Last November, a Wall Street Journal report pulled back the covers on a U.S. Marshals Service program that uses small planes carrying devices that mimic cellphone towers, allowing them to track criminals but also scoop up information from countless other phones of citizens not involved in any crimes. After months of trying to get more details on the program, one consumer privacy advocacy group has sued the Dept. of Justice hoping to compel the release of this information.
According to the complaint [PDF] filed today by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a federal court in Washington, D.C., the EFF filed Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests on Nov. 20 to the DOJ, FBI, and the Marshals Service.
The requests sought all available records about this program going back to 2007, including the docket numbers for cases in which the spy planes were used, usage logs for the snooping devices, areas where they were deployed, internal discussions of legal protocols and standards, policies for collecting and deleting data.
The letters asked for the requests be expedited because the sought-after information involves “[a]n urgency to inform the public about an actual or alleged federal government activity,” and were “made by a person primarily engaged in disseminating information.”
Though the relevant agencies each subsequently confirmed receipt of the FOIA requests, the complaint alleges as of this morning, none have produced any of the requested documents or provided EFF with any estimate for when the information might be made available.
“Not only have Defendant and its components failed to expedite the processing of Plaintiff’s requests, but it has also exceeded the generally applicable twenty-day deadline for the processing of any FOIA request,” reads the complaint, which contends that EFF has exhausted all available administrative channels for obtaining the requested documents, and alleges that the DOJ “has wrongfully withheld the requested records from Plaintiff,” in violation of FOIA.
EFF is asking the court to order the agencies to immediately process the FOIA requests in their entirety and produce all documents sought in the November letters.
The program, as described in the Journal article, uses Cessna planes equipped with so-called “dirtboxes” or “stingrays” that mimic cell towers of the most popular wireless providers in order to trick cellphones into providing their unique international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) information.
They then reportedly identify the device of the targeted subject and “let’s go” of the irrelevant information.
But what’s not known — because the DOJ hasn’t shared it yet — is exactly how long the stingrays hold onto that mass-collected ISMI data and what the agencies’ policies are for using, storing, and deleting it.
And because court documents are sealed, it’s also not clear if the court orders obtained for these searches describe the methods of data collection.
“These devices pose obvious privacy concerns, but the government has been opaque about its use of stingrays,” EFF Legal Fellow Andrew Crocker said in a statement. “It’s time to do away with the secrecy.”
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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