ACLU Rejoices as Federal Judge Tosses StingRay Evidence
A federal judge threw out evidence collected through StingRay surveillance by the Drug Enforcement Administration. A StingRay, or cell site simulator, is a type of surveillance equipment that mimics wireless towers, forcing nearby mobile devices to connect. The DEA used…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
a StingRay to locate the apartment of defendant Raymond Lambis and search it for narcotics and drug paraphernalia. Lambis asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to suppress the evidence, claiming the use of StingRay violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy. In a ruling Tuesday, Judge William Pauley agreed with Lambis. “The DEA’s use of the cell-site simulator to locate Lambis’s apartment was an unreasonable search because the ‘pings’ from Lambis’s cell phone to the nearest cell site were not readily available 'to anyone who wanted to look' without the use of a cell-site simulator,” Pauley wrote. The use of a cell-site simulator constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, but was outside the scope of DEA’s warrant, he said. “If the Government had wished to use a cell-site simulator, it could have obtained a warrant. … Absent a search warrant, the Government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device.” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Nathan Wessler applauded the decision. “After decades of secret and warrantless use of Stingray technology by federal law enforcement to track phones, a federal court has finally held the authorities to account,” he said in an emailed statement. “The feds are now firmly on notice that when they hide their intent to use invasive surveillance technology from courts and fail to get a warrant, their evidence will be suppressed. This opinion strongly reinforces the strength of our constitutional privacy rights in the digital age.” The DEA didn't comment.