Stingray devices — cell-site simulators that masquerade as legitimate commercial mobile towers to intercept data from nearby handsets — have been a fixture of criminal investigations for decades. What an investigation by Wired, reported on 12 October 2026, has now uncovered is categorically different: federal investigators asked to deploy stingrays to locate journalists covering anti-ICE protests in 2025, and in at least two instances they obtained the court orders needed to do so.
- Targets, not suspects: The surveillance requests were aimed at working journalists documenting demonstrations, rather than at individuals suspected of a crime.
- Judges pushed back: Magistrates rejected five of the eight stingray orders sought, holding that tracking reporters in the exercise of their profession breaches the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom.
- A parallel data trawl: Ninety-two customs summonses were issued to telephone carriers for call records and location data — a mechanism that carries a far lower evidentiary standard than a warrant.
A Television Producer in the Crosshairs
The concrete case at the heart of the reporting involves Jerome Richardson, a television producer at Temple University in Philadelphia. In November 2025 he covered a protest in Minneapolis against an ICE raid. Richardson was identified as a possible source of information in an investigation into irregular immigration, and agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requested warrants to track his location using stingrays. 39 people were detained in that operation.
The Legal Limits That Slowed the Operation
The most telling detail is not the technology but the judicial response to it. Magistrates turned down five of the eight orders that sought authority to use stingrays against journalists and against people inside the protest perimeter. Their reasoning was direct: deploying cell-site simulators against reporters performing their professional duties violates the First Amendment, which safeguards freedom of the press.
The three orders that were approved concerned individuals whom agents argued had a direct connection to organising the protest rather than merely covering it. That distinction is fragile. At any demonstration, the gap between an “organiser” and a “journalist documenting organisers” is precisely what source confidentiality is designed to shield — and it is exactly the boundary a location-tracking device collapses.
Customs Summonses: The Quieter Legal Front
Running alongside the stingray requests were 92 customs summonses that the DHS issued to obtain call records and location data from mobile operators. Unlike stingrays, which require a specific judicial warrant, customs summonses operate under a lower evidentiary threshold and were used at scale to build a map of relationships between demonstrators. For newsrooms, this matters as much as the hardware: communications metadata held by carriers can expose source networks even when no bugging device is ever switched on.
Why This Case Matters Beyond the Stingray Debate
The technology is not what has changed here — stingrays have been known since the 1990s. What has changed is the object of surveillance: active journalists, not criminal suspects. Digital privacy and mass surveillance have been under scrutiny since 2013, when the Snowden disclosures pushed government monitoring programmes to the centre of public debate, yet the target profile in this instance inverts the usual framing of counter-terrorism and immigration enforcement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has documented the case in detail, argues that using stingrays against the press produces a chilling effect that reaches well beyond the individuals directly affected. If reporters know that covering a demonstration exposes both their location and their sources to federal tracking, coverage of civil-rights movements becomes materially riskier — and journalism conducted in the public interest shrinks accordingly.
The legal precedent set by the five magistrates who refused the orders carries more weight than the three who granted them. But the very existence of those three approvals — and of 92 summonses that never required judicial sign-off — confirms that the use of surveillance tooling against journalists in the United States is not a theoretical possibility but a documented practice.
For reporters covering protests on US soil, the operational guidance that follows is practical rather than abstract: work with SIM-free handsets while at gatherings, and encrypt every conversation with sources through tools such as Signal or Briar. Password managers and phishing awareness remain baseline hygiene, but they are structurally insufficient against an adversary with direct access to telecommunications infrastructure. The durable question is not whether cell-site simulators will be aimed at the press again, but whether courts keep blocking them — and whether the metadata route, which needs no judge at all, quietly becomes the default instead.