UK Police Won't Comment On The Tracking of People's Phone Calls 52
Daniel_Stuckey writes You've maybe heard a bit about Stingray. Over the past couple of years, it has emerged that police forces in the US have been using the powerful surveillance tool, which tricks phones into connecting to a dragnet, to track mobile devices, and intercept calls and text messages. Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) continue to remain tight lipped about their use of the technology, leaving citizens in the dark on what privacy protections, if any, are in place for those who may get swept up by the broad surveillance techniques.
It's not extra-judicial (Score:5, Informative)
ECHR (Score:2, Informative)
The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that collecting and storing IP addresses, as mandated by a related directive, is illegal. This is considered to be collecting evidence of a possible crime that may or may not happen in the future and before the person is even a suspect. The same most likely applies to phone records to a certain extent, too. I'm curious to see how this plays out in the next few years.