Police State America

What’s Wrong Today:

From The Guardian:

All across America, from Florida to Colorado and back again, the country’s increasingly militarized local police forces are using a secretive technology to vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – including from people inside their own homes – almost always without a warrant

Ever heard of the “Stingray”? Few people have. Stingrays emulate a cellphone tower and cause all cell phones in range to register their location and identifying information with the stingray, not just with real cell towers in the area. They can track cell phones whenever the phones are turned on, not just when they are making or receiving calls. So even if you’re not making a call, police can know who you’ve been calling, and for how long, as well as your precise location.

“Stingray” is a trademarked name of the Harris Corporation. While it is a specific product, the name has entered the technical lexicon as a generic term like Kleenex or Xerox. In most sales agreements, Harris has required law enforcement agencies to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) forbidding them from discussing whether or not an agency even possesses such a device, much less describing its capabilities. Since when do the laws requiring public disclosure of certain transactions and activities by public agencies get trumped by a NDA signed with a private company?

Ars Technica helpfully provided this map of the 15 states that are known to employ stingray technology:

Beyond those states, 12 federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the National Security Agency, also employ them.

ACLU attorney Nathan Wessler said in an op-ed last Thursday:

This sort of invasive surveillance raises serious questions about whether our tax dollars are funding violations of the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. At a minimum, police should be required to go to a neutral judge, demonstrate probable cause and get a warrant before using stingrays, but many law enforcement agencies are not doing that…Other agencies may not be going to a judge at all, or they may be concealing stingray use even when they do seek a court order

Wessler also said:

Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover’s house, in a psychologist’s office or at a political protest

You may be asking: How do local cops get their hands on such advanced military technology? Well, the feds are giving it to them for free. When the US government is not loaning police agencies stingrays, the Defense Department and Homeland Security are giving federal grants to cops, which allow departments to purchase the gear at the cost of $400,000 each from contractors like Harris Corporation.

The militarization of police departments has been covered by the Wrongologist here. The New York Times wrote this week detailing all of the other free military gear – like machine guns, armored vehicles and aircraft – that police are receiving from the Pentagon. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the DHS has handed out $34 billion in grants to police departments across the country, many for the purchase of armored vehicles and weapons. This program has created a cottage industry of companies who make militarized equipment and take checks from local towns in exchange for military hardware.

Why haven’t we heard about stingrays?

Stingrays have stayed out of the public eye because local police departments refuse to disclose they’re using them, sometimes even to judges. In one case, although the Tampa, FL police and the ACLU had agreed to an ACLU review, US Marshals seized the stingray records, citing national security reasons. It was not the first time that the US has intervened in many routine state public records cases regarding use of the technology.

The Associated Press reported that the Obama administration has been telling local cops to keep information on stingrays secret from members of the news media, even when it seems like local public records laws would mandate their disclosure:

Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs

As WaPo’s Radley Balko wrote this week, the Obama administration could easily limit these tactics to “cases of legitimate national security” – but by distributing stingrays to local police for mass data collection, it has clearly chosen not to do so.

We know that local and federal law enforcement officials aren’t using this technology to catch terrorists. They’re using them for more mundane policing, like catching people suspected of drug crimes. So, the Obama administration is working with local police to prevent knowledge about a technology that may be violating the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans because, in the administration’s opinion, revealing the details of said technology could jeopardize national security.

If details of the technology threatens national security, then the federal government should prohibit local police from using the technology, reserving it only for cases of legitimate national security. Alternatively, the feds can continue what they are currently doing, letting local police use the technology for local cases, possibly violating the rights of American citizens in the course of investigations that have nothing to do with national security.

That would mean that the fed’s current stance of obstructing the dissemination of knowledge of stingrays is a form of conspiracy with those same local police to prevent American citizens from discovering that their rights may have been violated.

To make sense of this, we should look at it from the perspective of our requirement that the relationship between our government and its people not descend into tyranny.

If we continue to allow the Fourth Amendment to be gutted, kept around only for the sake of appearances, Americans will face a state of oppression similar to that which caused us to declare our independence in 1776.  

But the stingray is also part of a larger decay. It, along with the sources and methods of other governmental spying, can be used to build cases against the disliked, to destroy lives even where no real case actually exists.

Domestic spying creates an atmosphere of fear and wariness, which causes people  to let the powers that be do whatever they want, unchecked by the protections afforded citizens (on paper, at least) by the Constitution.

Fewer and fewer people will have the courage to participate meaningfully in government or speak up if and when government has gone too far.

In short, domestic spying enables tyranny, and stingray in the hands of local police is another tool of tyranny.

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