Over the past 12-18 months, there’s been an increased level of scrutiny applied to the various ways local, state, and federal law enforcement officials track and monitor the lives of ordinary citizens. One tool that’s come under increasing fire is the so-called stingray — a fake cell phone tower that law enforcement officials deploy to track a suspect, often without a warrant or any other formal approval.

A stingray is a false cell phone tower that can force phones in a geographical area to connect to it. Once these devices connect, the stingray can be used to either hone in on the target’s location or, with some models, actually eavesdrop on conversations, text messages, and web browser activity. It’s not clear how much the police cooperate with the cell phone carriers on this — in at least some cases, the police have gone to carriers with requests for information, while in others they seem to have taken a brute-force approach, dumping the data of every single user on a given tower and then sorting it to find the parties they’re interested in tracking. Stingrays can be used to force the phone to give up its user details, making it fairly easy for the police to match devices and account holders.

The potential uses for the information are enormous. Say a murder occurs on a particular street with an estimated time of death between 2 and 4 AM. Local law enforcement would have an obvious interest in compelling cell phone companies to turn over the records of every cell phone that moved in and out of the area between those two time periods. At rush hour, this kind of information would be useless — but if the cell phone network data shows a device in the same approximate area as the murder suddenly leaving the area at a high rate of speed, that cell phone owner is a potential suspect.

Virtually all the stingray devices in use across the United States are manufactured by one company, the Harris Corporation, which makes a variety of other tracking devices. Its other products can be used to conduct denial-of-service attacks on cell phones, monitor voice traffic, amplify the range and power of stingray attacks, and more sophisticated monitoring tools for triangulating an individual’s location.

A consistent disregard for constitutional safeguards

Used properly, stingrays could be an incredibly useful tool for law enforcement, but there are enormous problems with their current deployments. Police often fail to submit a warrant request — one police department in Florida has admitted to using a stingray more than 200 times since 2010 without ever getting a warrant for its use. These devices are indiscriminate — in rare cases, such as a stolen cell phone, police may know in advance precisely which device to target, but in the majority of scenarios they’re fishing for bait to see what they can find. The only indication that a phone has been trapped into connecting to a stingray may be a sudden increase in power consumption (the stingray tells the phone to run its antenna at maximum power).

The problems only increase from here. The Harris Corporation has an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) in place with all its customers that explicitly forbids them from disclosing the fact that they use or own a stingray device. In the aforementioned Florida case, police have acknowledged that they avoided applying for a warrant specifically so they would not have to explain the use of the stingray to a judge.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, having learned its lesson over repeatedly attempting to quash the Snowden disclosures, has welcomed discussion of how these devices are being used to spy on Americans by local officials without any regard for the rule of law.

Just kidding!

The Obama Administration is actually telling police agencies to refuse FOIA requests on security grounds or censoring such documents to the point of worthlessness. Last week, the US Marshals interfered in a case in Florida to prevent the ACLU from meeting with local police officials to discuss the use of stingray technology. According to the ACLU, the Marshal’s deputized the local police force, declared all materials related to stingray use to be government property, and took the records off-site.

The problem here isn’t necessarily the capability, but the ways in which that capability is being used. As with license plate detectors, the police have eagerly embraced the idea of tracking the movements of innocent people with no regard for how that data might be misinterpreted or abused. They’ve signed NDAs with a company that seeks to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act, and avoided disclosing the existence of programs in order to avoid the chance of possible censure.

New technology like DNA analysis and fingerprinting has often been controversial at the outset, but this widespread mobile tracking has no analog in history. There’s an ongoing campaign to blanket the US in local Freedom of Information Act requests for data on stingray use across the country; if you’re interested in contributing, details are here. The goal is to map individual departments and derive an understanding of how practices differ across the nation.