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Are Chicago Police Spying on Activists? One Man Sues to Find Out

Freddy Martinez wants the city to release financial records related to the purchase of cell phone surveillance equipment.
Image: Flickr/David D'Agostino

Freddy Martinez, a 27 year-old activist, is suing the Chicago Police Department (CPD) because they won’t release their financial records related to cell phone surveillance technology known as IMSI catchers. Failure to disclose these records is a “willful violation of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act,” states the lawsuit filed last week by the law offices of Loevy & Loevy. At least 25 police agencies in the US own an IMSI catcher known as a Stingray, a portable machine that sits in police cars and eavesdrops on cell phones, and Martinez wants to know if Chicago is one of them. The NSA isn't the only government agency spying on American citizens' communications these days.

An IMSI catcher like a Stingray works by pretending to be a fake cell phone tower that gives police access to all the data on your phone, from the texts you’ve sent to where you’ve been. Unlike searches of your car or your home, this collection of your personal cell phone data can be done without a warrant. Police departments purchase technology like Stingrays with federal grant money allocated to fighting terrorism, but otherwise, their usage remains a mystery.

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The manufacturers of said technologies want it this way; Wired reports that Harris Corporation, who makes the Stingray, has law enforcement agencies sign a nondisclosure agreement with each purchase. The Harris Corporation NDA is so powerful, it recently trumped a judge request in Florida. Besides Stingrays, there are seven other types of cell phone surveillance technology (commonly called IMSI catchers) named in the lawsuit; StingRay II, TriggerFish, Amberjack, Gossamer, Hailstorm, Harpoon and Kingfish.

USA Today reported 36 police agencies refused to disclose their use of any IMSI catchers, saying such a disclosure could be used by criminals and terrorists to thwart the police. This, or an NDA with Harris Corporation, may explain why the Chicago Police never sent the requested documents to Martinez.

Sources inside the department did tell reporters at the Chicago Sun-Times that the CPD uses TriggerFish to pinpoint a person’s location. TriggerFish comes in handy when dealing with kidnappings, explained these unnamed police sources.

By law, the Chicago Police Department had a max of 10 days to get back to Martinez under the Freedom of Information Act. It’s been months. Martinez filed his request on March 22 and the department emailed him back on April 1 to let him know they received his request and would respond that week. It is now June and Martinez has gotten nothing. Follow-up emails have yielded no response.

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“If the CPD hasn’t acquired any of this equipment, it should be easy for them to respond ‘we don’t have records of this equipment,’ but instead they have ignored the request,” and are not “complying with the law,” said Matt Topic, a government transparency and intellectual property attorney with Loevy & Loevy and Martinez’s lawyer, in an interview. Topic would be satisfied with any statement from the CPD at this point. “We ought to have an open and frank debate about this technology, it shouldn’t just be decided and deployed secretly—that raises constitutional and privacy concerns,” he added.

NATO 2012 protesters. Image: Flickr/Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt

Martinez, who works in the software industry, first wondered about police surveilling his phone in 2012 while he was attending the NATO protests. “I became suspicious because it was really difficult to use our phones,” he told me. “We had to resend the same message multiple times and battery life was nowhere near where it should be, and a phone battery that would last a day would be depleted in hours,” he explained. While there could be various reasons why the battery would drain quickly, like if the phone was roaming for example,  Martinez thinks cell phone surveillance technology is the culprit.

“So the way that these things operate is they force you connect—it forces your phone to transmit at max power, which causes the battery to drain,” said Martinez. When, for example, a Stingray or other IMSI catcher is turned on in an area where a protest is happening, anyone walking by will also “have their information sucked up as well.” This explains why just hanging out in the vicinity of a protest will drain your cell phone battery, even if you don’t make any phone calls or send any texts. I noticed my cell phone behaving this way while photographing the 2009 Tea Party protest and again with the Occupy Chicago protests in 2011, and attributed it to an annoying Verizon Wireless problem. Now, I am not so sure.

Both Martinez and Topic mentioned the CPD’s “long history” of surveilling activists, naming “the Red Squad” and the monitoring of the Black Panther Party as examples. In other words, it wouldn’t be out of character for the CPD to have purchased some sort of IMSI catcher and be using it at protests.

The Law Department of the City of Chicago was unavailable for comment at press time.