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After news broke that Edmonton police had admitted to owning and using a controversial surveillance device, the police department is backtracking, calling it a “miscommunication.”

In a story published by Motherboard, a subsidiary of Vice Media, police spokeswoman Anna Batchelor was quoted in an email statement confirming that Edmonton police have “used the device in the past during investigations.”

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The device in question is a StingRay, a controversial cellphone surveillance device that forces cellphones within a given radius to connect to it by mimicking a cellphone tower. This enables users to intercept information, such as audio or text information and location data.

Until this point, only the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were known to own the device in Canada, occasionally sharing it with local police agencies.

In another statement emailed to media on Friday, Batchelor wrote that “there was some miscommunication/misunderstanding internally surrounding the information obtained on whether the EPS owns a StingRay, and in fact, the EPS does not own a StingRay device.”