The next NSA? Police departments under scrutiny for phone, license plate surveillance

Fox News ^ | May 02, 2014 | Doug McKelway

[Olog-hai]

The NSA isn’t the only government agency raising concerns about electronic privacy. Local police departments are coming under similar scrutiny—not only for using spying technology, but for hiding their use from the public.

At least 25 police departments now use what is known as “Stingray,” a briefcase-sized box that swallows up cell phone data within a mile radius.

More than one in three large police departments are also using license-plate readers, which can record every plate—even on a four-lane highway—from vehicles going at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. […]

But the two technologies raise broader questions about 4^th Amendment protections. Last year, then-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued an opinion on license-plate readers that said data cannot be collected unless directly related to a criminal case.

The opinion was not binding. Many jurisdictions in Virginia and beyond still retain the data for years. …

[2ndDivisionVet]

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[867V309]

It’s the same NSA.

[Veggie Todd]

I was going to say, “We’re one step away from ‘Papers, Please’,” but by the time they ask for papers, they’ll already have the information on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

[Drago]

Related police serveillance of the public kept in a private database:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/02/sworn-to-silence-law-enforcement-cant-talk-about-this-tool-they-use-every-day/

[Gene Eric]

>> It’s the same NSA.

Not at all. The NSA is about intelligence and research; an agency we should hold in high regard. Despite the recent controversy, the NSA is not a medium-level enforcement agency that has its revenue tied to penal activity.

[867V309]

The NSA is about intelligence and research; an agency we should hold in high regard.

You're kidding, right? You trust the current administration?

[kiryandil]

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Tyranny in our time.

[snooter55]

bfl