Cops' Go-To Wiretap Provider Will Soon Beam Broadband From Space

You've maybe heard a bit about Harris Corporation. The information technology firm is at the center of ongoing debates over wiretaps being carried out by domestic law enforcement agencies that use the Stingray, Harris' covert mobile tracking device. And now, in an intriguing twist, Harris is poised to go to space.

The company recently secured a contract with Boeing to provide the aircraft company with Ka-band antennaes for the fourth and final unit in Boeing's suite of high-data-rate mobile communications satellites. According to a press release, the Harris-linked satellite will beam a Ka-band network to Earth, for use on everything from planes to deap-sea vessels.

It's certainly not the first time a multinational company has hired an info-tech developer of dubious legal standing. Besides, Harris has been selling "an entire range of secretive mobile phone surveillance technologies from a catalogue it conceals from from the public on national security grounds" to government agencies for years, as Ars Technica reports.

But it is cause for concern.

Just look at the Stingray imbroglio. The suitcase-sized mobile device essentially acts like a cell tower; when a phone is tricked, unbeknownst to its owner, to loop into the Stingray's dragnet, the phone's data can then be pilfered while it's tracked over a targeted area and fed to authorities in real-time data streams. Police don’t need any help from the NSA when they can simply pretend to be a cell phone provider and obtain logs for your phone calls, text and location data, and more. Just do around 600 hours of training, become an officer, and you too can spy on absolutely anyone.

As you'd imagine, rights groups are worried about what something like the Stingray brings to bear on basic privacy protections, namely through warrantless searches and seizures. What's more, Harris has made law enforcement departments across the country sign non-disclosure agreements before deploying the device. This has prevented those law enforcement groups from commenting in court cases on exactly how they tracked cell phones with Stingrays, from reporting the usage to courts, and from obtaining warrants.

Ultimately, Harris decides what information, if any, the department can release. This blocks police from seeking warrants, and allows Harris to determine what the press and the public is allowed to know about potentially unlawful surveillance. It’s akin to letting, say, Monsanto craft agriculture laws. Oh, wait.

What we know about how the device has been used comes from the recent appeal of a 2008 sexual battery case in Tallahassee, Florida, which revealed police had secretly used the Stingray over 200 times since 2010. There's also the Tucson, Arizona-based journalist who recently obtained a copy of the signed agreement between the police department and Harris Corporation, and found that the police department is required to alert Harris if a journalist or any other entity requests information on Stingray usage.

Mohamad Ali Hodai, the reporter that filed the public records request for information on the Tucson Police Department’s use of the Stingray, was prevented from receiving much of the requested information. A leaked email conversation between the department and Harris showed that the company even coached the officer involved on what laws to cite when denying the information.

I’ve been unable to get through to lawmakers in both Arizona and Florida for comment. Harris did not return my calls.

But I was able to get in touch with the ACLU of Arizona, which lodged a lawsuit to force police in Tucson to provide the information the journalist requested about the device’s use. Dan Pochoda, the legal director of ACLU Arizona, told me that this is about failure of police in Arizona and around the country (some 25 law enforcement departments in the US reportedly use Stingrays, which go for $400,000 a pop) to disclose information. After all, the ability for citizens and journalists to gather information through public records' request, Pochoda said, is a Constitutional right.

“It’s an important aspect of getting the information of the operations of our government and for transparency, like in any democratic society," Pochoda said. "It’s a prerequisite for understanding if things are being done in a fair, just and constitutional manner."

The problem, he added, is not that there was some kind of national security threat, confidential information, or a conflict of attorney-client privileges, which might allow an omission of information. Rather, it's that they wouldn’t disclose almost anything because of the contract: “This was a fairly egregious example of failure to follow the law on an important matter.”

Such failure to comply with records requests happens often, according to Pochoda, and leaves the ACLU no choice but to get involved. “If you let private contracts trump state law, clearly you wouldn’t have anything left of the state law requirements,” he said. For Pochoda, the problem is letting corporations decide when the law is enforced.

Which brings us back to the Harris-Boeing broadband satellite deal. If your wifi connection is sluggish on your next flight, does that mean you're being watched? That the contents of your entire harddrive are being scraped and fed to cops on the ground? Of course not. You have to be careful to not lose too much sleep over the thought of a private interest the likes of Harris, embroiled as it is in a broader discussion about Stingray surveillance, providing custom hardware to outfit a communications satellite owned by the world's largest aerospace company.

For now, Harris is merely priming the pump for faster, more widely-available commercial Internet connections. It's only if the brains behind the Stingray start to pick and choose when Boeing's orbital hotspot should fall under the auspices of various national airspace laws and also International Space Law that we should ask what should be done to bring the discussion down to Earth. We can only hope we never have to.