Police departments hiding their use of fake cell tower devices used to spy on everyone
At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states, the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants.
Thirty-six more police agencies refused to say whether they've used either tactic. Most denied public records requests, arguing that criminals or terrorists could use the information to thwart important crime-fighting and surveillance techniques. Click here to read more.
Article first appeared in the aclu.org/blog:
For some time now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been on a quest to better understand the use and legality of “stingrays." These devices, which are also known as international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, or fake cell towers, can be used to track phones or, in some cases, intercept calls and text messages.
The City of Sunrise, Florida, tried to take a page from the CIA’s anti-transparency playbook last week when it responded to an ACLU public records request about its use of powerful cell phone location tracking gear by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. And the state police are trying to get in on the act as well. We have written about the federal government’s abuse of this tactic—called a “Glomar” response—before, but local law enforcement’s adoption of the ploy reaches a new level of absurdity. In this case, the response is not only a violation of Florida law, but is also fatally undermined by records the Sunrise Police Department has already posted online.
A few weeks ago, the ACLU sent public records requests to 36 state and local Florida law enforcement agencies seeking information about their use of “cell site simulator” surveillance devices known as “Stingrays.” We were partly motivated by the discovery that the Tallahassee Police Department had argued in court to permanently seal court records discussing its Stingray use, apparently in deference to a nondisclosure agreement with the device’s manufacturer. That’s pretty offensive, but at least the new Tallahassee police chief has promised to investigate his department’s practices. The City of Sunrise’s position might be even more galling.
The ACLU sent a reply letter to Sunrise, explaining that it’s bad enough that the Glomar response has no basis under Florida law. Government agencies are required to respond to a public records request by searching for and releasing relevant documents, or explaining why individual documents fall within one of the narrow statutory exemptions to disclosure. Refusing to even confirm whether records exist violates the letter and spirit of the Florida Public Records Act.
But even more embarrassing for the city is that the Sunrise Police Department has already publicly acknowledged that it owns at least one Stingray. A document posted on the city’s public website reveals that in March 2013 the Police Department investigated purchasing a $65,000 upgrade to its existing Stingray device, as well as other related technology and services. (See here for an explanation of the abbreviations found on this form). An agency cannot acknowledge a fact in one context, but then refuse to confirm or deny the same information in response to a public records request. Sunrise’s response might be laughable if it weren’t such a bald violation of government transparency laws.
Sunrise is not the only entity attempting to conceal information about Stingray use. In response to an ACLU request, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (the state police) released heavily redacted records revealing that the agency has spent more than $3 million on Stingrays, that it has signed agreements with a number of local and regional law enforcement agencies allowing them to use the FDLE’s devices, and that it has asked local agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements.
As the ACLU points out in a Tuesday blog post, the city of Sunrise has already published an invoice from Harris on its own website dated March 13, 2013, showing that the city paid over $65,000 for a stingray. That document clearly states, in all-caps on each page, that “disclosure of this document and the information it contains are strictly prohibited by Federal Law.”
Sunrise’s attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment explaining this discrepancy.
Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Harris profited an average of over $533 million in each of the last five years. That same annual report states that the firm’s primary customer is the US government, but Harris is doing an increasing amount of business with governments overseas, accounting for 24 percent of the company’s revenue in 2012.
More recently, there have also been reports that Harris requires its law enforcement clients to sign similar nondisclosure agreements that forbid those agencies from publicly revealing whether they use the stingray. (This came up in a sexual battery and petty theft case that reached the appellate stage in Florida in November 2013.)
Earlier this month, the East Bay Express, a local alt-weekly newspaper based in Oakland, California reported that it had received documents showing that the Oakland Police Department had signed a similar agreement and was forbidden from responding to public records act requests concerning the use of stingrays.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/local-police-florida-acting-theyre-cia-theyre-not
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/cities-reluctant-to-reveal-whether-theyre-using-fake-cell-tower-devices/
Police spying on Muslims ‘makes us less safe’
When Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was dropping New York City’s challenge to a law that makes it easier to sue police for racial and religious profiling, it was the second piece of good news for minorities in his tenure so far.
