{"id":14337,"date":"2015-11-12T08:00:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14337"},"modified":"2015-11-12T08:00:53","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T13:00:53","slug":"data-grabbing-stingrays-are-attacking-our-civil-liberties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14337","title":{"rendered":"Data-Grabbing \u2018Stingrays\u2019 Are Attacking Our Civil Liberties"},"content":{"rendered":"

Data-Grabbing \u2018Stingrays\u2019 Are Attacking Our Civil Liberties\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\nCarolina K. Smith MD \/ Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Michigan police have been using portable cellphone tracking devices\u2014so-called Stingrays and Kingfish among them\u2014to investigate crimes since 2006. These devices are designed to imitate cell phone towers in order to gather metadata from cellphones in their vicinity. Police departments claimed to have purchased the equipment as a counterterrorism measure, but in fact it has been used for 128 \u201crun-of-the-mill\u201d investigations in Michigan, including burglaries and robberies.<\/p>\n

One reason this is concerning is that police agencies have been\u00a0required to sign contracts<\/a>\u00a0with Harris Corp., the company that makes the devices, saying they will not reveal they are using them. The devices are being used by police departments across the country, as well as\u00a0the IRS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe [now] have a much better handle on the incredible magnitude of use and proliferation of this technology,\u201d Nathan Wessler, staff attorney with the ACLU\u2019s Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, told Truthdig. \u201cWe now know of 57 state and local agencies and more than a dozen federal agencies that have bought these devices, and surely there are many more that have bought them or are borrowing them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Wessler said police departments get the devices with grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the ostensible purpose of fighting terrorism. However, he noted, the DHS doesn\u2019t check on how they are used once police departments have purchased them.<\/p>\n

Wessler was instrumental in establishing that officers in Michigan have been using these devices, and he has been tracking their use nationally. \u201cEfforts are now turning from transparency\u2014just figuring out what\u2019s going on\u2014to substantive oversight,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data-Grabbing \u2018Stingrays\u2019 Are Attacking Our Civil Liberties\u00a0 Carolina K. Smith MD \/ Shutterstock A\u00a0recent report\u00a0by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Michigan police have been using portable cellphone tracking devices\u2014so-called Stingrays and Kingfish among them\u2014to investigate crimes since 2006. These devices are designed to imitate cell phone towers in order to gather metadata from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2172,2171,10581,2621,10582,632,635,765,8738],"class_list":["post-14337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-aclu","tag-american-civil-liberties-union","tag-cellphone-tracking","tag-counterterrorism","tag-michigan-police","tag-police","tag-police-state","tag-surveillance","tag-truthdig"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14337"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14339,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337\/revisions\/14339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}