It’s bad news for police and potentially good news for an estimated 200 people being held in the “Free State’s” prison system based on evidence police gathered with the help of a powerful cell phone tracking tool – the Stingray — that a state court has now ruled was used illegally, according to USA Today. On March 30, a three-judge panel on Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals wrote “Cell phone users have an objectively reasonable expectation that their cell phones will not be used as real-time tracking devices, through the direct and active interference of law enforcement.”
The judges also accused Baltimore authorities of misleading the lower-court judge who had approved their use of the device. Cell site simulators, like Stingray, pretend to be a cell tower and track phones in real-time. Baltimore’s WJZW-TV notes Baltimore City police have relied on the Stingray-like technology more than 4,000 times since 2007–all to track cell phones.
“We have a grave concern that our clients are incarcerated because of the use of a stingray that was illegal,” said Natalie Finegar, who is coordinating a review of stingray cases for the city’s public defender. She said defense lawyers are focused most urgently on about 200 cases in which people appear to have been sent to prison based on evidence the police found after they used a stingray. “Those are the emergencies,” Finegar said. “By itself, it’s just a huge number of cases.”
Posing as a cell tower, Stingrays are suitcase-sized devices that allow the police to pinpoint a cell phone’s location to within a few yards. They have drawn alarm from privacy advocates, in part because they also can intercept information from the phones of nearly everyone else who happens to be nearby, noted USA Today.
Dozens of police departments from Miami to Los Angeles own stingrays, but few have revealed when or how they use them, in large part because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the FBI, the newspaper said. As a result, few courts have weighed in on the circumstances in which the police are permitted to use them.
The U.S. Justice Department last year ordered federal agents to obtain search warrants before using stingrays.
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