Local Police Departments Invest In Cell Phone Spy Tools

As we depend on our cell phones more and more, the tools to peek into our phones are getting better. Local police departments across the country are investing heavily in this technology. And, with few laws governing what police can collect and store, that has a lot of privacy advocates alarmed. NPR's Robert Siegel talks to City Lab reporter George Joseph about the spread of tools that let police collect cell phone data.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Increasingly, police departments are turning to military-grade surveillance tools to help fight crime - a trend that worries privacy advocates. A new investigation by CityLab, which is part of Atlantic Media, documents the spread of tools that let police collect cellphone data. CityLab reporter George Joseph joins me in the studio now. Welcome to the program.

GEORGE JOSEPH: Thanks for having me.

SIEGEL: And you we're looking at the 50 largest police departments in the country. What did you find out about the use of these tools?

JOSEPH: Well, we found through public records requests that the majority of the largest police departments across the country have primarily two types of devices - cellphone-interception devices, which are used to grab our phone data, such as our call logs and text logs out of the air, and cellphone-extraction devices, which are used when police have phones in their possession to actually suck up content from our phones, such as deleted messages, deleted photos, Google location history - that type of thing.

Interview continues here

Source: Local Police Departments Invest In Cell Phone Spy Tools : NPR - < http://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515841069/local-police-departments-invest-in-cell-phone-spy-tools >