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*** Stingray Affirmative Stingray Affirmative Summary



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*** Stingray Affirmative

Stingray Affirmative Summary

The Stingray is an IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catcher. That is, it’s a device used for intercepting mobile phone traffic by acting as a fake “cell tower.” The Stingray specifically can use this functionality to:

1. Obtain identifying information about a cell phone that can help facilitate wiretapping.

2. Locate a cell phone user

3. Capture the content of communications like calls and text messages.

4. Block service


The use of these devices has been criticized as a breach of privacy, as well as something that it is difficult to hold agencies accountable for. Federal agencies have denied FOIA requests related to the devices because of “nondisclosure agreements” with the corporation that creates them. They are also often used in secret and without obtaining any kind of warrant.

Stingray 1AC—Inherency



Contention One is Inherency:

Federal law enforcement agencies use StingRay to search and seize cell phone data without court oversight. This type of surveillance is very intrusive, and unless we intervene, the government will continue to violate our rights.



ACLU 2014 (“StingRays: The Most Common Surveillance Tool the Government Won’t Tell You About” Online https://www.aclunc.org/sites/default/files/StingRays_The_Most_Common_Surveillance_Tool_the_Govt_Won%27t_Tell_You_About.pdf)
Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have been using IMSI catchers to engage in dragnet searches and seizures of information from cell phones without disclosing this use to the courts or criminal defendants. By shrouding this technology in secrecy, the government has succeeded in deploying a highly intrusive form of surveillance. In cases where the government may have used an IMSI catcher, vigorous advocacy is necessary to obtain full discovery and suppression of tainted evidence. Unless criminal defense attorneys pursue these issues aggressively, the government will continue to write its own rules for conducting surveillance, without the benefit of court oversight or an adversarial process.

Stingray 1AC—Plan


Plan: The FCC should decertify Stingray catcher devices for use in law enforcement.

Stingray 1AC—Democracy Advantage



Contention Two is Harms - Stingray devices hurt democracy
Law enforcement agencies don’t only use StingRay to pursue suspects in criminal cases; the devices retrieve data from thousands of innocent civilians as well. This violates the Fourth Amendment and endangers democracy.
Fakhoury 2012 (Hanni Fakhoury for Electronic Frontier Foundation “StingRays: The Biggest Technological Threat to Cell Phone Privacy You Don’t Know About” October 22 Online https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/stingrays-biggest-unknown-technological-threat-cell-phone-privacy)
Beyond the government's conduct in this specific case, there is an even broader danger in law enforcement using these devices to locate suspects regardless of whether they explain the technology to judges: these devices allow the government to conduct broad searches amounting to “general warrants,” the exact type of search the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.

A Stingray—which could potentially be beamed into all the houses in one neighborhood looking for a particular signal—is the digital version of the pre-Revolutionary war practice of British soldiers going door-to-door, searching Americans’ homes without rationale or suspicion, let alone judicial approval. The Fourth Amendment was enacted to prevent these general fishing expeditions. As the Supreme Court has explained, a warrant requires probable cause for all places searched, and is supposed to detail the scope of the search to ensure “nothing is left to the discretion of the officer executing the warrant”.But if uninformed courts approve the unregulated use of Stingrays, they are essentially allowing the government to enter into the home via a cellular signal at law enforcement’s discretion and rummage at will without any supervision. The government can’t simply use technology to upend centuries of Constitutional law to conduct a search they would be prevented from doing physically.Stingrays Collect Data on Hundreds of Innocent PeopleAnd when police use a Stingray, it’s not just the suspects’ phone information the device sucks up, but all the innocent people around such suspect as well. Some devices have a range of “several kilometers,” meaning potentially thousands of people could have their privacy violated despite not being suspected of any crime. This is another fact the government didn’t fully explain to the magistrate judge in Rigmaiden.The government now claims it protected privacy by deleting all third-party data on its own after it collected it. But the government’s unilateral decision to binge and purge comes with its own consequences. Now there’s no way to know what exactly the government obtained when it used the device.Had the government told the court what it really was planning on doing and the amount of information it would obtain, the court may have exercised its constitutional role of ensuring the government narrowed its search. After all, it was for the court, not the government, to decide how best to balance the government’s need for information with third-party privacy, and any suspect’s future interest in access to potentially exculpatory information.
Constitutional violations like StingRay will create an unstoppable police state if they are not stopped.


