Turns Out Police Stingray Spy Tools Can Indeed Record Calls
The federal government has been fighting hard for years to hide details about its use of so-called stingray surveillance technology from the public.
The surveillance devices simulate cell phone towers in order to trick
nearby mobile phones into connecting to them and revealing the phones’
locations.
Now documents recently obtained by the ACLU confirm long-held
suspicions that the controversial devices are also capable of recording
numbers for a mobile phone’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as
intercepting the content of voice and text communications. The documents
also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that
you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug.”
The information appears in a 2008 guideline prepared by the Justice
Department to advise law enforcement agents on when and how the
equipment can be legally used.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California obtained the documents (.pdf) after a protracted legal battle
involving a two-year-old public records request. The documents include
not only policy guidelines, but also templates for submitting requests
to courts to obtain permission to use the technology.
The DoJ ironically acknowledges in the documents that the use of the
surveillance technology to locate cellular phones “is an issue of some
controversy,” but it doesn’t elaborate on the nature of the controversy.
Civil liberties groups have been fighting since 2008 to obtain
information about how the government uses the technology, and under what
authority.
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