Lawmakers Demand to Know Which Agencies Use a Controversial Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology

Kaveh Waddell reports:

First, it came out that the Justice De­part­ment was us­ing Stin­grays, a se­cret­ive cell-phone-track­ing device that al­lowed it to scoop up identi­fy­ing in­form­a­tion from thou­sands of mo­bile devices at once in or­der to pin­point the loc­a­tion of a tar­get.

But it wasn’t the only one. The rev­el­a­tions kept com­ing: Last month, doc­u­ments showed that even the In­tern­al Rev­en­ue Ser­vice is us­ing the sur­veil­lance devices—of­ten called “Stin­grays” after a pop­u­lar mod­el—mak­ing it the 13th fed­er­al agency known to op­er­ate them, ac­cord­ing to data from the Amer­ic­an Civil Liber­ties Uni­on.

Now, a bi­par­tis­an group of House law­makers wants to know just how many fed­er­al agen­cies are us­ing Stin­grays.

In a let­ter sent Monday, House Over­sight Com­mit­tee Chair­man Jason Chaf­fetz, rank­ing mem­ber Eli­jah Cum­mings, and the top two mem­bers of the pan­el’s IT sub­com­mit­tee—Reps. Will Hurd and Robin Kelly—asked 24 key agen­cies to share their policies for us­ing the sur­veil­lance tech­no­logy.

Read more on National Journal.

Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.