Cops mum on cellphone trackers to avoid tipping off ‘bad guys’

The FBI tells local police departments not to talk about how they use devices to secretly track people’s cellphones so as not to tip off criminals, according to the head of the bureau. “I don’t want the bad guys to know how we might be able to find them,” FBI Director James Comey said in a newly unearthed video clip from October. That’s “one of the reasons that we ask local authorities working with us and using our equipment not to talk about it,” he added. “It’s not because we’ve got something to hide from good people; we’ve got a lot to hide from bad people.” “With appropriate authority, we the feds and our local brothers and sisters have to be able to do that to investigate all kinds of things,” he said. “It’s work that you want us to be able to do -- again, appropriately, with appropriate authority.” The new video is from a press conference that occurred in October but only came to light as part of an investigation into StingRay/IMSI catchers technology by the Charlotte Observer.