Earlier, de Blasio abandoned the city’s appeal in the stop-and-frisk litigation, effectively conceding that the policies of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) targeted minority men.
It’s now time for the mayor to turn his attention to the NYPD’s mistreatment of another minority community: Muslims who have borne the brunt of the post 9/11 police surveillance.
Details of the surveillance program were revealed in 2011 in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press, which documented how the NYPD spied on Muslims in restaurants, grocery stores, laundromats, and even in their mosques.
The police didn’t infiltrate these communities because they suspected individuals of criminal or terrorist activity. They targeted entire communities in order to find out whether they were engaging in criminal or terrorist activity.
A federal judge in New Jersey recently held that the NYPD Muslim surveillance program was just fine. Of course the police were going to spy on Muslim communities, the judge said, that’s where the terrorists could be found.
This rationale was rejected in the stop-and-frisk judgment that de Blasio let stand. It’s also the type of program that’s forbidden by the city’s racial profiling law, which the mayor has supported. Indeed, late in his campaign de Blasio became increasingly worried about the NYPD’s focus on Muslims, saying that surveillance should be based on “specific leads.”
Requiring a lead to investigate is the opposite of spying on people because of their religion or race.
It’s also more effective. If there is one thing we are beginning to understand about counterterrorism, it’s that dragnet surveillance doesn’t work. (Beginning to understand? Didn't we learn anything from the Gestapo, KGB and sadly in our own country the NSA & DHS.)
The head of the NYPD’s Muslim mapping programs admitted under oath that the operations yielded no leads. At the federal level, President Barack Obama’s hand-picked review board expressed doubts that the National Security Agency’s massive data collection yielded much actionable intelligence.
Such operations may even make us less safe.
Muslims know firsthand the devastating impact that police spying has on communities. In New York, Muslim leaders report that fewer people go to mosques, and those that do are suspicious of strangers fearing they are informants.
Most Americans may not care whether Muslims are free to worship without worrying about government inference. But religious freedom – for all of us – is one of the principal promises of the Constitution. Notably, empirical research shows that mosque attendance correlates with greater participation in civic life and integration. And those are certainly outcomes that we wish to promote for all communities.
http://www.thecrimereport.org/viewpoints/2014-03-blanket-spying-on-muslims-makes-us-less-safe
TSA/DHS wasted $1 billion on useless ‘behavior detection officers”
Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.
There’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The TSA has fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.
In scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.
The TSA program was reviewed last year by the federal government’s Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies. In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time, less than chance. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average, 54 percent, only slightly better than chance. Their accuracy was even lower in experiments when they couldn’t hear what was being said, and had to make a judgment based solely on watching the person’s body language.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/science/in-airport-screening-body-language-is-faulted-as-behavior-sleuth.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=1
DHS wasted $1.3 billion on new St. Elizabeth’s headquarters will need an additional $3.2 billion:
When the Department of Homeland Security submitted its master plan for its headquarters on the west campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital in 2006, officials projected they would move into the new facility by 2015.
But today, construction is a decade behind schedule and at least $1 billion over budget. And Homeland Security, which as of September had received $1.3 billion, will need at least an additional $3.2 billion to complete the renovation of the 159-year-old mental hospital by 2026, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“Frankly, I just fail to see how this is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars — to spend this kind of money for a headquarters — and I’m just really disappointed in the way it’s played out,” Rep. Richard Hudson, North Carolina Republican, said during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing last month.
It’s “a boondoggle of epic proportions,” an exasperated Rep. Richard Hudson told DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson at a recent congressional hearing, “if you’re in the middle of a huge mess, you stop digging.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/23/dhs-under-fire-with-st-elizabeths-plan-over-budget/?page=all#pagebreak