Police Departments Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements with Surveillance-Tech Manufacturer, Conceal Info from Courts and Press

Here’s Kim
Zetter writing in Wired:

A 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.

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.

A copy of the contract was obtained from a police department in
Tucson, Arizona, which signed the agreement in 2010 with the Harris
Corporation, a Florida-based maker of the equipment used by the
department. The police department cited the agreement as one of the
reasons it withheld information from a journalist who filed a
public records request seeking information about the department’s
use of the equipment.

You can—and should!—read the rest here.
But if you want the short version, Frank Pasquale sums
it up in five words: “State secrecy + trade secrecy =
impunity.”