[cnvogel]

Just glancing at the document, the censoring is marked "Ex.4" (exemption #4) in all places.

Exemption 4 is: "A trade secret or privileged or confidential commercial or financial information obtained from a person". [https://www.sec.gov/foia/nfoia.htm]

Add: Frankly, I directly jumped to the (redacted) PDF of the user-manual, without even bothering to read the article. But the article nicely explains this, too...

[bediger4000]

There's absolutely no way that everything they marked "FOIA Ex.4" is exempt under than that wording. If trade secret laws were that strict, then literally everything would be a trade secret. The "exemption 4" marking is a big middle finger to the MOIA requester. But it does raise the question of what's so important about Stingray and Kingfisher that everything about them has to be kept under wraps? We know in general what they do. We know that they have delicate screw threads. Unless there's some general and very obvious 4th Amendment abuse going on, I can't see why you'd keep it under wraps.

[ethbro]

Not necessarily.

Stingray is actually built by the Harris Corporation, so it seems entirely logical that a public corporation would consider the technical manner it's designed to glean intelligence from a standard cell phone a trade secret.

They are, after all, selling that very product to the US Government.