Another police agency outed for conducting warrantless Stingray surveillance

Yet another law enforcement agency has been discovered to have spied on thousands of unsuspecting — and unsuspected — citizens via cell-site emulating devices.

The sheriff’s office of San Bernardino County, California, has deployed the devices more than 300 times — presumably eavesdropping on thousands of unwitting residents’ cellphones in the process — without obtaining search warrants or demonstrating probable cause, according to ArsTechnica.

The SBSD released a May 7 memo in response to a public records request, revealing the manner in which it has used the devices — commonly referred to as Stingrays, the trade name for a popular iteration of the device manufactured by Harris Corp.

From a Monday report from ArsTechnica:

In response to a public records request, the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department (SBSD) sent Ars, among other outlets, a rare example of a template for a “pen register and trap and trace order” application. (In the letter, county lawyers claimed this was a warrant application template, when it clearly is not.) The SBSD is the law enforcement agency for the entire county, the 12th-most populous county in the United States, and the fifth-most populous in California.

Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, can be used to determine location by spoofing a cell tower, but they can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone as well as information from other phones within the vicinity. For years, federal and local law enforcement have tried to keep their existence a secret while simultaneously upgrading their capabilities. Over the last year, as the devices have become scrutinized, new information about the secretive devices has been revealed.

This template application, surprisingly, cites no legal authority on which to base its activities. The SBSD did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.

SBSD attorneys also confirmed to ArsTechnica that the agency had used the devices at least 303 times throughout all of 2014, as well as through May 7 of this year.

Because the “pen register and trap and trace order” leaves open a pathway for law enforcement to deploy surveillance with minimal explanation as to its intended target or purpose, the potential for abuse is built in to the process. That’s why, according to Ars, “Washington state just signed into law a new warrant requirement for stingray use, which also imposes stringent disclosure and data minimization standards.”

This article, written from a prosecutor’s perspective, dates from 2009, but it highlights the appeal that pen registers and trap-and-trace orders continue to hold for law enforcement. As long as an agency can explain that surveillance conducted under such an order serves a general purpose in an ongoing investigation, that agency is protected under federal law from disclosing additional information about how it uses Stingrays and similar devices.

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