At the time, neither we nor the Informup team could find the LeadsOnline contract in the city’s data portals, leading to suspicion it was being deliberately concealed. But it turns out there’s a simpler, if equally shady, explanation – the contract never existed in the first place. Invoices from LeadsOnline obtained through a Right to Know request show the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police has been paying for CellHawk with a series of annual or biannual subscription purchases, avoiding leaving a paper trail that might have exposed the app’s purchase.
Examination of the invoices reveals some interesting clues. With every payment but two, someone included a short form certifying “that the goods or services shown on the Departmental Invoice(s) were furnished the City of Pittsburgh on order of the undersigned, without advertisement or other notice and without competitive bidding.” In spite of that “undersigned”, no name appears on the signature line of the form in any of the obtained documents. The same form has an entry asking “Will the need for similar goods or services recur? Yes[] No[] If yes, why?” The “No” box is checked in every instance, with a note reading “not at this time.” This declaration might have been convincing on the first invoice we obtained, from 2017, but it’s wearing pretty thin nine years later. In support of the CellHawk subscription for 2018, Detective Timothy Cole wrote the following in a memo to then-Chief of Staff Eric Holmes: “There are CDRs (Call Data Records) requested in most Homicide cases and this program is extremely useful in plotting the locations of the phone at certain times.” Yet the same invoice included the standard denial that the app would be used in the future. Similarly, in both 2017 and 2020 Detective Raymond Murray asserted to Holmes “Cell Hawk is a program that our unit/department has been using … with positive results.” But at least according to the anonymous filler-out of the attached form, not positive enough for the PBP to ever again renew its subscription.
This aversion to a formal contract does not originate with LeadsOnline. Every invoice from the vendor includes a disclaimer that begins with “Unless LeadsOnline and the Customer above have executed a written Agreement for the Service which governs this order…,” indicating the company has no issue with written agreements for service, aka contracts. In addition, the city once had an actual contract with LeadsOnline for equipment tracking software, a much more innocuous function than that performed by CellHawk. It’s fairly obvious that the PBP has avoided a contract for CellHawk to keep its use of the service secret, and the pretense of every subscription renewal being a one-off purchase is a fig leaf meant to bypass procurement rules that require contracts and/or competitive bidding for ongoing expenditures.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the PBP’s use of CellHawk. Since every subscription since 2017 has been for the top tier unlimited records version, we can’t tell from the invoices how many geofence warrants have been executed, let alone for how many individuals. The nature of geofence warrants is to collect all records from a defined area during a specified time frame. It is unknown how many individuals have had their movements tracked who had nothing to do with the crimes being investigated. The Intercept article linked above shows that in 2020 LeadsOnline claimed the app could track 20 phones at once, a number that will only have gone up in the intervening six years.
With the exception of the Homicide unit, we also don’t know which units and detectives are using CellHawk. If the app is as attractive to investigators as Cole claimed in 2018, we can expect its usage will have expanded since then. It would be particularly interesting to know whether the department used CellHawk to track protesters during the George Floyd uprising in 2020.
Anyone with more information is urged to email us at 412swineflu@proton.me.