WASHINGTON—The Justice Department will start revealing more about the government’s use of secret cellphone tracking devices and has launched a wide-ranging review into how law-enforcement agencies deploy the technology, according to Justice officials.

In recent months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun getting search warrants from judges to use the devices, which hunt criminal suspects by locating their cellphones, the officials said. For years, FBI agents didn’t get warrants to use the tracking devices.

Senior officials have also decided they must be more forthcoming about how and why the devices are used—although there isn’t yet agreement within the Justice Department about how much to reveal or how quickly.

The move comes amid growing controversy over the Justice Department’s use of such devices, some versions of which, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, are deployed in airplanes and scan data from thousands of phones used by Americans who aren’t targets of investigations.

There are still many instances where law enforcement doesn’t get warrants before using the devices, sometimes called “IMSI catchers” and known by various names like Stingray, Hailstorm, and “dirtbox,” according to officials’ public statements. The agencies that use the devices within the Justice Department—the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration—each have different rules and procedures for their use.