By Devlin Barrett
WASHINGTON--A Justice Department official defended the U.S.
Marshals Service Friday after The Wall Street Journal revealed the
agency operates a secret cellphone surveillance program that
deploys an airborne device mimicking cell towers to cull
registration data from thousands of Americans' mobile phones at a
time.
Without formally acknowledging the existence of the program, the
official said the Marshals Service doesn't maintain a database of
everyday Americans' cellphones.
The official said any of the Marshals' investigative techniques
are deployed "only in furtherance of ordinary law enforcement
operations, such as the apprehension of wanted individuals, and not
to conduct domestic surveillance or intelligence-gathering." The
official said the agency doesn't maintain any databases of
cellphone information of the general public, and said any activity
is legal and "subject to court approval."
The statement came in response to a Wall Street Journal article
Thursday night that revealed a secret program run by the U.S.
Marshals Service to hunt fugitives by scanning the skies for
cellphone registration numbers. The program, which has been fully
operational since about 2007, sends up a small plane equipped with
an airborne device which tricks cellphones into thinking the device
is the nearest cell tower, according to people familiar with the
program.
The phones, sometimes tens of thousands of them, will then send
their unique identifying information to that device, which then
sifts through them to find a suspect phone, these people said. As
soon as it registers a phone that doesn't match the suspect's
device, it "lets go" of that phone, these people said.
Once it finds the targeted phone, the plane continues to circle
until it can tell the precise location of that individual to within
10 feet, these people said.
A Justice Department official on Friday said they still wouldn't
confirm or deny the existence of such a program, because doing so
would allow criminals to better evade law enforcement. But the
official said it would be "utterly false" to conflate the
law-enforcement program with the collection of bulk telephone
records by the National Security Agency, a controversial program
already being challenged in the courts and by some members of
Congress.
Privacy advocates call the program a dragnet and have called
into question whether judges who sign court orders are told the
method being used to hunt for suspects. Because those court
applications are sealed, it is unclear what courts have been told
about the program.
One maker of the devices that mimic cell towers is a Boeing Co.
subsidiary, which has stated in a public regulatory filing that
some of their machines have the ability to store the numbers of
non-targeted cellphones for later cross-referencing. And a person
familiar with the technology being deployed said that data is
stored when it is used overseas by U.S. military and intelligence
personnel.
Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com
Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires