Stingray documents offer rare insight into police and FBI surveillance

Court records in Oakland reveal cases where a warrant wasn’t
required to listen to calls and how much law enforcement uses
the devices

Nicky Woolf in San Francisco
Friday 26 August 2016 20.26 BST

Court documents ordered released by a judge in Oakland, California, have revealed rare insights into how local police and the FBI use a sophisticated surveillance device known as Stingray.

Stingray, manufactured by the Delaware-based Harris Corporation, is one of a class of devices known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI-catchers”. About the size of a suitcase, they work by pretending to be a cellphone tower in order to strip metadata and in some cases phone content and data from nearby devices tricked into connecting to it.

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The Oakland documents, which were first reported on by Ars Technica, show that the city police department used its Stingray device for several hours in a search for a suspect named Purvis Ellis, the lead defendant of four alleged members of an Oakland gang facing trial on nine federal charges including the attempted murder of a police officer in January 2013.

After they failed to locate Ellis using their Stingray device, the Oakland police then asked the FBI for help, the documents reveal. The FBI – using their own Stingray and an “augmentation device” about which little is known – located Ellis and brought him into custody.

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