Salon: The NYPD’s “Big Brother” problem is getting even worse

Salon: The NYPD’s “Big Brother” problem is getting even worse by Daniel Denvir:

America’s largest police force has long behaved like an intelligence agency. That hasn’t changed in the Snowden era.

Nearly three years after Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations, many Americans are once again losing a disproportionate amount of sleep over terrorism and seem ready to re-embrace extensive and extralegal surveillance as an ordinary fact of life.

Last week, it was revealed that the New York Police Department has secretly deployed Stingray devices, which vacuum up the location of mobile phones by posing as a cell tower, on a large scale and without first seeking a warrant. The NYCLU, through a freedom of information request, discovered that they had done so more than 1,000 times since 2008, picking up data not only on suspects but also on an untold number of innocently-bystanding New Yorkers’ en masse.

But this startling end run around the Fourth Amendment, like the recent revelation that NYPD uses X-ray vans that can see through buildings, has gotten little public attention. In large part, that’s because law enforcement is exploiting returning public terrorism fears with very loud, panicked warnings that the problem is not too much surveillance but too little—that in particular, the encryption of iPhones and other technology is allowing for crime and terror suspects to “go dark” and avoid detection.

This entry was posted in Cell site simulators, Surveillance technology. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.