Attorney General Eric Holder continues to resist Senators’ efforts to glean more information about federal law enforcement agencies’ domestic surveillance tools—apparatuses that reportedly have, in part, been built with help from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote to the Attorney General last week, asking for more information on cellphone scanning technology. The letter was published Monday.
According to recent reports by the Wall Street Journal, the technology is in use by the US Marshall’s Service, and can scan data of thousands of phones at once when mounted to small aircraft and flown over a particular area.
A follow-up report by the Wall Street Journal revealed how the CIA aided the program. An agency spokesperson admitted to the WSJ that the CIA “does share technology with other parts of the government, but it is up to those agencies to decide how to use it.”
In their letter, Grassley and Leahy note that if reports of CIA involvement in the program are true, then the “practices raise additional concerns.” The lawmakers are calling on the Attorney General’s office to answer a series of questions, including one that seeks to ascertain under what circumstances the DOJ uses cell-site simulators to capture domestic communications, and whether or not such collection is done for law enforcement purposes or on behalf of the intelligence community.
The letter sent last week is the second that the duo has sent this year to the Department of Justice inquiring about intrusive surveillance tactics. The first letter, which The Sentinel reported on in January, also called on the Attorney General to answer questions about police spy tools revealed by the Wall Street Journal. The initial outreach, however, appears to have been wholly ignored.
“DOJ’s failure to answer these questions has heightened our concerns,” the Senators wrote in their latest missive to the DOJ.
Leahy and Grassley, the two top judicial authorities in Congress, have been caught off guard by a series of revelations coming out of the Department of Justice concerning surveillance technology in recent months.
In addition to the airplane-mounted cell-site simulators—known as “dirtboxes” or “stingrays”—other systems, including radar technology that allows police to peer inside buildings and a nationwide license plate reading system, have confounded the Senators.
“This pattern of revelations raises questions about whether the Justice Department is doing enough to ensure that — prior to these technologies’ first use — law enforcement officials address their privacy implications, seek appropriate legal process, and fully inform the courts and Congress about how they work,” Grassley and Leahy wrote in their January letter to the Attorney General.
The lawmakers called on the DOJ to respond to their latest letter by Friday.
