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Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal.
The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.
The StingRay family of trackers are manufactured by the Harris Corporation, a company with $5 billion in annual revenue and headquarters in Melbourne, Florida. As “cell site simulators,” the trackers trick mobile phones into connecting to a StingRay as if it were a cell tower. This allows police to determine the cell phone’s location, and thus its owner’s.