Jerome Richardson was 21 years old and still in college when law enforcement quietly began looking for him through his phone. The Temple University student had helped produce Don Lemon’s coverage of an anti-ICE protest, and according to court filings, investigators wanted to find him badly enough to seek permission to use a cell-site simulator — a controversial device commonly known as a Stingray or an IMSI catcher. A cell-site simulator works by impersonating a cell phone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it so that investigators can locate a specific device. In Richardson’s case, judges in two states signed warrants authorizing exactly that. One was signed in Minnesota on January 30, twelve days after the protest at Cities Church in St. Paul. The next day, a judge in Pennsylvania signed another. Richardson’s lawyers later filed a motion asking the court to throw out any tracking evidence obtained as a result, writing that the purpose of the warrants was “locating and arresting him.” At the time, Richardson was one of 39 people charged with conspiring to violate worshippers’ civil rights and interfering with religious worship. He has since graduated from Temple University and moved on with his life, but the surveillance requests remain a disturbing part of the record — and they raise serious questions about how far the government will go when it is trying to pressure, frighten, or punish people connected to journalism.
To understand why Richardson ended up in this position, you have to go back to the protest itself. The demonstration took place at Cities Church in St. Paul on January 18, during a regular worship service. The protesters said they deliberately targeted that service because one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, also led the local field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For people who believed ICE was breaking up families and terrorizing immigrant communities, the church was a powerful symbol: here was a pastor carrying out enforcement policies that they considered cruel, all while standing in a sanctuary. The scene was tense, loud, and deeply confrontational. Prosecutors, however, saw something criminal. They brought charges against 39 people, alleging conspiracy to violate the civil rights of worshippers and interference with religious worship. That list included organizers and activists, but it also included journalists: Georgia Fort, an independent reporter, and Don Lemon, who was at the time a CNN host. Both have said they were at the church only to cover the demonstration, not to take part in it. Richardson’s role was even further removed from the confrontation. He had helped produce Lemon’s coverage, meaning he worked behind the scenes to make sure the story reached the public. That is what journalism is supposed to look like: a team of people gathering information, filming, editing, producing, and publishing. To use a Stingray against a student producer is not just an attack on one person; it is an attempt to reach through him and intimidate every other person who makes reporting possible.
The surveillance requests in this case are startling not only because of who was targeted, but because of how much remains unknown. Agents asked for cell-site simulator warrants to locate Richardson’s phone in two different states. They also applied for similar warrants targeting the phones of Georgia Fort and Jamael Lundy, who was then a candidate for the Minnesota State Senate. In addition, they sought pen register orders for Fort and for a phone number that WIRED traced to Lemon. A pen register is a less aggressive tool, but it still gives investigators a list of the numbers a phone contacts, revealing who a person talks to and when. It is a way of mapping someone’s relationships, their friends, their sources, their closest connections. What makes this so troubling is that no one can say for sure whether any of these applications were approved or whether the Stingrays were ever actually used. The records reviewed by WIRED do not establish whether investigators deployed a cell-site simulator to locate Richardson. They also do not show whether judges approved the applications targeting Fort and Lundy. In a July letter filed in court, Fort’s lawyers said prosecutors “did not know” whether the surveillance applications had been authorized or had yielded any evidence. That means the government itself cannot explain what happened — and for a defendant, that uncertainty is almost worse than knowing. You cannot challenge a secret. You cannot confront a surveillance technique that may or may not have been used. You can only wait and wonder whether the government was listening, tracking, or collecting data about the people around you.
To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand how a Stingray actually works. Your phone is always looking for the strongest available signal. A cell-site simulator broadcasts a signal that looks exactly like a real cell tower, so your phone connects to it without hesitation. Once it does, the device can read identifying information from your phone and determine its location. But it does not stop there. Because the fake tower broadcasts into an entire area, it can collect identifying information from every phone in the vicinity — not just the target’s phone. A journalist covering a protest could be standing in a crowd of hundreds of people, and the device would sweep up data from all of them. That indiscriminate collection is why privacy advocates describe Stingrays as dragnet surveillance tools. They are not like a search warrant for one apartment or one computer. They are more like a police officer standing at the entrance to a building and taking down the names of everyone who walks in, whether or not those people have anything to do with the case. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect people from unreasonable searches, and the Supreme Court has recognized that privacy in location data matters. But the secrecy surrounding these devices has made it extremely hard for lawyers to enforce those protections. If a police department can use a Stingray without telling the public, without telling the defense, and without explaining what it captured, then the constitutional check on government power is effectively erased.
The secrecy problem is not hypothetical. For years, the use of cell-site simulators was hidden even from the courts and from criminal defendants who had every right to know. In 2023, FBI records released to the public showed that local police departments borrowing simulators from the federal government had to sign agreements promising to keep details of their use secret — even in court. That means a defense attorney could file a motion to suppress evidence, but the police could refuse to say whether a Stingray was used, how it worked, or what data it collected. The judge, the prosecutor, and the defendant were all expected to accept the government’s word. That is not how the justice system is supposed to work. It is especially dangerous when surveillance is aimed at people engaged in political activity. Protests against ICE are constitutionally protected speech. Journalists who cover those protests are doing a job the First Amendment was designed to shield. The government does not have the right to quietly track everyone in a crowd just because it disagrees with the message or wants to identify the people responsible for a disruption. Yet privacy advocates have warned for years that exactly this kind of abuse was possible. A Stingray is a perfect tool for chilling speech: it is invisible, indiscriminate, and nearly impossible to challenge. If the government can use one to target a student who produced news coverage, every source, every editor, every photographer, and every ordinary citizen should be worried.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital civil liberties, has been at the front of the fight to expose these devices. Cooper Quintin, the group’s senior staff technologist, put the issue in stark terms. “Using an advanced surveillance capability such as a cell-site simulator against members of the free press for reporting stories that are unfavorable to the president is an appalling attack on the First Amendment,” he said. His message is simple: a free press depends on more than just the person whose name appears in the byline or on the screen. It depends on producers, technicians, assistants, drivers, sources, and all the other people who help bring stories to life. If the government can track any of them in secret, the whole institution of journalism becomes a target. Quintin has spent years building tools to help people detect when these fake cell towers are nearby. WIRED used one of those tools near the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and found evidence suggesting that a cell-site simulator was being operated in the area. It is still unknown who was behind it or what they were looking for, but the discovery shows how easily this technology can appear in public without anyone knowing. Richardson has now graduated from college, and he was never accused of violence or of leading the protest. He was a young person doing behind-the-scenes work for a journalist covering a controversial event. The warrants in his case may never be fully explained, and the applications aimed at Fort and Lundy may never see the light of day. But the record is enough to remind us that privacy is not a luxury — it is the foundation of free speech, free press, and the right to stand up in public without leaving a trail of surveillance behind. If the government can secretly force a student’s phone to reveal itself because he helped a reporter tell a story, then it can do the same to anyone. And if we do not keep fighting for the right to know what happened, the next Stingray could be pointed at all of us.
