Two senators want to know why the Internal Revenue Service appears to be spying on taxpayers.
In an Oct. 29 letter to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked what the IRS is doing with cell-site simulators known as Stingrays.
“While the devices can be useful tools for identifying the location of a suspect’s cellphone or identifying an unknown cellphone, we have previously expressed concerns about the privacy implications of these devices, as well as the inconsistent practices and policies across the federal, state and local agencies that employ them,” the senators wrote.
The senators asked for information on a range of specifics. Those included whether the department has any policies governing the use of the technology, whether it loans the devices out to state or local agencies and the number of devices the department owns.
The secretive devices have been in use by several agencies for several years. Over the last two months, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice implemented self-imposed policies stating that they would attempt to obtain warrants before using the devices. That was prompted, in part, by several letters from Grassley and Leahy expressing their concern.
Presently, the only agencies that own the devices that have no policy are the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and, unless Lew indicates otherwise, the Treasury Department.
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The discovery that the Treasury Department owns the devices was reported by The Guardian on Monday. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the paper discovered that the Treasury made more than $71,000 in purchases from Harris Corporation, which manufactures the devices. More than $65,000 went toward upgrading the Stingrays to a more powerful device known as a HailStorm, while $6,000 went to training IRS staff to use the devices.
