The commingling of secret surveillance and ordinary police work upended what had appeared to be a routine case:
This raises an obvious question: Given that the legally available alternatives are to disclose the details of the device or to give up on using it in criminal cases, which policy should governments follow?
They should disclose. How can this even be an issue?!
Yes, let’s show the criminals exactly how to defeat the technology that makes it possible to catch them.
I’m a dude who firmly believes that the government ought to keep secrets about intelligence collection methods, and would looooove to see Snowden in prison for a long time, but… this is totally different.
I don’t think the government is entitled to prosecute someone on the basis of evidence that will not be revealed in court. The claim made in the article is that this technology is 100% accurate: which I submit is probably true, but the defense ought to have the right to question whether that is true.
I’m no expert in the rules of evidence, but if the police want to use a technology to collect evidence, but don’t want to reveal the method by which the evidence is collected, then that evidence shouldn’t be used in court.
ETA: I’d probably have a little more sympathy for the government is this technology was taking down Pablo Escobar or something. But a couple street hoods in a $130 drug deal? This, my dear police departments, is where you want to expend your silver bullets?
The case in question is such a pissant case that I can see why they decided offering a plea was preferable to revealing their new spy toy.
I’d say that if revealing it is such a big risk to its use against important criminals, they probably ought not deploy it against doofuses like the case in the OP. Then again, LE has a habit of acting like they must use every tool they are given as much as they possibly can.
That just kicks the can down the road, though – holding it back for a bigger case only delays the day when they have to disclose how it works so that its reliability and legality can be properly tested.
Eventually, all their techniques are revealed. It is impossible in this system for them to have truly secret techniques to use against criminals…They aren’t the CIA and this isn’t international spying. Given that situation, their only choice is to hold the technique in reserve for a truly important case. Hell, every video gamer knows enough not to expend rare items on simple mooks.
I don’t think the government is using this as evidence, though. Rather, they’re secretly using it to figure out who to investigate, then busting and convicting them using traditional (and indisputably legal) methods.
The problem with that is that (1) they need a warrant to use it, and (2) the traditional and indisputably legal methods are not indisputably legal if they are based on an underlying Fourth Amendment violation. It’s the same reason the cops can’t pull over people without reasonable suspicion and then use “traditional” policing methods to charge some of them with crimes.
All any security does is raise the cost of of stealing whatever is being protected.
By now, the big time crooks undoubtedly have acquired a working example and know what it does and how to defeat it.
The other issue is this things “infallibility” - there was, IIRC, a case in FL where a person cited for speeding got his hands on a radar gun of the type used to accuse him.
With the help of a MIT buddy, he made a joke of the device - clocking a tree at 80 mph, etc.
I suspect the cops don’t want to have their newest toy humiliated by clever people.
I’m not defending it, just saying that people aren’t being convicted on secret evidence in some Kafkaesque nightmare. Also, I think its more analogous to a cop deciding that cars of a certain type are more likely to be driven by criminals, then closely watching those types of cars for a reason to pull them over. That’s not a Fourth Amendment violation.
Well yeah, but video gamers also know not to expend rare items on bosses because maybe you’ll need it later, for a tougher boss.
Wait, this was the final *final *optional boss ? Huh :).
And since real life doesn’t come with a truly definitely not-a-fakeout final boss…
And in the meantime it’s more or less unusable, since any two-bit crook will ask to have the machine examined, which the cops won’t want to for pissant crooks, rinse repeat.
The two doofuses they blew it on weren’t even advanced mooks and that much was obvious.
Let’s not ignore that these devices are not targeted. They spoof a mobile phone tower, and in doing so intercept communications for all phones in range, not just those of a target. In other words, police are consistently not only violating the Fourth Amendment rights of suspects they are monitoring/investigating who may indeed be guilty, but also every other person in the vicinity.
There is a reason the police try to hide their usage of Stingrays even from judges. It’s because they know that it would be much harder to get a warrant from judges if they disclosed the details of what they were actually doing.
Good point.
But they don’t need a warrant to pull over cars. They do need warrants to use the Stingray, but the OP’s article suggests that judges don’t know what the Stingray does.
App for detecting them
Who has them
How it works and everything
Big secret there.
ArsTechnica has some additional analysis of recently released records published by the ACLU.
So why blow a case, even a small one, to keep their not-so-sooper-sekrit tool hidden?
I read the first few lines of the report and was very concerned. It sounded like the guy robbed someone, would have gotten a minimum of 4 years in jail, and, by god, he got a sweetheart deal.
But then I read more, and, what little details they recount, it seems he was present when two friends used BB guns to steal pot and $140 from a drug dealer. It also seems that Williams never touched a gun, made no threats, and I couldn’t find a description at all of how he was actually involved in the robbery, outside of being present.
What really got me, though, was that the report starts with this recounting of how he could have gotten a minimum punishment of 4 years in prison and what a sweetheart deal he got, yet it’s hidden in the middle of the article, in fucking parenthesis, that the people who actually had the weapons and made the threats to the drug dealer, got probation also. There is also no indication whatsoever that the defendant had any priors or was threat to continue this kind of standing by while other people rob a guy lifestyle.
God forbid I question the statements of his defense attorney and an unnamed civil libertarian, that this was some kind of deal of the century, but, from the article, it sounds about right for what they did. I know the “sweetheart deal” narrative is necessary to raise the “Oooooooo, look how far the police will go to hide this thing” angle work, but in my experience, standing by while your friends use BB guns to rob a drug dealer isn’t going to result in a prison sentence, especially when the guys who actually did it get probation too.
And the DA should provide the information about the usage of the Stingray when it is used to gather evidence in a criminal proceeding.