Stingrays

This weekend, the Charlotte Observer ran this article, entitled Charlotte Police Investigators Secretly Track Cellphones. The article concerns the use of so-called stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers or cell site simulators. They are machines that simulate cell towers and connect with the cellular telephones located nearby. Officers frequently use them to triangulate the location of a suspect – or more precisely, the location of a suspect’s phone. There’s a controversy about the legal status of these devices, which I’ll summarize in this post. No constitutional or statutory limits on use. At one end of the spectrum, one could argue that there are no constraints on police use of stingrays. Constitutionally, the argument would be that a stingray simply detects the signals that a suspect’s phone voluntarily broadcasts to the world, and so does not infringe on any reasonable expectation of privacy. Cf. State v. McGriff, 151 N.C. App. 631, 638 n.1 (2002) (in a case where one neighbor “inadvertently intercepted” another neighbor’s conversation on a cordless phone, apparently because of channel overlap, the court strongly suggested that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in “cordless telephone conversations”). At a minimum, cell phones send their signals to cellular service providers, which arguably destroys any expectation of privacy in the signals. Statutorily, the argument would be that stingrays normally are configured not to collect the content of any communications, so the wiretapping laws don’t apply; and that stingrays operate over the air instead of being installed on a particular phone line, [...]