This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 14th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown. Stingrazer devices that allow police to trick your phone into connecting to the cops.

And then the police can scoop up a wide

variety of your data and it often happens without state approval and sometimes

state lawmakers may not be aware. Adam Bates is author of the new Cato paper, Stingray, a new frontier in police

surveillance. Even just a few years ago we knew very little about what stingrays actually do.

And police departments were loath to release pretty much any information about them,

partially because of non-disclosure agreements that they had signed.

What do Stingrays do and how to state and local police make use of them?

So a Stingray device is a surveillance device. It's what we call a cell site simulator.

So what it does is it mimics the signal of a cell phone tower and your cell phone is designed to connect to whichever tower is

giving it the strongest signal at any given time.

So what the sting rate does is it sends out a boosted signal that essentially mussels out the legitimate cell phone signals and

forces phones in the area to connect to the device.

Once the device is connected to your phone, the user of the stingray has access to your, they can try and your number, they can see incoming and outgoing phone numbers, and with the right software, they can even

take actual content off your phone, such as SMS text messages.

To what extent have advances in technology that is like end-to-end encryption and that sort of thing that

you know Apple and what's app and various other programs have made available stymied efforts to surveil over some time period people using a stingray.

Law enforcement agencies are still loath to reveal the details of stingray devices.

So there's still a lot we don't know.

And every law enforcement agency that's been found to use a stingray device

has said we're not taking content. So as far as the effect that end to end

...