Justice Department to Require Warrants for Cell Phone Tracking Technology

The Justice De­part­ment said Thursday it will re­quire its law-en­force­ment agents to get a war­rant be­fore us­ing tech­no­logy that tracks the loc­a­tion of cell phone users by pos­ing as cell­phone towers. The cell phone-track­ing tech­no­logy, which sweeps up identi­fy­ing in­form­a­tion from every mo­bile device with­in range in or­der to find a tar­get device’s loc­a­tion, has been met with cri­ti­cism from pri­vacy ad­voc­ates who have raised con­cerns about the wide­spread data col­lec­tion it makes pos­sible. Some­times called Stin­grays after a pop­u­lar mod­el used by law en­force­ment, the cell-site sim­u­lat­ors op­er­ate by mim­ick­ing a cell­phone tower and es­tab­lish­ing con­nec­tions with nearby devices search­ing for a cell sig­nal. When devices con­nect to the sim­u­lat­or, they trans­mit identi­fy­ing in­form­a­tion. Po­lice can single out a device and use the dir­ec­tion and strength of the sig­nal to ac­quire its loc­a­tion. The Justice De­part­ment has his­tor­ic­ally re­mained highly se­cret­ive about the tech­no­logy, of­ten push­ing state and loc­al po­lice to stay si­lent about their us­age of the sim­u­lat­ors. Stin­grays do not re­ceive GPS in­form­a­tion, and may not be used to in­ter­cept com­mu­nic­a­tion to and from mo­bile devices, or the data stored on them, ac­cord­ing to the Justice De­part­ment. In ad­di­tion to re­quir­ing war­rants, the de­part­ment also set data-re­ten­tion and de­le­tion stand­ards, stip­u­lat­ing that all data must be de­leted once the tar­get of the cel­lu­lar sur­veil­lance has been iden­ti­fied and set­ting up audit­ing pro­grams to make sure the de­le­tion stand­ards are fol­lowed. The policy ap­plies to Justice De­part­ment law en­force­ment only, and does not ex­tend to state and loc­al po­lice. Ac­cord­ing to re­cords ob­tained by the Amer­ic­an Civil Liber­ties Uni­on, 53 agen­cies in 21 states and the Dis­trict of Columbia own and op­er­ate Stin­grays...more