EFF: California Can Pioneer Local Community Oversight of Police Surveillance
California Can Pioneer Local Community Oversight of Police Surveillance For nearly a decade, a company known as Harris Corp. managed to sell sophisticated military surveillance equipment to police departments across the U.S. without any elected policymakers knowing that their tools even existed. A proposed law in Sacramento could ensure that this history never repeats itself. Corporate secrets subvert transparency The particular tools built by Harris Corp. are cell-site simulators , sometimes described as a “Stingray” (after the trade name of an early version). They monitor cell phone networks by mimicking a cell tower and gaining transmissions from cell phones near it, thereby exposing the phones’ locations and unique identifiers (such as an IMSI number), and enabling capture of metadata and unencrypted voice and text content. This saga reflects how executive secrecy can extend from Washington all the way down to the local level. While originally devel...