NYPD TRACKED CITIZENS’ CELLPHONES 1,000 TIMES SINCE 2008 WITHOUT WARRANTS

Ciara McCarthy | The Guardian - FEBRUARY 11, 2016

IMAGE CREDITS: FLICKR, 49770271@N08.

New York City police have tracked citizens’ cellphones over 1,000 times since 2008 without using warrants, according to public records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The organization announced on Thursday that the NYPD has typically used “stingrays” after obtaining lower-level court orders, but not warrants, before using the devices. The department also does not have a policy guiding how police can use the controversial devices. This is the first time that the scope of stingray use by the nation’s largest police agency has been confirmed.

The devices, generically known as stingrays, work by mimicking cell towers and tracking a cellphone’s location at a specific time. Law enforcement agencies can use the technology to track people’s movements through their cellphone use. Stingrays can also detect the phone numbers that a person has been communicating with, according to the NYCLU. The devices allow law enforcement to bypass cellphone carriers, who have provided information to police in the past, and can track data about bystanders in close proximity to the intended target.

Mariko Hirose, the NYCLU attorney who filed the records request, said the records reveal knowledge about NYPD’s stingray use that should have been divulged before police decided to start using them.

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Google To Censor US Search Site For European Users

Forbes | Emma Woollacott | February 10, 2016

(Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)

Google is removing the loophole allowing European users to sidestep the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling that censors their search results.

After the European Court of Justice ruled two years ago that people could ask for search results to be removed if they contained inaccurate or ‘outdated’ information, Google attempted to strike a compromise.

It complied with the order – but only for European versions of its website. This meant that European users wanting to see uncensored results have only to log on to Google.com to get the unedited version; and plenty do.


This state of affairs, as you might imagine, isn’t good enough for the European authorities, and in September last year the French data protection authority, CNIL, ordered the company to start removing offending content from its sites worldwide.

And while the initial fine was set at just €300,000 – a drop in the ocean for a company with annual revenues of about $66 billion – Google was told this could rise to an extraordinary 5% of global operating costs under new data protection legislation set to come in next year.

And now, says Reuters, the company’s come up with another compromise: to censor non-European domains, but only when they’re being accessed from the country where the right to be forgotten request has been made.

For example, if a British citizen made a successful removal request, nobody accessing Google search from the UK would be able to see the removed item, whichever national version of Google they used. Anybody searching the same domain from outside the EU, meanwhile, would see the full list of results.