The FBI Is Still Pretending Stingrays Are Super Secret Cop Spy Tech That Shouldn’t Be Discussed In Court
When I was but a wee Techdirt boy, the FBI was telling cop shops that had borrowed or obtained Stingray devices they'd best not talk about it in court or it would be their NDA'ed ass on the line. In 2015, documents the FBI hoped no one would see (and actually told local cops they couldn't release) showed the FBI was forcing Stingray users to drop cases, rather than discuss this repurposed war gear in court.
That was 2015. That was roughly four years after criminal defendant Daniel Rigmaiden managed to sniff out the devices through internet research and public records requests while trying to suppress the evidence that had gotten him arrested three years earlier. In other words, what's know about Stingray devices traces back to 2008, when Rigmaiden made a concerted effort to discover how the feds had tracked his AirCard, the only thing linking him to where he actually was physically when he was arrested.
A few years after the 2011 article based on Rigmaiden's findings, Stingrays weren't really a secret. People generally knew what they were capable of. Still, both the FBI and Harris Corporation swore users to secrecy. If it appeared evidence derived from surreptitious deployment of cell site simulators might be discussed in open court, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies were pressured to drop cases. Or, if the case seemed promising, the FBI encouraged them to engage in parallel construction," i.e. finding some other way of duplicating the results obtained from Stingray devices so courts wouldn't be aware of how this evidence was actually obtained.
We are now eight years past that inflection point. And little has changed, at least in terms of the FBI. The general public is now fully aware law enforcement possesses devices capable of spoofing cell towers to locate phones and their owners. It's so common it's now just a consumer commodity, as Dell Cameron reports for Wired:
The controversy around stingrays" is so old that the tactical advantage they once offered exclusively to military spies works far more efficiently today as a commercial capability. To wit, finding a phone is nowa standard feature on nearly all phones.
That's just one of several points Cameron makes in his article discussing FBI Stingray records obtained by the ACLU. The FBI is still applying pressure, trying to maintain secrecy about a law enforcement product everyone already knows pretty much everything about at this point in time.
Documents obtained by the ACLU show, for example, that police requested technical assistance from the FBI in May 2020 during a manhunt for a gang-affiliated suspect wanted of multiple murders. This is a serious crime and a good use of our assistance abilities," an FBI official wrote in response to the request. Though redacted to protect the privacy of the individuals involved, the document indicates the suspect had recently attacked a female victim leaving her greatly injured.
The arguments compelling all this secrecy is difficult to square with the reality that, in the year 2023, both innocent people and criminals alike are far from naive abouthow muchlike a tracking devicecell phonesactuallyare.
This apparent effort to terminate a criminal case occurred the same year Harris Technology ditched Stingray development because it considered the product obsolete.
How the FBI managed to justify these ongoing demands for secrecy (if they indeed ended in 2020) remains a mystery. The known ability of phones to act as tracking devices (even if users take general precautions) had long since passed the point of general knowledge. It had seeped into pop culture and from there entered the weird realm of people just trying to get paid for not working. Back to Dell Cameron:
Whether everyday people comprehend that their phones are constantly broadcasting their locations is a question best answered by the man who wascaught stowing his phone in a potato chip bag so he could play golf instead of work-a trick so effective (or possibly unnecessary) that, in the end, it took an office snitch to bring him down. It's hard to imagine the crime spree the man might've pulled off had he only applied this advanced telecommunications mastery toward some more felonious endeavor.
While the golfer was hailed widely as a MacGyver" in the press, the trick he used to deceive his employer was first popularized in the 1998 thrillerEnemy of the State.Early in the film, Gene Hackman's character grabs and stuffs Will Smith's phone into a potato chip bag (screaming at him, meanwhile, that the NSA can read the time off your fucking watch.")
As Cameron points out, if people know the office vending machine is stocked with ad hoc Faraday bags, there's very little chance criminals - sophisticated or not - realize the entity most likely to rat them out has a 6.3'' screen, multiple cameras, and generates a shitload of data cops can mine without a warrant, much less a [whispers furtively] Stingray.
Give it up, g-men. We all know what you know. Stop pretending Stingrays are anything more secret than dusting for fingerprints or beating suspects with a large [tries to pronounce this correctly] fon bk (???). It's a spy tool that spies can't even use because those being spied upon already know what it is. That it can still be used to capture the careless doesn't mean it's too sensitive for public consumption.