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‘Stingray’ Tracks Unused Phones
For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device —a stingray— were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The Harris StingRay II, one of several devices dubbed ‘stingrays’ are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, stingray works by mimicking a cellphone tower, getting a phone to connect to it and measuring signals from the phone. It lets the stingray operator “ping,” or send a signal to, a phone and locate it as long as it is powered on, according to documents reviewed by the Journal.
The device has various uses, including helping police locate suspects and aiding search-and-rescue teams in finding people lost in remote areas or buried in rubble after an accident.
FBI and Department of Justice officials say investigators don’t need search warrants because it “does not intercept communication, so no wiretap laws would apply.”
Associate Deputy Attorney General James A. Baker and FBI General Counsel Valerie E. Caproni both said at a panel at the Brookings Institution in May that devices like these fall into a category of tools called “pen registers,” which gather phone numbers dialed, but don’t receive the content of the communications.
To get a pen-register order, investigators don’t have to show probable cause. If the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation, a government attorney only needs to certify that information will ‘likely’ be obtained in relation to an ‘ongoing criminal investigation’.
Senators have been questioning the NSA about geo-tracking, and whether or not citizens are being tracked without their knowledge.
Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall (D., Colo.) wrote a letter to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asking whether the agencies he leads, including the NSA and the CIA, “have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes.”
The general counsel of the National Security Agency, said the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.” “There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said.