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Last week, activist Freddie Martinez sued the Chicago Police Department for records on Stingrays after the department ignored his Freedom of Information request.In a phone interview, Martinez said that he first suspected the Chicago Police Department was using Stingrays during a 2012 NATO summit in the city. Martinez said protesters began noticing their cell phones behaving strangely: batteries draining too fast, text messages not sending, etc.Similar lawsuits have popped up around the country. In March, a local independent journalist sued the Tucson Police Department for records on the Stingray device it had bought in 2010 for more than $400,000.Oakland County, Michigan, officials denied a Freedom of Information request from the Detroit News in April seeking information on the county’s use of Hailstorm, a more advanced version of the Stingray technology. The county claimed the records were protected by anti-terror laws—a justification that has appeared in several other cases.
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Florida also happens to be the home of Harris Corporation, the defense contractor that manufactures IMSI technologies such as Stingray and Hailstorm.Harris spent $3.5 million lobbying the federal government in 2013, including on such bills as the Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).Harris gets a lot of bang for its buck. The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Harris a sole-source contract for its IMSI catchers, meaning DHS did not go through a competitive-bid process. When a state or local police department gets a DHS grant for cell-phone tracking technology, it buys a Harris product.
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State and local police departments mostly appear to obtain Stingray devices through federal grants under the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative.For example, Oakland County, Michigan, received a $258,370 federal grant for its IMSI catcher, according to records obtained by the Detroit News.When it applied for AUSI funding in 2011, the San Jose police said the money would “assist regional law enforcement in countering terrorism and investigating and apprehending terrorists.” Yet the devices often end up being used in regular criminal investigations.“When it's being used by state and local law enforcement, it's overwhelmingly being used for regular police activities,” Wessler said. “In Tallahassee, not one use was for counter-terrorism. I expect that's true everywhere else. It demonstrates how easy it is to get these DHS grants and how little oversight there is once the money goes through.”
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