Tag Archives: stingray

A victory for the 4th amendment…

Well…going to stay away from politics for the day…unless there is a ruling in the Trump U. case….and there was a good ruling from a federal court that I wanted to talk about. As you know, the 4th amendment sets out that the government needs a warrant approved by a judge to search your “person, places, or things…” and you also know that police across this country have been violating the 4th amendment at will when it comes to modern day electronic devices such as cell phones since the law has not caught up with modernity…well, now it has. A federal judge has ruled that information gathered by the so-called “stingray” cell phone tracker that has been used for years now without warrants across this country is a violation of the 4th amendment. What this stingray does is “spoof” a cell phone tower…in reality creating a fake tower that all of the cell phones in the area will talk to and recognize as a real one…essentially allowing the police to track a persons movements or the movements of his phone to be accurate, with the judge saying “Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device.” This is good new for those of us that believe that the 4th amendment has been eroded over the years to allow the police to violate it at will….now, we need to have this ruling used as precedent across the country since there are over 200 organizations who have these tracking devices and are using them without warrants on a daily basis…..