Whitehead 2012 (John Whitehead for The Rutherford Institute “The Corporate Surveillance State: How the Thought Police Use Your Cell Phone to Track Your Every Move” Online https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_corporate_surveillance_state_how_the_thought_police_use_your_cell_)
Advanced technology now provides government agents and police officers with the ability to track our every move. The surveillance state is our new society. It is here, and it is spying on you, your family and your friends every day. Worse yet, those in control are using life’s little conveniences, namely cell phones, to do much of the spying. And worst of all, the corporations who produce these little conveniences are happy to hand your personal information over to the police so long as their profit margins increase. To put it simply, the corporate-surveillance state is in full effect, and there is nowhere to hide.Using the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone, police are now able to track your every move. Your texts, web browsing, and geographic location are all up for grabs. Using “stingray” devices, often housed in mobile surveillance vans, federal agents track the cell phones of unsuspecting people. By triangulating the source of a cell phone signal, agents are able to track down the whereabouts of the person holding it. These surveillance sweeps target all cell phone signals, not just those of criminal suspects. Examples of extralegal police surveillance in the years since 9/11 are numerous, from the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program to the NYPD’s spy network that targeted Muslims in the New York area.Unfortunately, the now widespread tactic of spying on people via their cell phones resides in a legal grey area, which has allowed police agencies to take drastic steps to record the daily activity of all Americans. Whereas cell phone tracking once fell only in the purview of federal agents, local police departments, big and small, are beginning to engage in cell phone tracking with little to no oversight. Small police agencies are shelling out upwards of $244,000 to get the technology necessary to track cell phones. And as you might expect, most police departments have attempted to keep knowledge of their cell phone tracking programs secret, fearing (as they should) a public backlash.Federal courts are divided on the issue, some saying that a warrant is necessary before executing a cell phone search. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently ruled that tracking the location of a cell phone without a warrant is legal and, thus, not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. This lack of concern for the Fourth Amendment—which requires reasonable suspicion that you’re up to something illegal before the police conduct surveillance on you—is widely shared among the federal and state courts. In fact, courts issue tens of thousands of cell tracking orders a year, allowing police agencies to accurately pinpoint people’s locations within meters. Unless they’re charged with a crime, most people remain unaware that their cell data has been tracked.[…]On the rare occasion that a telecom corporation resists a police effort to spy on a particular cell phone customer, there are methods by which companies are coerced to comply with the data requests. Telecoms are frequently harassed by the FBI with National Security Letters (NSL), which are demands for user information without warrant or judicial oversight. These include a gag order, which prevents the recipient from discussing the demand with others, including the media. Roughly 300,000 of these NSLs have been sent out since 2000, implying a massive spying effort on the part of the federal government. One telecom is currently in a battle with the federal government over an NSL demanding user data. The telecom refused to abide by the NSL, and in response the federal government has sued the telecom, insisting that their refusal jeopardizes national security. The end logic of this is that our private data is actually not private. The federal government claims that knowing our personal information is critical to preserving national security, and thus neither telecoms nor users may resist the sharing of that information.Of course, corporations are just as interested in tracking people’s daily activities as the government. Cell phone companies and the software companies that create applications for their devices track your personal information so that they can market their services to you. Unfortunately, this leads to mass aggregation of user data which is then used by government agents to spy on and track all cell phone users. For example, Carrier IQ, a software company, and cell phone manufacturers HTC and Samsung are currently in the midst of a class-action lawsuit brought by Android phone users whose phone activities are recorded by a “rootkit,” a piece of software surreptitiously installed on cell phones that records the keystrokes of phone users. The FBI denied a December 2011 FOIA request to determine how the government was utilizing Carrier IQ’s software, as it could have an adverse impact on ongoing investigations. The agency’s refusal suggests that not only is Carrier IQ spying on cell phone users for their corporate purposes, but that federal agents are utilizing the software to conduct their own spying campaigns.Unfortunately, with intelligence gathering and surveillance doing booming business, and corporations rolling out technologies capable of filtering through vast reams of data, tapping into underseas communication cables, and blocking websites for entire countries, life as we know it will only get worse. As journalist Pratap Chatterjee has noted, “[T]hese tools have the potential to make computer cables as dangerous as police batons.” Telecoms hold on to user data, including text messages and Internet browsing history, for months to years at a time. This, of course, has some ominous implications. For example, British researchers have created an algorithm that accurately predicts someone’s future whereabouts at a certain time based upon where she and her friends have been in the past.


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