Federal Stingray Exposed

By Alan Korwin

PHOENIX, AZ –-(Ammoland.com)- The lamestream media told you:

Nothing.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

At an ACLU presentation about privacy last week, I heard from one of their attorneys representing them in federal court.

There may only be nine amendments in their Bill of Rights, but they’re pretty good on some issues, and limiting federal power concerning privacy is sometimes one of them. Gotta take your allies where you find them.

The important part is this. Privacy and copyright and patent law lag way behind technology and will for a long while. Anything left in The Cloud (like anything you have in a gmail account) for more than 180 days is deemed “abandoned” under the small text no one reads governing cell phones, laptops, all apps, pretty much everything, according to their attorneys.

The feds and the big firms take this to mean they can harvest it all and use it as they see fit, go gripe all you want, according to the knowledgeable ACLU attorney arguing this particularly amazing case they just came from in U.S. District court.

In the days when you downloaded stuff from a server and kept it locally this was not so much the case, so you owned it and controlled it (mostly). With The Cloud in the picture, this is no longer the case. So aside from the fact that anything you transmit is like an old-fashioned party-line telephone that people with know-how can snoop on, anything you keep in The Cloud is not solely yours if it’s there for six months or more, they say.

Go ahead and argue with me if it makes you feel more secure. Chuckle. Have a nice day. I’m just sayin’.

FWIW, this isn’t even what their case was about. It seems the feds have been tapping everybody’s cell phone, to track one individual, in an undisclosed radius, for three years, under a one-month search warrant, using a device called a Stingray. They know your location if you have a cell phone with you, in something up to a cell tower’s radius (they won’t reveal the full range).

The poor guy under surveillance has been in prison for five years now without a trial (it’s a tax case) and the story goes downhill from there. The federal court was apparently very concerned with the 4th Amendment implications all over the case, and cloaked use of the device, and federal secrecy over the matter without court understanding or approval. Attorney Linda Lye was in from California for ACLU representing their interests, and she was in District court for three hours on what she said would normally by a 20-minute hearing.

Her description was rattling. The judge, in what she said was highly unusual, grilled the feds, who were evasive, obfuscatory and dumbfounded at some of the judge’s questions. The suits huddled with each other before answering. He’d ask things like, why were you still working under a 30-day warrant. After some whispering they responded, what does “conclude” mean (I’m paraphrasing).

These are the people we’re supposed to trust with all the guns?

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