Stingray technology, also
referred to by investigators with a confusing array of other names
including "WIT" and "Triggerfish," is interesting and creepy stuff.
It mimics cell phone towers to get mobile devices to reveal their
locations, turning your handy widgets into tracking beacons. The
technology is controversial because courts are generally unfamiliar
with the devices, and there's growing evidence that they're being
used by law-enforcement agencies who obtain authorization for their
use by peddling them to jurists as older, much less-intrusive
technology, when they bother seeking permission at all. The LAPD
was
caught presenting stingrays to judges as "pen register/trap and
trace," which dates back to the days of operators and land-line
exchanges. Now, as
noted at Reason 24/7, the American Civil Liberties Union has
unearthed evidence that the feds have been doing the same thing —
so frequently, in fact, that judges have become annoyed and the
United States Attorney for the Northern District of California is
trying to get a handle on the practice.
In the process of gathering information about the use of
stingrays in the case of United States v. Rigmaiden, the
ACLU obtained
several internal Justice Department emails. The first email in
the series, sent to the USACAN-Attorneys-Criminal mailing list on
May 23, 2011, says in part:
Effective immediately all pen register applications and proposed
orders must be reviewed by your line supervisor before they are
submitted to a magistrate judge.
As some of you may be aware, our office has been working closely
with the magistrate judges in an effort to address their collective
concerns regarding whether a pen register is sufficient to
authorize the use of law enforcement's WIT technology (a box that
simulates a cell tower and can be placed inside a van to help
pinpoint an individual's location with some specificity) to locate
an individual. It has recently come to my attention that many
agents are still using WIT technology in the field although the pen
register application does not make that explicit.
The rest of the email makes it clear that higher-ups have no
idea as to the extent of stingray use, beyond the fact that it's
common.
Another email makes it clear that using stingray technology was
sometimes the initial intent of a pen register application, and
other times it was just dropped in as a matter of convenience. "In
other words, a pen might have started out as just a pen, and later
the agents decided to use the order to also attempt to locate the
target," the author suggests with a fine regard for plausible
deniability. "They may or may not have told you about this
decision. So check in with your agents to find out if they have
been using pen register orders to locate targets with the WIT
boxes, whether or not they started out intending to do so."
Who knew that warrants were so ... elastic? Well, aside from the
agents stretching them to acommodate powerful new surveillance
technologies, that is.
On the plus side, judges apparently are catching on and trying
to reign-in some excesses. … Read More
↧