Posted on 09/22/2011 8:21:28 AM PDT by Palter
For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest.
Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response to inquiries.
A stingray's role in nabbing the alleged "Hacker"—Daniel David Rigmaiden—is shaping up as a possible test of the legal standards for using these devices in investigations. The FBI says it obtains appropriate court approval to use the device.
Stingrays are one of several new technologies used by law enforcement to track people's locations, often without a search warrant. These techniques are driving a constitutional debate about whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but which was written before the digital age, is keeping pace with the times.
On Nov. 8, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether or not police need a warrant before secretly installing a GPS device on a suspect's car and tracking him for an extended period. In both the Senate and House, new bills would require a warrant before tracking a cellphone's location.
And on Thursday in U.S. District Court of Arizona, Judge David G. Campbell is set to hear a request by Mr. Rigmaiden, who is facing fraud charges, to have information about the government's secret techniques disclosed to him so he can use it in his defense.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
But they can handle that like they handle photo radar tickets (which only prove your CAR was speeding). They assume that since it was your phone, it was with you. Then they give you a chance to rat out whomever had your phone if it wasn't you, and there's not much you can do about it, especially since it's only a "civil" matter and not criminal. The real flaw I see in the idea is proving who was driving. If there are four people in a car and they each have a couple smartphone/tablets, etc., only the driver is liable. How are they going to figure out who to send the ticket to, and what prevents multiple tickets from being issued to multiple devices even if they all belong to the guilty party?
I leave my phone at home quite a bit or leave it in my car. I really don’t care if the government knows where my phone is located. It’s the very nature of the system. The cell towers have to be able to figure out where you are located.
Ah, so selective adherence to the constitution is fine and dandy. Good to know where you stand.
For the case where you don't know who the guy is, only that he's the user of Phone X, then establishing that Person A was at the physical location of Phone X, and that no other persons were there, can be valuable circumstantial evidence.
This is not new technology. In the book “Killing Pablo”, about hunting down Pablo Escobar in 1993, the author relates how they tracked Pablo by his cell phone.
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