Local officials in 11 cities around the US launched a campaign on Wednesday to crack down on the unsanctioned police use of surveillance equipment, especially devices that imitate cellphone towers.



The coalition of officials and advocacy groups has said it wants to return authority over domestic spying to the townships and cities across the US that legally oversee police departments.

In partnership with 17 different organizations from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), employees of local governments around the nation will distribute model legislation, including to their own communities.

“The decisions that are now made principally by police departments need to be made by the city council,” said Chad Marlow, the ACLU’s advocacy and policy counsel. “And we need to maximize community input into those positions.”

Cell-site simulators, such as Harris Corporation’s Stingray device or Digital Receiver Technology’s (DRT) Dirtbox, fool cellphones into treating them like cell towers can be used to scoop up data from all devices that connect to the fake tower.

Many including the EFF and a Georgetown law professor have argued that the use of the devices by police is illegal. In some cases, district attorneys have dropped charges when the use of a cell-site simulator was revealed during discovery.

Marlow said that while the exotic nature of the technology is often played up for shock value, the prejudicial use of it, too often, is not. “It became very clear that as a matter of a policing justice issue, and a racial justice issue, not just in the fact of the surveillance itself but in the way that it was deployed against low-income and minority communities in particular.”

Matt Mitchell, of Crypto Harlem, a cybersecurity and civil liberties group based in New York City, said the practice of targeting poor neighborhoods and minorities was all too familiar: “It’s replacing physical stop-and-frisk with digital stop-and-frisk,” he said.

Police departments are rarely transparent when they obtain surveillance equipment, Marlow said. Rather than include funds used for spying technology in budgets submitted to the oversight of elected officials, police departments have sometimes purchased the devices with funds that were never open to scrutiny. “Sometimes they use civil asset forfeiture funds because they sort of seize it on the lowdown and then use it on the lowdown,” Marlow said. For Baltimore’s secret drone surveillance program, revealed by Bloomberg News in August, funds came from “a private donor”.

The legislative guidelines also suggest that law enforcement be required to report use of any approved devices to elected officials. “To verify legal compliance, surveillance technology use and deployment data should be reported publicly on an annual basis,” the guidelines say.



Officials in cities from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Tesla Motors’ hometown of Palo Alto, California, will announce legislation based on the proposed rules, saying that “surveillance technologies should not be funded, acquired, or used without express city council approval”. They will also generally encourage city councils nationwide to exclude their police forces from engaging in domestic spying.

The effort is the descendant of the ACLU’s TakeCTRL campaign, launched on 20 January, which resulted in bills barring corporate and government access to private citizens’ data in five states. The followup campaign, with the help of the other organizations, is designed to mirror that success on the municipal level.