United States law enforcement has used undercover distributions of phones to monitor suspects’ activities, raising rights concerns, Human Rights Watch said today. The Justice Department should disclose its policies regarding the tactic and whether it is currently being used.

Human Rights Watch has identified two forms of this technique that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has used or, evidence suggests, has contemplated using. One involved the undercover sale of BlackBerry devices whose individual encryption keys the DEA possessed, enabling the agency to decode messages sent and received by suspects. The second, as described in a previously unreported internal email belonging to the surveillance software company Hacking Team, may have entailed installing monitoring software on a significant number of phones before attempting to put them into suspects’ hands.

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Even if authorized by a warrant, the dissemination of vulnerable devices could create a risk of significant harm. Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, told Human Rights Watch it would be “frightening to use a wiretap order to authorize seeding compromised devices among people.” She suggested that anyone who might accept such a tactic when the targets are suspected drug traffickers should consider a hypothetical scenario in which agents secretly gave such non-secure devices to “journalists or activists.”

The existence of this technique might also “make people suspicious of using the products that are out there for protecting themselves,” Pfefferkorn added.

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