Tacoma PD Joins the Ranks of Police Agencies Concealing Use of Cellphone Trackers

What’s increasingly fascinating
about law enforcement agencies’ adoption of stingray
devices—widgets that spoof cellphone towers to get mobile devices
in the area to ping them and reveal their locations—is not the
availability of advancing technology for locating people, but the
lengths to which cops will go to conceal its use. Technology in all
areas advances; telephones led to the invention of wiretaps and pen
registers. Subject to properly vetted search warrants, that might
just mean it’s a new area to which to apply search and seizure
protections. But when agencies, like the Tacoma, Washington, police
department, conceal the use of stingrays (more generically known as

International Mobile Subscriber Identity locators) from city
council members, defense attorneys, news media, and even judges,
something shady is happening.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Last year the LAPD, seemingly
always eager to behave in the most morally challenged way, was
caught
presenting stingrays to judges as old-school, less-intrusive pen
registers. In 2011, the Justice Department cautioned federal
agents that
applications to use pen registers had to be approved by
higher-ups after federal judges pushed back on the common use
of stingrays under that cover.

Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union
uncovered emails among Florida police revealing that such
concealment is not just common practice, but policy followed on the
advice of federal agencies. Here’s part of one very telling
exchange:

As you are aware for some time now, the US Marshalls
and I believe FDLE have had equipment which enables law enforcement
to ping a suspects cell phone and pin point his/her exact location
in an effort to apprehend suspects involved in serious crimes. In
the past, and at the request of the U.S. Marshalls [sic], the
investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been
revealed so that we may continue to utilize this technology without
the knowledge of the criminal element. In reports or depositions we
simply refer to the assistance as “received information from a
confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.” To date
this has not been challenged, since it is not an integral part of
the actual crime that occurred.

So this excerpt from a very interesting
News-Tribune article about the laborious efforts
journalists went through to discover that the Tacoma Police
Department is using stingrays, and the reactions engendered, sounds
awfully familiar:

Judge Culpepper [the presiding judge of Pierce County Superior
Court] said police must show probable cause to get a pen register
order, but as far as he knows, Tacoma police have never said they
planned to use a Stingray to collect a suspect’s information.

If police delete information gathered from innocents, Culpeper
said, “maybe there’s no harm.” But “If they are storing it, what
are they storing it for? And who says they can store it in the
first place?”…

Culpepper said he plans to ask more questions of the Police
Department when investigators next ask him for a pen register order
or a warrant:

“I think I’ll probably ask what kind of device are you going to
use?” he said.

In refusing the newspaper’s request for an interview about the
police department’s use of the devices, Police Chief Don Ramsdell
“cited a nondisclosure agreement it has with the FBI.”

So law enforcement agencies from coast to coast, from local to
federal, are concealing the use of devices that indiscriminately
turn every active cellphone within range into tracking beacons as a
matter of policy. Not just the public that pays their salaries and
suffers their scrutiny, but even the judges who are supposed to
review and approve search warrants are deliberately kept out of the
loop.

The police problem in this country certainly includes armored
vehicles and
bad attitudes, but it doesn’t stop there.