Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union are trying to uncover more about the FBI's role in helping local police acquire powerful cellphone surveillance devices. For more than a decade, the true scope of their use against Americans has remained a closely guarded secret. The police departments and prosecutors have followed the federal government's secret requirements to the extreme.
The FBI is accused of violating the nation's freedom of information law by refusing to acknowledge the existence of documents that contractually prohibit police from releasing information about stingrays. The documents do exist. I should know. I am looking at several of them.
In our own purely private experiences, characteristics which show, or tend to show, that there are in the world things other than ourselves and our private experiences, is what we human beings must find. These documents are warm from my printer. The question of what, if anything, exists beyond ourselves has been keeping philosophers up at night.
That is over. These documents are not fake. I am touching them. With my hands.
The non-disclosure agreements that police departments have already made public can be described as explicitly prohibiting police from discussing the use of stingrays in the broadest sense. The bureau for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department prepared an agreement in 2012 that bars police from telling the public, the press, and other law enforcement agencies that they acquired a stingray.
In plain English, the agreement instructs police to use the data collected from such devices to convict people of crimes, while also concealing the existence of the devices themselves from judges, defendants, and juries. If the public learns anything about the devices or their capabilities, the FBI can seek the dismissal of charges against a suspect.
The Washington Post reported on the existence of these agreements years ago. It is refusing to do it a second time. The agency told the Post in 2015 that nondisclosure agreements don't preclude police from discussing the equipment's use. The FBI may now prefer silence rather than live a lie because of the agreements themselves.
The agreements themselves are not covered by the exemption because they are not based on the idea that withholding certain information from the public would compromise law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.
The Center for Human Rights and Privacy compiled them. I am not a lawyer, but I can judge for myself.
The American Civil Liberties Union launched its effort to get copies of the non-disclosure agreements 11 months ago after learning that the Harris Corporation would no longer sell them directly to local police. Police agencies are turning to other manufacturers, including one in Canada whose patents lean heavily on the work of engineers overseas, as reported by Gizmodo.
The public doesn't know if the FBI is imposing conditions on state and local agencies' purchase of cell site simulator technology from these or other companies
The FBI refused to confirm or deny the existence of any responsive records after they were asked for them. It is only legal in rare cases where the existence of the requested records would reveal information that is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
The lawyers called the FBI refusal to confirm or deny if it has records about secrecy agreements ironic.
They said that the FBI has continued to impose nondisclosure agreements and other conditions on local and state police. It is information about whether the government is skirting transparency requirements.
The FBI didn't comment.
The use of stingrays, a technology that is used to track the locations of cellphones by mimicking legitimate cellphone towers, is not controversial solely due to the secrecy surrounding it. It is a factor. They have gone to extreme lengths to hide their existence. Criminal cases have been dropped because police refuse to be questioned about the use of stingrays in court. The U.S. marshals used to raid a Florida police department to seize any documents related to stingrays in order to keep them from being disclosed under the state's public records law.
The U.S. Justice Department used to distribute a template for warrant applications that made it appear that the devices were related to other phone tracking technologies. Defendants have been convicted of crimes without knowing how police gathered evidence against them. The police have used a controversial law enforcement technique known as "parallel construction" to hide stingrays.
For decades, law enforcement agencies across the country have used Stingrays to locate and track people in all manner of investigations, from local cops in Annapolis trying to find a guy who nabbed 15 chicken wings from a delivery driver, to ICE tracking down undocumented immigrants in New York and Detroit. Until a few years ago, even the existence of this technology was shrouded in near-total secrecy.
Even if the FBI is free, we know what it is.
After publication, the FBI declined to comment.
