Michael from Muckrock sez, “There’s a lot of lessons that the federal government should have learned in the aftermath of Katrina. Increased domestic surveillance, however, appears to be the one the FBI took to heart, using the natural disaster as a justification for ramping up its use of Stingray cell phone tracking throughout Louisiana after the storm.”
“In the summer of 2005, the U.S. Gulf Coast bore the brunt of several hurricanes, including Hurricane Katrina which severely degraded the capabilities of the [redacted],” the memo reads in part. Subsequent, heavily redacted sentences suggest that the storm crippled the FBI’s capacity to conduct certain types of cell phone tracking operations via equipment on-hand at the time of landfall.
FBI ordered more cell phone trackers in wake of Hurricane Katrina [Shawn Musgrave/Muckrock]
(Icon: KatrinaNewOrleansFlooded, U.S. Coast Guard, public domain)
