POWERFUL MOBILE PHONE SURVEILLANCE TOOL
CellHawk allows law enforcement to visualize large amounts of information collected from cellular towers or providers.
The public has largely ignored Hawk Analytics, a Texas company that makes CellHawk. CellHawk is widely used by law enforcement. It helps police departments, the FBI, and private investigators across the United States convert information from cellular providers into maps showing people’s movements, locations, and relationships. The Intercept obtained police records that revealed that a powerful surveillance tool was being used in complete secrecy and with little oversight.
CellHawk’s maker claims it can process a year’s worth of cellphone records in just 20 minutes. This automates a process that was previously tedious and involved hand-drawn paper plots. The web-based product can access call detail records (or CDRs), which track mobile contact between devices for mobile service providers. They show who is talking to whom. It can also manage cellular location records. These are created by phones connecting to different towers as the owners move about.
These data may include “tower dumps,” which list all phones connected to a particular tower — a form of dragnet surveillance. According to a Brennan Center for Justice report at NYU, the FBI obtained more than 150,000 phone numbers in a single tower dump conducted in 2022 to collect evidence against a suspect in a bank robbery.
Police use CellHawk to process data they receive from cell phone carriers such as AT&T or Verizon. These datasets are often in large spreadsheets and often without warrants. This contrasts with the more well-known stingray, a phone surveillance device that spies on cell phones by pretending to be a carrier tower, tricking them into connecting and intercepting their communications. CellHawk is not like the stingray. It doesn’t require police to place a device near people of interest. It helps them exploit information already collected from private telecommunications providers or third parties.
CellHawk’s surveillance capabilities extend beyond analyzing metadata from cell phone towers. Hawk Analytics claims that it can extract incredibly detailed intelligence from large data sets like GPS and ride-hailing records — information often generated by Americans. CellHawk claims it uses GPS records to create its “unique animation analytics tool,” which plots the calls and locations of a target over time according to company promotional materials. The site says, “Watch data come alive as it moves around town and the entire county.”
According to a brochure, the tool can help to map interpersonal connections. It can be used to “see how they move relative to each other” and to animate more than 20 phones simultaneously.
CellHawk is described as a tool that can be used to automate continuous surveillance rather than just processing spreadsheets from cellular companies. CellHawk boasts the ability to send text and email alerts “to surveillance team” whenever a target moves or enters, or leaves a specific “location or Geozone” (e.g., Your entire county border.
Hawk Analytics states that this capability allows investigators to “view plots and maps of the cell towers most frequently used at the beginning and ending of each day.” However, brochures sent out to potential clients were more direct, saying CellHawk could help “find where your suspect sleeps at night.”
Minnesota Data Sharing and Loose Regulation
After using the software in 2015, Hennepin County in Minnesota, including Minneapolis, was impressed. A criminal intelligence analyst praised CellHawk’s simplicity in an email sent in February 2016, comparing it to another tool. CellHawk is relatively new and much cheaper than other subscription software. Cellhawk’s most outstanding feature is its ability to be used ‘hands-off.’ The software handles everything. Drag and drop is all that’s required. It can download calls from all the major phone companies. The software’s most significant selling point is mapping. It also features animation, which is excellent!
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office uses CellHawk as part of an intelligence-sharing effort through a Minnesota Fusion Center known as the Metro Regional Information Center. According to the St. Cloud Times, this center brings together the FBI with eight counties, serving up to 4,000,000 people. Cloud Times.
Andrew Skoogman spoke for the sheriff’s department and said that the office did not use certain CellHawk functions often. He said it was “scarce” that HCSO would analyze tower dumps, and it was “fairly uncommon” for the office to use CellHawk’s automated location alerting service. This is used “based on the analytical needs of investigators.”
Providers often share the telecommunications data that is at heart CellHawk. Verizon received over 260,000 orders, warrants, subpoenas, and emergency requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2019, including more than 24,000 for information about the location. The legal requirements to obtain this information can sometimes be unclear. In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union called the legal requirements for tower dumps “extremely murky.” According to a Brennan Center report, some courts allowed access to such data using court orders. This lower evidentiary standard is used than a warrant under the Stored Communications Act and requires only “reasonable grounds” to believe the records are relevant to ongoing investigations. A court order is sufficient to obtain location records specific to a subscriber. However, they must span at most seven days. In that case, the police will need a warrant. According to a Supreme Court ruling in 2018, this would be a complete warrant. Whether police require a warrant or a court order to get “real-time” location data has also caused disagreement among courts.
Hennepin County established its legal standards for deploying technology such as CellHawk. These standards were outlined in a policy document from the sheriff’s office dated August 2015, months after CellHawk had been in use. The document, entitled “Criminal Information Sharing and Analysis,” was made public following a 2018 data request and was completed several years later after the election of a new sheriff. The office required “[r]easonable suspect,” which was defined as “present when sufficient facts have been established to give… a reason to believe that an individual, organization, or group is involved in a definable criminal activity or enterprise.”
However, the policy doesn’t say that a judge must approve investigators to retain information. Skoogman didn’t respond to The Intercept’s question about the legal standard used for collecting CDRs.
When Chad Marlow was asked to review Hennepin County’s CellHawk policy, he said that while the CellHawk technology wasn’t inherently problematic, the county had set a low standard regarding how it collects CellHawk data. For traffic stops, “reasonable suspicion” is the standard threshold, but not for intrusive search, which requires probable cause. CellHawk can analyze data from texts, calls, and ride-hailing apps, among other things. These capabilities are more intrusive than a traffic stop. Marlow stated that the county’s definition of reasonable suspicion was “bizarrely convoluted.” Investigators should have “a reasonable basis to suspect a crime has been committed, not MAYBE being committed.”
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