U.S: Police Hid Spy-Tool Use from Judges

U.S: Police Hid Spy-Tool Use from Judges

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794332_m featureA non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona journalist.

According to Wired the NDA includes an exception for “judicially mandated disclosures,” but no mechanisms for judges to learn that the equipment was used. In at least one case in Florida, a police department revealed that it had decided not to seek a warrant to use the technology explicitly to avoid telling a judge about the equipment. It subsequently kept the information hidden from the defendant as well.

The Harris Corporation, a Florida-based company, is the leading maker of stingrays in the U.S. The secretive technology is generically known as a stingray or IMSI catcher, but Harris sells models of stingrays it specifically calls the Stingray and Stingray II. Stingrays are designed to emit a signal that is stronger than nearby cell phone towers in order to force phones in the vicinity to connect to them.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

When mobile phones — and other wireless communication devices like air cards — connect to the stingray, it can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can then triangulate the device’s location with much more precision than they can get through data obtained from a mobile network provider’s fixed tower location.

Some stingrays have the ability to collect content as well. But U.S. authorities have asserted in the past that they don’t need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because the ones they use don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages but rather operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.