Evidently police in Baltimore have been using a Stingray to spy on phones, but if reports are correct, the police tried to conceal the fact that they were using it.
The stingray is a device that can enable police and other malicious agents to scoop up private data from your smartphone without you even knowing about it.
A lawsuit was recently filed against the Baltimore police accusing them of unlawful activity relating to Stingray tech.
It began when Kerron Andrews was released from jail after being trapped there for two years pending a trial, according to reports by CBS Baltimore.
He is suing the Baltimore Police Department because he claims that the manner in which they searched him was unlawful.
No search warrant was obtained when the police acted upon him, the lawsuit claims.
What the police actually did — rather than getting a warrant — was use a Stingray or a device similar to a stingray to find Andrews’s location.
They were apparently able to track Andrews in such detail that they pin-pointed him inside of a house.
They did this by using Stingray capabilities to locate Andrews’s phone.
According to Andrews’s lawyer, the police are enabled to send signals that would penetrate the walls of the home, through Andrews’s own pocket and into his cell phone, which then leads to “activating his cell phone and retrieving information from his cell phone.”
Aside from the inherent problems associated with monitoring the smartphones of private citizens, police are being accused of illegal search and seizure.
Andrews’s lawyers intend to prevent police from continuing to use such technology without a warrant.
Stingrays can apparently scoop up all kinds of data from a smartphone — and not just your smartphone, but everybody around you as well.
This is believed to occur because the range within which Stingray technology operates is quite wide, scooping up data from a variety of users instead of just focusing on one.
