How transparent are police about surveillance technology? It depends on where you look. When it comes to acceptable levels of secrecy around police tools, states have drawn their lines in very different places, resulting in some communities where it is much harder for the public to know what invasive tools are being used.
State public records laws are designed to provide residents a way to learn about their government’s activities. They are variably effective in practice. It is not unusual for requests related to surveillance technologies to be ignored. Police departments have a few specific exemptions that they may apply to withhold or redact records, and they will commonly apply these, like those designed to prevent “law enforcement techniques” to be withheld, in broad and sometimes completely inappropriate ways.
This variance has impacted EFF’s ability to catalog known uses of CSS and other surveillance equipment across the United States in the Atlas of Surveillance. Cell-site simulators (often referred to as IMSI catchers or stingrays) are an extra-sneaky and privacy-invasive type of police tech. The device acts like a legitimate cell phone tower to trick devices within a particular range to link up to it. The CSS can then pinpoint the location of particular devices and sometimes harvest or alter sensitive information on them, like the numbers called, the duration of the call, and the content of sent messages. Law enforcement considers CSSs so secret that they have been known to throw out a criminal case rather than disclose that they used a CSS. You can learn more about CSS here.
Although the Atlas tracks CSSs, much of our data is derived from a 2017 research project by jou
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