrests without convictions as a precursor to employment in at least a few jurisdictions in the US. [0]

[0]: https://www.workplacefairness.org/criminal-records-workplace...

Ahhh, good ol' government inefficiencies and obfuscation. I have no faith in there ever being efficient systems in place because it'll just make it harder to hide shady behavior.

That’s how it’s been developed, continues, and planned. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be like this.

Thanks for your work

There is a similar problem with FOI requests in Australia.

It's not there to get information, it's there to give the appearance that they give information.

The most used excuse here is it will take "too many resources".

They often follow the same set of steps to legally delay or prevent information going out.

There is a FOI ombudsman, but they are so swamped the backlog is enormous.

I wonder, are court records generated by the issuing of warrants? If so, I imagine you could have gone at it from the other direction and simply gotten a list of warrants and looked for terms that looked stingray-ish. So maybe warrants aren't actually recorded in court records?

> I wonder, are court records generated by the issuing of warrants? If so, I imagine you could have gone at it from the other direction and simply gotten a list of warrants and looked for terms that looked stingray-ish. So maybe warrants aren't actually recorded in court records?

That's probably the case as I believe warrants can be requested even when court is not on session. As someone who has sat in court a couple times I can say the only warrant I ever saw a judge issue was a bench warrant.

Do you happen to have a city-by-city breakdown of the responses anywhere?

Nothing yet, but I hope to get something in the next couple weeks. Here are all of the requests, including their responses: https://www.muckrock.com/project/search-warrant-data-608/

Do you have a template for this? I'd like to submit such a request to my own city.

Yep, please check out the requests at: https://www.muckrock.com/project/search-warrant-data-608/

It'd be a good idea to limit the set of record points to only those that you're interested in.

The problem is knowing a Stingray was ever used in the first place. It's been documented that the police routinely utilize parallel construction when they discover things through illegal means in the first place.

https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-secret-surveillance-pro...

Seems like the police casually breaking the law is the core of the issue. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The ACLU.

edit: to be clear, I think the government itself could really do with reeling it back a bit as well - but this very news is a reminder that some people are watching out for the watched.

The ACLU was mostly mute on these issues during the prior administration, when these abuses became routine.

Just a couple of links to disprove this troll:

https://www.aclu.org/cases/florida-stingray-foia (2014)

https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-florida-v-city-sarasota-stin... (2014)

https://www.aclu.org/cases/foia-request-justice-department-p... (2014)

... and tons more, at https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles?topi...

The first two are state cases, not federal, as are many of the others. I would have thought that "the administration" would clearly refer to Federal cases.

Providing information is fine, but please omit the name-calling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The judiciary branch.

That very same judiciary branch has a secret court that rubber stamps almost all mass surveillance requests given to them.

Latin for "Who will guard the guards themselves?".

Alternatively also translated as “Who watches the watchmen?”

And even without knowing Latin the sentence is recognizable :) At least to me, when I looked at it, it looked very similar to that. Guards, watchmen, custodians. Guarding, watching, being in custody of. And I know from other languages like French words like "qui" (though I don't speak French either, only know a select few words).

The tv show The Wire was a documentary after all.

Almost all airports permanently run a Stingray like device

Care to elaborate more on this?

> For two months last year, researchers at the University of Washington paid drivers of an unidentified ridesharing service to keep custom-made sensors in the trunks of their cars, converting those vehicles into mobile cellular data collectors. They used the results to map out practically every cell tower in the cities of Seattle and Milwaukee—along with at least two anomalous transmitters they believe were likely stingrays, located at the Seattle office of the US Customs and Immigration Service, and the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

source: https://www.wired.com/2017/06/researchers-use-rideshares-sni...

> At Trudeau airport, Radio-Canada detected the catcher's presence through the use of a CryptoPhone — a cellphone look-alike that emits red alerts when a fake antenna tries to catch its signal. Several red alerts were received, throughout the afternoon and early evening, in the section of the airport for U.S. departures.

source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/trudeau-airport-spyi...

