New police radars can 'see' inside homes
Brad Heath, USA TODAY 1:27 p.m. EST January 20, 2015
Radar
devices allowing officers to detect movement through walls have been secretly
used by at least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies over the last two
years. VPC
At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies quietly deployed radars
that let them effectively see inside homes, with little notice to the courts or
the public.
(Photo: L3 Communications)
WASHINGTON — At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have
secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to
effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a
practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service,
began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to
the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The
technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has
said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the
inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant.
The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio
waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of
more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where
they are and whether they are moving.
The RANGE-R
handheld radar is used by dozens of U.S. law enforcement agencies to help
detect movement inside buildings. See how it works in this video provided by
L-3 Communications VPC
Current and former federal officials say the information is
critical for keeping officers safe if they need to storm buildings or rescue
hostages. But privacy advocates and judges have nonetheless expressed concern
about the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies may be using the
radars — and the fact that they have so far done so without public scrutiny.
"The idea that the government can send signals through the
wall of your house to figure out what's inside is problematic," said
Christopher Soghoian, the American Civil Liberties Union's principal
technologist. "Technologies that allow the police to look inside of a home
are among the intrusive tools that police have."
Agents' use of the radars was largely unknown until December,
when a federal appeals court in Denver said officers
had used one before they entered a house to arrest a man wanted
for violating his parole. The judges expressed alarm that agents had used the
new technology without a search warrant, warning that "the government's
warrantless use of such a powerful tool to search inside homes poses grave
Fourth Amendment questions."
By then, however, the technology was hardly new. Federal
contract records show the Marshals Service began buying the radars in 2012, and
has so far spent at least $180,000 on them.
Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said officials
are reviewing the court's decision. He said the Marshals Service
"routinely pursues and arrests violent offenders based on pre-established
probable cause in arrest warrants" for serious crimes.
The device the Marshals Service and others are using, known as
the Range-R, looks like a sophisticated stud-finder. Its display shows whether
it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and, if so, how far away
it is — but it does not show a picture of what's happening inside. The
Range-R's maker, L-3 Communications, estimates it has sold about 200 devices to
50 law enforcement agencies at a cost of about $6,000 each.
Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities,
including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a
building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is
capable of being mounted on
a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop
systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within
them.
The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way
home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it.
Those concerns are especially thorny when it comes to technology
that lets the police determine what's happening inside someone's home. The
Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that
the Constitution generally bars police from scanning the outside of a house
with a thermal camera unless they have a warrant, and specifically noted that
the rule would apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed.
In 2013, the court limited police's
ability to have a drug dog sniff the outside of homes. The core
of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, is "the right of a
man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable
governmental intrusion."
Still, the radars appear to have drawn little scrutiny from
state or federal courts. The federal appeals court's decision published last
month was apparently the first by an appellate court to reference the
technology or its implications.
That case began when a fugitive-hunting task force headed by the
U.S. Marshals Service tracked a man named Steven Denson, wanted for violating
his parole, to a house in Wichita. Before they forced the door open, Deputy
U.S. Marshal Josh Moff testified,
he used a Range-R to detect that someone was inside.
Moff's report made
no mention of the radar; it said only that officers "developed reasonable
suspicion that Denson was in the residence."
Agents arrested Denson for the parole violation and charged him
with illegally possessing two firearms they found inside. The agents had a
warrant for Denson's arrest but did not have a search warrant. Denson's lawyer
sought to have the guns charge thrown out, in part because the search began
with the warrantless use of the radar device.
Three judges on the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the
search, and Denson's conviction, on other grounds. Still, the judges wrote,
they had "little doubt that the radar device deployed here will soon
generate many questions for this court."
But privacy advocates said they see more immediate questions,
including how judges could be surprised by technology that has been in agents'
hands for at least two years. "The problem isn't that the police have
this. The issue isn't the technology; the issue is always about how you use it
and what the safeguards are," said Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Marshals Service has faced criticism for concealing other
surveillance tools. Last year, the ACLU
obtained an e-mail from a Sarasota, Fla., police sergeant
asking officers from another department not to reveal that they had received
information from a cellphone-monitoring tool known as a stingray. "In the
past, and at the request of the U.S. Marshals, the investigative means utilized
to locate the suspect have not been revealed," he wrote, suggesting that
officers instead say they had received help from "a confidential
source."
William Sorukas, a former supervisor of the Marshals Service's
domestic investigations arm, said deputies are not instructed to conceal the
agency's high-tech tools, but they also know not to advertise them. "If
you disclose a technology or a method or a source, you're telling the bad guys
along with everyone else," he said.
Follow investigative reporter Brad Heath on Twitter at @bradheath
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