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Comment by graylights | Hacker News Reader

So the problem is they claimed "Confidential Source" and the presumption was that it was an informant? To me secret surveillance fits the definition of "Confidential Source". I don't see any deception there. (EDIT: I've been corrected, apparently legal definition defines source as person)

The real question is why can the magic words "confidential source" be used as justification for a warrant without more clarification.

Well also the part about using the devices in the first place without warrant.

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According to this[1] definition, a confidential source is a PERSON who provides information. If this is so, then the judge that approved the warrant was actually tricked: a person providing information implies that the information may be volatile (the witness may have seen something by pure luck), and on top of that it also means that the information was obtained through a legally sanctioned way (ie, a witness and/or a confession). If they used a word that defines a person to identify something that was not a person, then yeah, there was some deception involved.

If I read the article correctly, what happened is that the police obtained information in ways they apparently weren't allowed to use (unconstitutional surveillance), and then hid this fact under the pretense of a supposed person giving that information. This is all kinds of wrong and, among other things, voids those warrants.

[1] http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/confidential-source%20/

There's a much bigger problem going on here. Why is it acceptable to say that your information comes from a "confidential source" at all? The nature of the claim is that it can't be verified; a confidential source cannot be distinguished by any means from a fevered imagination.

I assume you can't get a warrant to search someone's house for drugs by saying "he looks like a junkie to me". It would be too easy to ask how claiming a "confidential source" is better than that. How is it different?

Thank you, that clarified the article a lot for me. I still stand by "Confidential Source" is a horrible justification because it's impossible to verify the validity of something confidential.

That impossible verification is what was being abused in this case.

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> It's not clear whether warrantless use of Stingrays is unconstitutional.

No, it may be true that no court has ruled explicitly if that were the case, but to claim that this is somehow unclear is just plain false.

They're quite literally constructing a fake, pre-tapped cell tower for your cell phone to connect to.

This requires a warrant by any sane interpretation of the Constitution, it requires a warrant by any reasonable understanding of how wiretaps affect our privacy rights.

If some court rules counter to what I've just said, it is reasonable to conclude that the judge(s) in question is out of his gourd. We have a few bad ones on the bench.

The law enforcement agents who do this agree with me. Why else would they seek to hide it? They know that it can only be ruled unconstitutional, else they'd go get their rubberstamp from the guy in black robes... hell, if anything they're more optimistic than I am, seeing how they feel their chances of a judge ruling in their favor are too low to risk it.

What we need is a crowd-sourcing-tower triangulation mapping app. It will continually poll the RSSI for the tower, and the tower details from your phone and map the location of each tower - and provide info to help identify what the tower type is or who it belongs to.

If there were a way to differentiate between a Stingray tower and then let mobile devices blacklist connecting to them...

I would suggest that the court avoid ruling on the issue and instead pursue along the lines of perjury and obstruction of justice which provide a pretty wide latitude, given that 'whole truth' thing.

Put a couple cops and prosecutors in jail and the system will figure itself out.

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