Court Shuts Down Federal Officers Who Wanted To Run A Stingray Device For A Month Straight

from the 30-days-of-wtf dept

For a long time, cell site simulators, a.k.a. “Stingrays” made headlines on nearly a daily basis. Then they just kind of fell off the map.

L3Harris — the manufacturer of cell site simulators that commanded enough market share to see its flagship product become the victim of genericide — saw the writing on the wall and exited the market. Part of this was due to cell tech advances that made it more difficult to obtain the information these faux cell towers were meant to collect. Part of that was also Supreme Court precedent that made the tech inherently less popular with US law enforcement.

Riley raised questions about cell site simulator use by requiring warrants for cell phone searches. And spoofing a cell tower was definitely a search, as the devices forced every cell phone in the area to connect to the Stingray and cough up identifying info about the device. Carpenter arrived a few years later and made it clear long-term tracking via cell site location was no longer something covered by the Third Party Doctrine.

But the biggest contributor to the decline in Stingray device usage were the warrant requirements instituted by both federal and local law enforcement agencies. What used to be a Wild West free-for-all was now something that required judicial approval. Apparently, a lot of cops decided this tech they once claimed was so useful to investigations it couldn’t be discussed in open court was useless now that it was subject to oversight.

We’re seeing a bit of an anomaly here. Not only is the use of cell site simulators being discussed in open court, but the federal officers have been denied their unusual — and outrageous — request to basically go wardriving for a month in Akron, Ohio. Here’s This Week in Security with more details:

A U.S. magistrate judge last month denied to issue a search warrant allowing federal agents to snoop on the phones of “thousands of uninvolved, unsuspecting individuals” across Ohio in an effort to identify a suspected criminal’s device, a rare rebuke by a court blocking the use of a cell-site simulator.

In the ruling, the judge said the federal government wanted to deploy a cell-site simulator that would have allowed “access to the information of thousands of individuals in the Akron, Ohio area,” but refused the warrant on grounds that it would have allowed federal agents to “gain unbridled discretion to examine the movements of private citizens at all times for thirty days.”

The ruling [PDF] by the magistrate doesn’t name the federal agency seeking the warrant, nor does it give any details about the alleged criminal activity that might help narrow the list down. The rest of the docket remains sealed so it may be weeks, months, or never before we learn anything else about this incident.

Here’s what it does say about the events leading up to this severely deficient warrant:

On June 15, 2026, the government sought approval of a warrant for use of CCSS for up to 30 days, 24 hours a day, to identify the cellular device(s) used by a suspect involved in criminal activity in Akron, Ohio. The affidavit to the warrant application established probable cause to believe that a specific individual is using one or more unknown cellular devices in criminal activity. The affidavit also suggested that there is probable cause to believe that uncovering the identity of the cellular device(s) would unveil more evidence of criminal activity.

The problem is right there in the first sentence. The government appeared to think the only thing it had to do to satisfy the particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment was to suggest it might limit this roving, 24/7 surveillance to a few areas in Akron.

Moreover, in an attachment to the warrant application, the government described five different locations at which a CCSS could be used to identify the suspect’s cellular device(s) “when the officers to whom it is directed have reason to believe that [the suspect] is present” and “in the
vicinity of” the following locations:

the suspect’s residence;
the suspect’s overnight location;
the suspect’s daytime location; and
two other densely populated locations the suspect frequently visited.

That’s wild. This is basically telling the court the government wants to force thousands of devices to connect to its cell site simulator at multiple locations for a period of 30 days. That the agency said it would “take no further investigative steps” until it had gathered enough info to make sure it had found its preferred suspect is hardly comforting. The fact that it claimed it would delete any irrelevant information (at an unspecified time) following its 30 days of wardriving doesn’t help much either.

The court says this is obviously impermissible under any interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, especially given Supreme Court precedent handed down in recent years. It also cites geofence warrants that have been recently rejected by magistrates for pretty much the same reason: wholesale surveillance of hundreds or thousands of people attempting to present itself as a legitimate search under the Fourth Amendment.

The court reminds the government that the Fourth Amendment says this about warrants:

[N]o Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The court says this warrant is no better than the geofence warrant rejected by an Illinois federal court back in 2023: searching for a suspect by searching everyone officers encounter isn’t “particular,” and the use of warrant doesn’t make it more acceptable.

There, just as here, the proposed warrant allowed the government access to thousands of identifiers and location data in an undetermined geographic area. Id. at 715–16. The court found the CCSS [canvassing cell site simulator] “akin to a warrant application to search an entire apartment building—or an entire city block—where the government has probable cause only that evidence of a crime will be found in one specific apartment unit, for up to 30 days.” As that court recognized—and as this Court now concludes—the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement bars this sort of “rummaging” through the proverbial home.

That much should have been obvious to the investigators seeking to have this warrant approved. Either this was ignored in hopes investigators could slip one by the judge or the government thought this might somehow be more constitutional than a geofence warrant with the same parameters. Either way, the government was wrong.

Despite cops relying on Google location data more than cell tower dumps or Stingray devices these days, it’s clear they’re still relying on tech that has completely fallen out of favor over the past several years. I guess if you’ve already bought it, you may as well use it. Sunk cost meets diminishing returns. Fortunately for the Fourth Amendment, blowing the dust of a cell site simulator hasn’t changed the way courts view these warrants.

Filed Under: akron, cell site location, cell site simulators, ohio, stingray, surveillance