By Justin Glawe
It took the curiosity of a skinny,
fidgeting 27-year-old to force the Chicago Police Department to admit they
purchased controversial surveillance technology. The department, legally boxed
into a corner over its use of a device known as the StingRay, finally admitted
to acquiring the cell-phone tracking product last summer, six years after
actually buying the thing. The watchdog work came not from a newspaper or any
other media outlet in the city, but Freddy Martinez, an information technology
worker who oversees websites for a private company from a downtown office
building.
Martinez is now in the midst of his
second lawsuit against the Chicago police over their refusal to disclose how
they actually use the StingRay. These types of devices can capture, track, and
monitor cell phone data, even without judicial oversight. Over a burger and
whiskey-ginger at a bar in Chicago's Loop district, Martinez described the
relatively benign circumstances that led him to become a plaintiff against the
Chicago police, in the process costing city taxpayers a bit more than $120,000
in fees to defend the law enforcement agency.
"I was interested in it from a
technological standpoint," he said of the device. Martinez, who fiddled
with his phone throughout our conversation and expressed a preference for a new
job that requires little human interaction, filed a Freedom of Information Act
request in June of last year asking Chicago police to hand over records
regarding the device—if they even existed.
"They basically ignored it,"
Martinez told me.
StingRays can pick up text messages
about where to meet for dinner as easily as they can the location of the next
major drug buy.
The StingRay and its sister device, the
KingFish, are products of the Harris Corporation, which did not respond to a
request for comment for this story. The devices mimic cell towers, allowing
police to listen in on and read communications from suspects' phones. But the
high-tech surveillance toys are capable of much more than honing in on one or
two bad guys police want to catch talking about criminal activity—they can also
pick up all cell communications within a certain radius.
So this gives them the power to launch
an NSA-style surveillance program on a micro level. And while the NSA's
clandestine surveillance of communications were initiated with the intention of
preventing crimes and acts of terrorism, privacy activists have raised red
flags that the nationwide surveillance program is monitoring good, law abiding
Americans like you and me. The same goes for police use of StingRays, which can
pick up text messages about where to meet for dinner as easily as they can the
location of the next major drug buy.
Martinez, a Chicago native, was miffed
when Chicago police ignored his FOIA request. With the help of an attorney
friend, he eventually sued. After repeatedly denying that they'd even purchased
the devices, Martinez's lawsuit forced the cops to own up. In a trove of documents
released as part of a settlement for that lawsuit, police confirmed they'd
purchased a StingRay upgrade in 2008 at a cost of $65,000. Martinez estimates
the department has spent more than $300,000 total on the technology, according
to documents in his possession, which includes upgrades (from 2G to 4G, for
instance), training, and maintenance.
Martinez told me that funding, unlike
the $120,000 in tax dollars to defend against his lawsuit, may come from a
somewhat more nefarious source: drug dealers.
He believes police purchased StingRays
with so-called "1505" funds, money seized in raids on drug dealers
and organized crime syndicates. This, Martinez and other privacy advocates
contend, is a way for police to essentially launder the money used to purchase
devices that many claim regularly violate the constitutional rights of people
who aren't even suspects in a crime.
"There was no City Council
approval for this," he said about the department's purchase of the
devices, suggesting there is no line in the city budget for that year letting
public officials and citizens in on what became a four-year secret. In fact,
many of the council members may not even have known that the technology was
being used until news of Martinez's settlement with the department broke. But
that was just the beginning.
Police and prosecutors have at times
purposefully avoided mentioning the device to judges, who provide crucial
oversight in the investigation of crimes.
Martinez's second, active lawsuit is
intended to make Chicago police explain the process by which they secure
approval for use of the devices. Traditionally, seizure of cell data phone
data—used to track a drug dealer or a murder suspect, for instance—has to go
through an approval process. First, police have to convince prosecutors that
they have enough evidence to go after someone for a crime. Those prosecutors
must then convince a judge of the same, and finally, that judge must approve a
subpoena requiring cell companies to hand over data, or a search warrant allowing
police to seize electronic devices and process them for evidence. Often, that
entire process is side-stepped when police have access to StingRays. In fact,
according to the ACLU, police and prosecutors have at times purposefully
avoided mentioning the device to judges, who provide crucial oversight in the
investigation of crimes.