> The devices are operated out of at least five U.S. airports, "covering most of the U.S. population". It is unclear whether the U.S. Marshals Service requests court orders to use the devices.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbox_(cell_phone)

That's super interesting. Those are international departure airports. I wonder if what they're doing is sniffing for phone numbers of interest showing up in the international terminal indicating a 'person of interest' is trying to leave or arrive. I assume people trying to leave or enter the country without permission might have false ID and a false name on their ticket but they probably don't think about changing their phone number.

Once you have a number pop up on the Stingray you distribute that person's photo to all the border agents.

Or the reverse.

Since airports are one of the very few places where you can positively identify a certain person was there at a certain time, you can combine a passenger list with a device list to get some soft matches to previously unlinked devices.

Combine that linked metadata with other dragnet metadata, and you're going to learn a lot.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

That should mean they can also correlate who picks up or drops off whom... so even if you aren't traveling, you're in their database linked to someone who is.

Combined with APNR and patterns over time, yes.

Probably used for things like terrorist watch lists, national security ventures, etc... highly doubtful it's used for domestic law enforcement purposes. The US wants to know when foreign nationals of interest attempt to enter/exit the country.

Very naive of you to think that.

What is the difference between a permanent stingray and a cell tower?

One actually provides cell service.

Stingrays provide cell service.

There are issues with some units that downgrade your data signal to a slower connection than you would get with a normal cell tower.. but otherwise you would never know the difference.

The person you are replying to is actually making an excellent point as most current methods of detecting stingrays are heavily reliant on the "tower" moving or changing.

Or when challenged they drop the charges as to not disclose the true "source".

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/prosecutors-drop...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/alleged-getaway-...

But even when they have a warrant to go after one person, the fact that they can scoop up information from everyone else even remotely near that person, and those people never find out is pretty abusive.

Like, if my neighbor is a drug dealer, and the police get a warrant to search their apartment, maybe that's reasonable. If they use that warrant to search every apartment on my block, that's messed up. If they do that without leaving a trace, so I have no idea when or if it has happened ... then I'm living in a panopticon.

You should go read about parallel construction :-)

>Stingray use requires a warrant and every case should be dismissed where one was used without a warrant. I'm sure that's the main reason they want to hide the use of stingrays, they know they're doing something wrong.

they'll just do a parallel construction - use stingrays to find other evidence, scrap stingrays from record and only go forward with evidence gathered from usage of stingray.

OTOH, Google and Facebook, with annual incomes larger than the GDP of a medium European country, can log everyone’s every breath, on the internet and, more recently, in real life, with impunity. I just can’t wrap my head how the municipal police doing it is “nightmarish authoritarianism”, but big adtech, de facto way more powerful, gets a cursory pass.

Because people generally endeavor to stay on the topic of a discussion? You seem to be assuming that criticizing government surveillance is somehow an approval of corporate surveillance - it's not either/or, they're both attacks on Free society.

Google et al don’t arrest people or hold them in jail, so that is one dimension in which they are less able to pose a threat.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t pose a threat though.

No, but they certainly can hand them over to those who can! https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech...

I think most people would view it from the lens of Police inherently having legislated power over people and the ability to detain, arrest and/or charge people.

Big adtech have insane amounts of data and deep pockets but realistically no means to carry out the above, however that doesn't mean big adtech should get a pass.

The argument is that you use those products and give them that information voluntarily, however under-handed the tactics are to get you to volunteer that info. Law enforcement surveillance isn't voluntary.

If police use the lack of information from those avenues as a justification for a warrant to conduct surveillance then that argument is moot.

Are you privy to any warrants actually being issued solely because the police couldn't turn up info on a suspect via Facebook or Google? Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't think that's a thing that actually happens.

Although reputation and behavior has a role in the decision other factors would need to be in play. I meant more that no social media could be seen as anti social by a judge and added to the list of things that ultimately satisfies probable cause.

Any smart, ethical police department would go for a warrant. I'm friends with someone in law enforcement and they say the last thing they want is evidence tossed. Often they get warrants they don't even need just so there isn't a chance of having evidence tossed later.

They probably can't get warrants for what they are doing, which is trawling large swaths of traffic hoping to find something useful.

Having dealt with police throughout various stages of my life(never as a suspect,or offender),all I can say is that they lie,cheat and misinform people. I'm sure there are plenty of decent people out there but the force has plenty of those with broken moralle compasses.

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