By Matt Cagle

Anaheim Police have spent almost a decade secretly building an inventory of powerful cell phone surveillance devices and making them available to neighboring cities in Orange County, documents obtained by the ACLU of California reveal.

This cell phone spying program – which potentially affects the privacy of everyone from Orange County’s 3 million residents to the 16 millionpeople who visit Disneyland every year – shows the dangers of allowing law enforcement to secretly acquire surveillance technology.

The devices include the suitcase-sized “Stingray” equipment, another hand-held and easy-to-hide cell phone spy tool, and – most surprisingly – a military-grade piece of equipment known as a “dirtbox” that until now was only thought to be used by the federal government and two major cities.

If a city of only a few hundred thousand people like Anaheim has purchased this wide array of devices, it begs the question of how widespread these tools really are.

Additionally, Anaheim has represented in its secretive funding requests that “every city in Orange County has benefited” from its cellular surveillance equipment, raising further concerns about transparency, democracy, and accountability.

It’s bad enough that Anaheim’s secretive acquisition of this surveillance technology deprived the city’s residents of the opportunity to participate in critical decisions affecting their own community.

But by loaning out this technology well outside Anaheim’s borders, the police department has subjected people all over Orange County to surveillance decisions made by unelected leaders from other communities.

About cell phone surveillance

A cell site simulator, often referred to as “Stingray,” mimics a cell tower and tricks nearby cell phones into communicating with it. In order to function, these devices interact with all cell phones in radio range, which means they potentially retain data about the communications and locations of innocent people.

Although federal, state and local governments widely use cell cite simulators, governments have gone to greatlengths to hide information about how those simulators work and are used. Anaheim’s secrecy here is not an accident. The city and its departments bought these devices in secret and initially refused the ACLU’s request for public records.

Only after we filed a public records lawsuit and engaged in extensive discussions did Anaheim produce any documents, which were heavily redacted—an on-going point of contention in our lawsuit.

What the documents show

The “Dirtbox”

Anaheim has possessed at least three different forms of cell phone surveillance technology since at least 2009, the documents show. The police department used a federal grant that year to purchase a powerful, military-grade device known as a “dirtbox” from a Maryland-based company named Digital Receiver Technology, Inc., or DRT.

A dirtbox can collect information about thousands of phones at once, and a predecessor version of Anaheim’s device is capable of intercepting and recording digital voice data, according to a classified catalog recently leaked to the media.

Other dirtbox models are capable of breaking the encryption of cellphone communications, according to media reports. If an earlier model is capable of eavesdropping on conversations and scooping up emails and text messages, can Anaheim’s later-generation model do the same?

One of the unique features of a dirtbox is that it can be airborne, and as a consequence scoop up information from not just a few hundred phones in its vicinity, but from thousands of phones. Until now, the only reported domestic use of these powerful devices was by the federal government and the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago.

While the documents do not discuss Anaheim’s aerial use of the device, they include an email from Lt. Dave Vangsness, head of the Anaheim Police Department’s Air Support Bureau, discussing what appears to be a memorandum of understanding for the dirtbox.

Vangsness has publicly boasted about an Anaheim-owned 10-seat Cessna that “can quietly conduct surveillance during narcotics investigations.”

It’s worth noting that Anaheim police purchased the same dirtbox model sought by the U.S. Air Force around 2012. All of this raises troubling questions about how exactly Anaheim used their device and just how many people have been affected.
 

Stingrays and other surveillance devices

In 2011, two years after buying the dirtbox, Anaheim appears to have bought a Stingray from Florida-based Harris Corp using a combination of federal grant dollars and local funds. And in 2013, Anaheim’s Chief of Police approved an upgrade to the department’s Stingray the ACLU believes enabled it to monitor modern LTE cellular networks used by millions of customers on smartphones made by Apple, Samsung, and others.

In other words, as cell carriers upgraded their networks to LTE, Anaheim police took steps to exploit that very network which millions of customers would entrust with their private communications.

Finally, in late 2013 Anaheim also purchased a controversial hand-held cell phone surveillance devicemanufactured by a company called KEYW and marketed as a tool for covertly locating phones and LTE signals in hard-to-reach places, including the interiors of buildings.

The documents turned over to the ACLU, when compared with publicly available price quotes, strongly suggest that Anaheim bought a device called a Jugular. With a lightweight Jugular in hand, individual officers can easily conduct cell phone surveillance around and inside of buildings, including private homes, without alerting bystanders.

Potential warrantless use

The documents obtained in the public records suit do not confirm whether Anaheim police investigators obtain a warrant before using these devices.

The records state that Anaheim obtains a “court order” or “court approval” for use of the DRT, KEYW, Harrisdevices, but a court order is not necessarily based on probable cause, as is required for a warrant.

This is important because devices like the KEYW Jugular can be used to find devices in hard-to-access spaces, such as the interiors of homes where people have the right to be secure from unreasonable searches under the Fourth Amendment.

The ACLU documents predate CalECPA, the new California law requiring a warrant for these devices. We do not know what legal process Anaheim seeks for cell phone surveillance today.

