It turned out that police in Florida was deliberately concealing using of the surveillance tools to track suspects from both judges and defendants. Apparently, at the request of the US Marshals Service, the police using “stingrays”, when applying for warrants, have been telling judges that they knew about the suspect’s location from some “confidential source”. In other words, they lied about the fact that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Emails dated April, 2009, were recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), revealing coppers discussing the deception. The Union pointed out that the emails disclosed the fact that concealing the use of stingrays deprived defendants of their right to challenge illegal surveillance and people remained unaware about invasive monitoring by the police.

ACLU said that both local and federal law enforcement shouldn’t be hiding basic and accurate information about their practices from the defendants and the courts – in other words, they shouldn’t lie.

“Stingrays”, or IMSI catchers, work by simulating a mobile phone tower and tricking any nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thus detecting their location. When devices, including smartphones and tablets, connect to the IMSI catcher, it can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic information, along with data identifying the device’s location. As you can understand, the police can move the stingray around and thus triangulate the location of a device (and a person who carries it) with greater precision than when using information from a fixed tower location.

The authorities of the United States have long asserted that they don’t need a warrant to use such devices because they don’t record phone calls or text messages. However, the American Civil Liberties Union believes that the use of such devices should require a warrant. However, the police simply don’t obtain a warrant, but instead conceal using stingrays from judges and people they accuse of illegal activities. In other words, the authorities don’t tell the public about what technology they employ. Moreover – it turned out that police in Florida may be going even further to hide their use of IMSI catchers when seeking the warrants to search facilities where a suspect is located. They simply tell the courts that they obtain the information from other sources while it is not true.