A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use
of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently
when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
The surprise move by the U.S. Marshals Service stunned the
American Civil Liberties Union, which earlier this year filed the public
records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police department for information
detailing its use of the controversial surveillance tool.
The ACLU had an appointment last Tuesday to review documents
pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota police detective. But marshals
swooped in at the last minute to grab the records, claiming they belong to the
U.S. Marshals Service and barring the police from releasing them.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly
extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen
regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.
“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with
federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray
information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases
invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The
feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the
public.”
Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower
and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing
their location. A stingray can see and record a device’s unique ID number and
traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a
stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device’s location with greater
precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower
location.
The records sought by the ACLU are important because the
organization has learned that a Florida police detective obtained permission to
use a stingray simply by filing an application with the court under Florida’s
“trap and trace” statute instead of obtaining a probable-cause warrant. Trap
and trace orders generally are used to collect information from phone companies
about telephone numbers received and called by a specific account. A stingray,
however, can track the location of cell phones, including inside private
spaces.
The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause
warrant to use stingrays because the device doesn’t collect the content of
phone calls and text messages, but instead operates like pen-registers and
trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and
others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace.
