Hello > Who's there?

If you thought Stingray covered the territory - think again

Powerful Mobile Phone Surveillance Tool Operates in Obscurity Across the Country

CellHawk helps law enforcement visualize large quantities of information collected by cellular towers and providers.

Sam Richards

The Intercept |

Until now, the Bartonville, Texas, company Hawk Analytics and its product CellHawk have largely escaped public scrutiny. CellHawk has been in wide use by law enforcement; the software is helping police departments, the FBI, and private investigators around the United States convert information collected by cellular providers into maps of people’s locations, movements, and relationships. Police records obtained by The Intercept reveal a troublingly powerful surveillance tool operated in obscurity, with scant oversight.

CellHawk’s maker says it can process a year’s worth of cellphone records in 20 minutes, automating a process that used to require painstaking work by investigators, including hand-drawn paper plots. The web-based product can ingest call detail records, or CDRs, which track cellular contact between devices on behalf of mobile service providers, showing who is talking to whom. It can also handle cellular location records, created when phones connect to various towers as their owners move around.

Such data can include “tower dumps,” which list all the phones that connected to a given tower — a form of dragnet surveillance . . .

Police use CellHawk to process datasets they routinely receive from cell carriers like AT&T and Verizon, typically in vast spreadsheets and often without a warrant. This is in sharp contrast to a better known phone surveillance technology, the stingray: a mobile device that spies on cellular devices by impersonating carriers’ towers, tricking phones into connecting, and then intercepting their communications. Unlike the stingray, CellHawk does not require such subterfuge or for police to position a device near people of interest. Instead, it helps them exploit information already collected by private telecommunications providers and other third parties.

CellHawk’s surveillance capabilities go beyond analyzing metadata from cellphone towers. Hawk Analytics claims it can churn out incredibly revealing intelligence from large datasets like ride-hailing records and GPS — information commonly generated by the average American. According to the company’s website, CellHawk uses GPS records in its “unique animation analysis tool,” which, according to company promotional materials, plots a target’s calls and locations over time. “Watch data come to life as it moves around town or the entire county,” the site states.

The tool can also help map interpersonal connections, with an ability to animate more than 20 phones at once and “see how they move relative to each other,” according to a promotional brochure.

CellHawk helps police exploit information already collected by private telecommunications providers. . .

The company has touted features that make CellHawk sound more like a tool for automated, continuous surveillance than for just processing the occasional spreadsheet from a cellular company. CellHawk’s website touts the ability to send email and text alerts “to surveillance teams” when a target moves, or enters or exits a particular “location or Geozone (e.g. your entire county border).”

On its website, Hawk Analytics claims this capability can help investigators “view plots & maps of the cell towers used most frequently at the beginning and end of each day.” But in brochures sent to potential clients, it was much more blunt, claiming that CellHawk can help “find out where your suspect sleeps at night.”

A screenshot showing the previously more honest version of their marketing.
Screenshot: Sam Richards

 

More Requiring “reasonable suspicion” is a typical threshold for traffic stops, not for intrusive searches, which require probable cause. CellHawk’s capabilities — combing through data from calls, texts, ride-hailing applications, etc. — are patently more intrusive than a traffic stop. Beyond that, Marlow said, the county’s “definition of reasonable suspicion is bizarrely convoluted” and should require that investigators “have to have a reasonable basis for a crime being committed not MAY BE being committed."

Screenshot from a Hawk Analytics promotional video displaying “link analysis,” which reveals a large network of “co-conspirators and associates” in a matter of seconds. The more data points, in this case cellphone numbers, run through CellHawk likely exponentially expands the number of other individuals roped into an investigation.
Screenshot: The Intercept

Deployed — and Promoted — Across the Country

Hawk Analytics CEO Mike Melson, whose bio on the company website describes him as a former NASA engineer, offers free trials to law enforcement organizations to which he hopes to sell his product . . .

Hawk Analytics has many clients around the United States. This reporter conducted a survey using the Freedom of Information Act to collect invoices for CellHawk subscriptions from agencies referenced on CellHawk’s website, referred to in CellHawk’s training sessions, or mentioned in local news reports. He found numerous agencies fielding the technology: Atlanta and Fayette County, Ga.; Kansas City, Kan.; Franklin County, Va.; Utah County, Utah,; Fort Collins, Colo.; Hidalgo County, Texas; Orange County, Calif.; and, of course, the FBI all have paid for CellHawk in the last several years. The Madison, Wisconsin, police department appears to have thousands of potential CellHawk records from 2018 alone but has demanded close to $700 to examine and provide them.