Cops Must Promise to Keep Secrets for FBI, FCC Phone Snooping Tech

Cops around the country have been
using a device called a surveillance device called a “StingRay” to
locate and monitor cellphones. The tool is about suitcase-sized and
casts a wide net into which countless people’s metadata is caught.
Not much else is known about them. That’s exactly how cops want it,
and that’s how the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) want it, too, newly released documents confirm.

Some background: Unbeknownst to just about
everybody (city council, county prosecutors, and superior
judges included), the Tacoma, Washington Police Department (TPD)
has for years been using the surveillance tool. Court cases have
revealed
that other local law enforcement agencies sign a non-disclosure
agreement (NDA) with Harris Corp., which produces StingRays, but
federal agencies’ involvement has been hazier. 

MuckRock, a site that focuses on freedom of information
requests, got its hands on some paperwork, and
highlights the fact that “the FBI received notification from
Harris that TPD was interested in a StingRay, [which] reveals a
surprising level of coordination between a private corporation and
a federal law enforcement agency. The agreement… makes clear that
completing the NDA is compulsory by order of the FCC” and FBI. Four
out six pages that MuckRock received were completely censored, but
“the document’s opening paragraph cements details previously only
guessed at.”:

Documents released in August referred to a nondisclosure
agreement (NDA) between Tacoma and the Justice Department, but the
agreement itself was not released until last Friday. The Tacoma
document provides key insight into the close cooperation among the
FBI, Harris Corporation and the Federal Communications Commission
to bar StingRay details from public release.  

Tacoma police chief Donald Ramsdell signed the NDA on January 3,
2013, along with special agent Laura Laughlin of the FBI’s Seattle
field office and four Tacoma officers authorized to operate the
StingRay system.

The document indicates that
every law enforcement agency that gets an FBI StingRay has to sign
the same NDA the Tacoma cops signed. The American Civil Liberties
Union, which has an ongoing StingRay case in Arizona,
writes, “We have seen the
FBI pressure local law enforcement agencies to withhold basic
information about purchase and use of Stingrays before, but now we
have greater insight into how it does so.” And, luckily, an “FBI
agent’s declaration in the Arizona case quotes extensively from the
nondisclosure agreement, thus filling in some of the text blacked
out in the Tacoma document.”

“It’s not clear to me why the FCC would have an interest in
requiring law enforcement agencies to sign NDA’s with the FBI,
unless they were concerned that the spread of this technology could
harm users of American communications networks,” suggests Alan
Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The devices are problematic for a few reasons. Cops often
justify that they use them for anti-terror activity, but
don’t actually, and since the agencies are bound to their NDAs,
they use them without the approval of individual search warrant. As
such, the Electronic Frontier Foundation
describes StingRays as “an unconstitutional, all-you-can-eat
data buffet.”