"We have due process for a
reason," Martinez said.
In addition to privacy and
constitutional concerns—and there are many; just ask Cyrus Farivar over at
ArsTechnica, who has been tracking the use of StingRays for some time—there is
a glaring contradiction between how Chicago police have addressed the devices,
and how they're used in real life.
"They claim this is military-grade
technology," Martinez said of police. "Yet they don't have records of
use? That seems strange to me."
Martinez's second lawsuit calls for
police to provide these allegedly non-existent records, which, of course, he
doesn't think is likely. The Chicago Police Department, recalling their initial
denial that StingRays had even been purchased, has claimed there are no records
for their use—when they've been checked out to different officers or units, or
how they've been used to investigate crimes. StingRays didn't officially exist
in the department's arsenal until last summer, and now the law enforcement
agency claims it doesn't even internally track usage of the devices.
A request for comment from the Chicago
Police Department went without response, but considering the ongoing nature of
the litigation, that's not at all surprising. Regardless, thanks to the work of
Martinez and others, we know the department's use of spying technology goes
back as far as the protests surrounding a 2012 NATO summit in the city. And
StingRays may have been used more recently, as the Black Lives Matter movement
took hold in Chicago.
The Chicago Police Department paid a
total of $321,800 for the StingRay technology.
Law enforcement agencies across the
country have slowly begun opening up about their use of StingRays and similar
devices. Often, that transparency has come only as a result of court cases. In
other instances, reporters and media outlets have fought to make police use of
the devices public. The Harris Corporation has tried to keep their profitable
technology out of the news by having law enforcement agencies sign
non-disclosure agreements (not that the cops have been particularly open
anyway). The company even went as far as asking the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) to block the release of a user manual for the StingRay and
KingFish devices, saying the document contained "'trade secrets' and
information about 'law enforcement techniques.'"
Chicago police, specifically the three
top-ranking members of the department's Bureau of Organized Crime, agreed to
their own non-disclosure agreement with the Harris Corporation. In a letter
dated January 17, 2012, from Sgt. James Washburn to his superiors, Cmdr. Joseph
Gorman and Chief Nicholas J. Roti, the sergeant laid out how a new version of
the Harris Corporation's cell-tracking technology would be made available to
the department.
"Upon execution of the attached
non-disclosure agreement, Harris Corporation will issue a trial edition of the
new platform for our use and testing," Washburn wrote before laying out
the eventual price tag. "The cost of this new platform, if the testing
goes as planned, is approximately $21,000."
While it's unclear if that purchase was
ever made, other buys are contained in the documents obtained through
Martinez's lawsuit. They include the purchase of a StingRay upgrade in 2009 for
which the department was billed $65,000. A "software package" came at
a cost of $22,000, according to the documents. Various other purchases were
included on that invoice for a total of $164,500. Another invoice shows the
department paid $157,300 for a KingFish device and accompanying software and
hardware, bringing the total paid for the technology to $321,800.
Washburn, the Bureau of Organized Crime
sergeant who processed invoices and purchase orders between the Florida-based
Harris Corporation and the Chicago Police Department, didn't respond to a
request for comment. The non-disclosure agreement between police and Harris was
crafted by the FBI, Martinez's documents show. And some of the $120,000 charged
to taxpayers to defend against the IT worker's first lawsuit comes from
consultations between lawyers representing the Chicago Police Department and
administrators with the FBI and the Department of Justice. Taxpayers were
essentially billed so one government agency could speak with another, according
to documents obtained by Martinez.
For Martinez, simple questions started
this whole ordeal. Did Chicago police purchase these devices? Apparently so. Do
they have records of usage of the self-proclaimed "military-grade"
technology? They do not, police have claimed. Not a single member of the
department has come forward to explain how the technology is employed to fight
crime—with one exception.
"Investigations of kidnappings,
murders, and other serious crimes" require use of the devices, the Chicago
Sun-Times reported earlier this month.
The officials responsible for
explaining why law enforcement needs the StingRay and KingFish in its arsenal
of crime-fighting tools?
"Police sources."