Anaheim’s underground surveillance network

The ever-expanding use of these devices appears to go beyond Anaheim’s city limits. Anaheim represented in funding requests that it makes its cell surveillance arsenal available to other police departments in Orange County and had written procedures for sharing the dirtbox. The secretive use of this equipment outside of Anaheim means the police not only deprived its own residents of the opportunity to debate or choose whether to be subjected to cell phone surveillance, it also did the same for the residents and elected leaders in neighboring jurisdictions, undermining the democratic process in those places as well.

It’s time for reform

Law enforcement entities should never acquire surveillance technology without telling the public, let alone multiple generations of devices capable of spying on private communications, as these Anaheim documents show.

Anaheim’s gradual slide towards more and more surveillance illustrates the risks of secret surveillance outside of the democratic process.

But communities are fighting back. As federal and state policymakers pass new restrictions on cell surveillance devices, local communities are moving forward with surveillance reforms that range from robust use policies for Stingrays to civilian oversight communities to an ordinance that requires transparency, accountability, and oversight for all surveillance technologies.

The ACLU is hopeful these reforms will take hold in places like Anaheim too so that when police seek the next generation of surveillance technologies, it won’t take the public seven years and a lawsuit to find out about it.

Read the documents

Read the Anaheim cell phone surveillance documents we received.

Matt Cagle is Technology and Civil Liberties Policy attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. Special thanks to former Technology and Civil Liberties fellow Matthew Callahan for his assistance on this project.

Rebecca Chamorro’s doctor said yes. Her hospital said no.

The hospital did not say the procedure Ms. Chamorro wanted was not safe. It did not say the procedure was not a medical necessity. Instead, the hospital said the procedure violated its ethical and religious principles.

Ms. Chamorro is scheduled to deliver her third child by C-section in two weeks. She and her husband decided their family would be complete with three children and she opted to have a tubal ligation—a permanent form of birth control commonly referred to as “getting your tubes tied.”

For women who want a tubal ligation, performing it immediately following delivery, or postpartum, is the best practice, or what doctors call the “standard of care.” Medical advantages to performing the tubal ligation postpartum include the practical ease of the procedure and the fact that a woman doesn’t need a separate surgery and anesthetic later. The procedure is immediately effective, and it adds no additional recovery time.

But Ms. Chamorro’s hospital, Mercy Medical Center Redding, is a Catholic-affiliated facility that follows directives written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which call vasectomies and tubal ligations “intrinsically evil.”

Mercy Medical Center is part of the corporation Dignity Health System, one of the fastest growing health care corporations in the country and the recipient of millions of dollars in federal and state funds each year. Those public dollars amount to a taxpayer subsidy for a hospital system that denies basic health care to the public.

Far from being places that simply treat fellow Catholics, Catholic hospitals are open to and increasingly serve the general public. These hospitals repeatedly and illegally impose private morality on their patients, regardless of a patient’s religious beliefs. Unfortunately, it is women like Ms. Chamorro who suffer, and whose doctors are prohibited from providing their patients with the care they need.

The imposition of religious principles on best practices in health care is a growing problem for our country. Dignity Health is the largest hospital provider in California and the fifth largest health care provider in the country. This expansion has left many patients without viable alternatives for health care.

Because all of the surrounding hospitals with labor and delivery wards near Ms. Chamorro are also Catholic-affiliated, she would need to travel 70 or even 160 miles to get her tubal ligation at the same time as her C-section.

This is not a matter of inconvenience. This is simply not feasible. Ms. Chamorro would have to find a new obstetrician and make multiple, long trips to meet with that new physician, or she would have to move to one of those locations prior to delivery.

She would have to leave her family behind in Redding during this time, as well as during her delivery and hospital recovery time, or otherwise pay to put them up in a hotel, which insurance typically does not cover. Moreover, if she went into early labor, she would not be able to make the trip and would have to deliver in Redding.

The last 15 years has seen a rapid expansion of the Catholic hospital system. Ten of the 25 largest hospital systems in the U.S. identify as Catholic, and nearly one in nine hospital beds in the country is in a Catholic-identified facility.

The ACLU and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP filed a lawsuit in December on behalf of Ms. Chamorro and Physicians for Reproductive Health challenging Dignity Health’s use of religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to its patients.

Physicians for Reproductive Health is a nationwide organization of physicians, with 1,200 member doctors in California. Some of those doctors have admitting privileges at Dignity Health hospitals and are being prevented from performing postpartum tubal ligation for their patients.

Ms. Chamorro made the same decision about a quarter of American women make when they opt for birth control – tubal ligation directly following her upcoming C-section.

Unfortunately, the judge denied her motion for preliminary injunction, but we believe that courts will ultimately uphold a patient’s right to obtain medical care in this situation.

Ms. Chamorro is our third client in the past several months who has requested a postpartum tubal ligation in a Catholic hospital and who has been denied on religious grounds. We continue to hear from women throughout the state who are shocked to find that they are being denied healthcare not because their doctor refuses, but because their hospital does.

We hope this case will establish once and for all that California hospitals that receive tax dollars and are open to the general public cannot invoke religion as a reason to deny patients basic health care.

Learn more

Chamorro v. Dignity Health (Religious Refusals)

Ruth Dawson is staff attorney for the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California.