Court Documents Show FBI Had To Bail Out Oakland Police With Its Bigger, Better Stingray

Tech Dirt

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica has obtained court documents showing the Oakland Police Department had to call in the feds -- and their IMSI catcher -- to track down a suspect wanted in connection with a shooting of an off-duty police officer.

According to new government affidavits filed earlier this week, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) used its stingray without a warrant in 2013 for several hours overnight as a way to locate a man accused of being involved in shooting a local police officer. The OPD called in the FBI when that effort was unsuccessful. The FBI was somehow able to locate the suspect in under an hour, and he surrendered to OPD officers.

The only reason these affidavits even exist is because the judge presiding over the prosecution of Purvis Ellis ordered the government to submit declarations detailing how the devices were used to locate him. Two declarations -- one from the FBI [PDF] and one from the Oakland PD [PDF] -- shed some additional light on the now-ubiquitous cell phone-tracking technology.

Neither law enforcement agency sought a warrant for their Stingray deployments. Both declarations claim none was needed because of "exigent circumstances." Given that this occurred before the DOJ instituted a warrant requirement for the FBI's Stingray use, it's unlikely any evidence is in danger of being tossed.

The Oakland PD's declaration states the same thing: no warrant was sought because of "exigent circumstances." Similarly, there appears to have been no warrant requirement in place for the Oakland Police Department at that time. That doesn't mean the court won't find that the use of a Stingray device (or, in this case, two of them) requires the use of a warrant, but even if it does, the good faith exception is likely to apply -- especially in the FBI's case, as its warrant requirement was still thee years away. In both deployments, pen register orders were used to obtain subscriber info. Because exigent circumstances dictated the requests, no judicial approval of the orders was needed.

Ellis' lawyers are hoping the judge will find the circumstances surrounding the Stingray deployments to be not nearly as "exigent" as the government claims.

Prosecutors argued that because the three men involved in the altercation were at large, there was a clear exigency. Ellis’ defense, meanwhile, has countered that because the OPD had declared the scene “secure” 14 minutes after Karsseboom was shot, there was no exigency. This issue remains unresolved. [MORE]