From the Wilmington Star-News:
In November 2012, Wilmington City Council signed off on a $37,000 maintenance agreement for five separate devices manufactured by Harris Corp., a Melbourne, Fla., company. Among the devices covered in the agreement were a StingRay, which mimics a cellphone tower to locate a cellphone and gather metadata; an AmberJack, an antenna system that can track and locate cellphones, according to Harris documents; a KingFish, which gathers identity codes and shows the connections between phones and numbers being dialed; and three Harpoons, amplifiers for the StingRay devices.
In April 2008, council signed off on a $135,060 purchase agreement with Harris Corp. involving surveillance equipment, but it was not clear whether that money covered in whole or in part the StingRay, AmberJack or Harpoons.
According to a nationwide ACLU investigation, other cities in North Carolina that likely have similar tracking capabilities include the Charlotte and Durham police departments.
And no, I don’t expect the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to talk about what cellphone-monitoring technologies they actual have and how they use them, though at least in general terms they should.
