NYPD Has Deployed Stingrays Over 1,000 Times Without Warrants

Privacy

from the no-surprises-here-(other-than-the-document-release-itself) dept

The New York ACLU has obtained documents from the NYPD — a feat on par with prying paperwork away from the FBI, CIA or NSA — showing the department has been deploying Stingrays without a warrant since 2008. This puts them on the same timeline (and with the same lack of legal paperwork) as the Baltimore Police Department, although the BPD was much more proactive with their deployments: over 4,300 since 2008, as compared to the NYPD’s relatively restrained 1,016.

Not only does the NYPD deploy Stingrays without warrants, it apparently does so without any official guidance at all. (The better to keep paper trails from developing, I would guess. This also allows it to choose its own scapegoat when the political hammer falls, rather than there being a bunch of inculpatory signatures on internal policies/permission slips.)

The NYPD also disclosed that it has no written policy for the use of Stingrays but that, except in emergencies, its practice is to obtain a “pen register order” – a court order that is not as protective of privacy as a warrant – prior to using the device.

The use of pen register orders suggests major police departments all had the same idea when they got their hands on the repurposed military technology: it’s a phone, so why not pen register orders? Well, to begin with, Stingrays capture a whole lot more than a pen register would — like everyone connecting to the faux cell tower, rather than just the target. Pen registers also can’t be used to track someone in motion. All they can do (in the historical sense) is generate phone records of calls made and received. Utilizing this paperwork lowers the amount of proof needed to obtain permission as well as obscures the technology behind the collection of “phone records.”

That the NYPD is using Stingrays is no surprise, considering how many other law enforcement agencies in the country use them. The NYPD has always considered itself to be an extension of federal intelligence services and a bit of a standing military force, so it follows that it would be ahead of the curve when it comes to both surveillance equipment and repurposed military gear.

What is surprising is that these documents are in the ACLU’s hands at all. The NYPD is notoriously resistant to FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requests, having gone so far as to deny requesters copies of its FOIL response procedures.

And, as usual, the Stingrays went into use without any sort of public comment period or any information being passed on to affected citizens (which would be anyone with a cell phone) by the city representatives who signed off on the purchase orders. No doubt these were pushed through with maximum secrecy while NYPD officials chanted their “terrorism” mantra and spritzed the passing documents with holy water redactions.

“Terrorism” is the most frequently cited reason when law enforcement agencies seek to obtain military technology — which Stingrays are — but the documents obtained show no deployments for terrorist-related activity. Instead, they’ve been used to tackle all sorts of “normal” crime, from the violent (rape, homicide, armed robbery) to more mundance illegal activities — like bail jumping, fraud, drug possession, suicide [?] and the location of material witnesses. For the most part, the NYPD’s Stingrays seem to be effective in tracking people/phones down, but that’s hardly any excuse for brushing past the Fourth Amendment with a minimum of paperwork or internal accountability.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, imsi catcher, nypd, stingray, warrants