Informup, a new local media nonprofit focusing on city council proceedings, is reporting that the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has a contract with a company called LeadsOnline for the use of software called CellHawk, which exploits bulk cell tower data obtained from phone companies to track cell phones.
Details about CellHawk’s capabilities can be found in a 2020 article from The Intercept. The app ingests huge spreadsheets of raw cell tower data to present in viewable, searchable, and digestible formats, making the data useful not only for tracking of individuals, but for mapping the movements of groups within a particular area during a particular time period. Like a protest, for example.
City Council Member Deb Gross spotted an invoice from LeadsOnline prior to a committee meeting, and either recognized the name or became curious and made inquiries. The Informup piece quotes Gross claiming she was told by an unnamed member of “the administration” that the PBP obtains warrants for all data it collects through CellHawk. Gross’ administration contact told her Pittsburgh has had a contract with LeadsOnline for the last seven years. Gross’ comments at the meeting are included in this video, starting at about 1:06:00.
Informup also reports that the city’s contract with LeadsOnline for CellHawk is not available through any of the city’s various information portals. Our own investigation confirms this to be the case.
A few more points:
If the seven year timeline is correct, CellHawk was first licensed by the Peduto administration in 2019 with no notification whatsoever. Ed Gainey then continued the contract throughout his term as mayor, as well as the practice of keeping it secret. Presumably new mayor Corey O’Connor plans to follow his predecessors’ lead. The software would have been in use during the George Floyd uprising, and may well have been employed by the police in their years-long roundup of protesters from 2020 into 2022.
Even if Gross’ anonymous source is correct that warrants are issued for all CellHawk data now, we don’t know if this has always been true. 2019 was six, maybe seven police chiefs ago, depending on the exact starting date of the contract. It is not at all certain that every one of them was fully committed to protecting the constitutional rights of suspects, especially when using a surveillance tool nobody knew about. Pennsylvania’s wiretap act requires that police show probable cause to conduct cell location tracking, but this is a fairly low bar. Most judges almost never deny warrant applications. Worse, we don’t know what cell providers’ policies are regarding handover of data, or LeadsOnline’s for processing it. Do they require police to show them a warrant or just assert that they have one?
Countermeasures are going to be expensive and inconvenient. Per the Intercept piece, CellHawk relies on both cell tower and GPS location data, the latter presumably gleaned from data brokers who obtain it from app vendors like Meta. Carrying a burner phone, or no phone at all, are therefore the only ways to stay off the app’s radar when attending a protest or other sensitive activity.
We don’t even know how much the city is spending yearly on the app. The invoice flagged by Gross was for $2,754, but she didn’t say over what time period, let alone how much taxpayer money was spent in past years. Nor do we know how many warrants/requests for data have been processed through the app over the life of the contract.
The Informup article dropped on February thirteenth, and so far no other outlets have picked up the story. At this point they probably won’t. (In full disclosure, we only noticed it after a link popped up on the Pittsburgh subreddit.) This paucity of coverage extends nationally. A Google News search for “cellhawk” shows the only critical coverage is that Intercept article. Unicorn Riot mentions the app in a compendium of surveillance tools in use in Minneapolis in 2022. Everything else is from the police trades or business press, except for a few local news bits from Atlanta snickering about how CellHawk was used to track the boyfriend of a county district attorney.
Given CellHawk’s power and ease of use, the lack of coverage is disturbing. The app does most of what the cell tower simulators known as stingrays do, albeit not in real time, without the need for police to deploy their own hardware. This might explain why the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s stingray detection tool has to date not found anything – police departments might have abandoned the devices in favor of CellHawk.
Stingray vendors are notorious for adding nondisclosure clauses to their contracts, forcing their clients to keep the devices’ use a secret. This has led to the rise of “parallel construction”, where cops find some other excuse for having information that they actually got from a cell site simulator. Is LeadsOnline pulling the same trick? Has Pittsburgh been concealing the LeadsOnline contract all this time because there’s a clause in it requiring them to do so?