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Sprint Revealed Customer GPS Data 8 Million Times
An anonymous reader sends along Chris Soghoian's blog entry revealing that Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' GPS location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. The data point comes from a closed industry conference that Soghoian attended, at which Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager at Sprint Nextel, said: "[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that's just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don't know how we'll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in." Soghoian's post details the laws around disclosure of wiretap and other interception data — one of which the Department of Justice has been violating since 2004 — and calls for more disclosure of the levels of all forms of surveillance.
Automated tool for locating cells? wow that sounds like an invitation for disaster and abuse. So what happens first, someone hacks it, or it's used in a 1984 style manner? (my guess is the latter has already happened/happening.)
As if... So, tell me, how many of these were legal crime fighting uses and how many were just cops checking up on their girlfriends, ect. 8 million. and thet's just Sprint.
Yesterday's unmedicated-schizophrenic black helicopterite conspiracy theory is today's mundane maybe-the-media-will-actually-bother-to-pick-it-up-I-think-we-have-some-space-on-page-six story.
You think the cops are watching YOU? What are you doing that makes you so paranoid?
That's cute, quaint, and outdated. It used to be that the state had limited resources and therefore, of economic necessity, it could only focus its manpower and its surveillance capability on what it considered to be the most dangerous/influential dissidents. That has been the case, historically.
Technologies like automated GPS and massive databases have changed the game. The more technology advances, the cheaper it becomes to surveil more and more people. A state that would have had to focus its efforts on the 50 most dangerous dissidents 100 years ago can now use those same resources to monitor hundreds or thousands. Over time, that becomes more and more the case. You now have modern governments with plenty of manpower, nearly unlimited funding (thanks to deficit spending), and high technology which can efficiently keep tabs on millions of people at once. The more this is the case, the less unusual you have to be to stand out from the crowd and attract unwanted attention and scrutiny. We are quickly heading towards a future where even expressing a slightly unpopular political opinion can get you noticed whether or not you are informed of this fact.
Think of all the people who have committed no crimes, have not even been accused of a crime, yet end up on the "no-fly" list for no apparent reason and are not allowed to find out why. Right here in America, the "land of the free." Then consider that this list is special because its existence is publically acknowledged and its use appears to be relatively limited.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I'd think, the 1st Amendment ought to protect their speech, at least... Maybe, wasting the judge's time is contempt, but I am very-very-very worried about people getting fined for expressing their legal opinions — they didn't curse the judge or refuse to rise up. Simply ruling against them is one thing, fining them for even bringing the matter up is a "chilling message".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's great that they have a web interface to service the law enforcement needs to track people by the GPS in their cell phone. How does the web site verify a valid warrant? Does the web site ask them to hold it up to the screen for verification?
A warrant is only necessary if the government wants to take something by physical force or wants to search something that is considered private against the consent of the owner. If the cops knock on your door and ask to read your copy of TV Guide, they don't need a warrant if you voluntarily give it to them. Knowing and uncoerced consent (absent any other taint of illegality such as an illegal seizure) always negates the need for a warrant.
Moreover, as far as the law is concerned, absent a particular contractual obligation (i.e. an NDA), when you convey information to a third party you are also conveying the right for them to disseminate it. For instance, absent such an agreement, if you send me a threatening legal letter, it is perfectly legal for me to post it on the internet for all to mock. I could also just print it out and give it to the police. Letters in the mail, of course, enjoy considerable fourth amendment protection from the police but the fourth amendment does not prevent disclosure by the intended recipient.
Finally, I have a Sprint device with GPS and there is a very conspicuous warning the first time you enable the location feature that it is conveying that information to the network, with a big YES and NO button. So in total, the customer voluntarily conveys their location information to Sprint, who in turn, voluntarily conveyed it to law enforcement. No warrants are necessary because disclosure by the intended recipients is never a fourth amendment concern. Once you give somebody a piece of information, they can do with it as they please (copyright notwithstanding, but GPS coordinates are hardly a creative work) -- if you don't want them to disclose it, don't tell it to them in the first place.
Ultimately, the legal system presumes that we are all intelligent adults (perhaps that's wrong) that are capable of waiving our rights by voluntarily giving others private information. This might not be the best normative choices of policies, but it underlies the entire American notion of "reasonable expectation of privacy" which almost always informs (if not decides) fourth amendment questions. The Courts have refused to sign on the notion that a Sprint customer has a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that he voluntarily gives to Sprint -- the mere act of giving information to a third party (absent contractual obligations) evinces a lack of expectation of privacy in it.
I can think of a whole bunch of examples where this technology could be misused.
Here's an obvious example. You feel passionately about some cause so you go to some rally in a park somewhere. Mind you this rally is totally peaceful and people even cleanup after themselves!
However, unknown to you the "Feds" have setup a program that queries this database looking for anybody whose within the boundaries of the park and puts all the names into a big dossier.
It would be very easy to append that dossier to the do not fly list.
Suddenly you're turned away at the airport and when you go to investigate why (if you can even find out!) you're told "You attended a rally for 'X', we've deemed the people of X and those whose support X (it's a bad letter anyway...) to be a terrorist organization or an organization that supports terrorists."
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Errr - since the phone company gets paid every time they provide the data, I doubt they put any roadblocks in the process.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
You have to agree to be monitored by the police to use a cel phone in the states? and you act like its no big deal!
You seem to think that they are talking only about GPS enabled phones, but what they are probably talking about is cel phone triangulation, more commonly called GPS-A. To me its pretty scary because the government should not be able to track you without a court ordered warrant! thats called freedom, and it prevents SEVERE abuses of power. Sounds like this info may be archived to a database too. Very chilling.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Cell towers are not omnidirectional. Well, the tower as a whole MIGHT be, but usually each tower is comprised of multiple sector antennas, usually 60 degrees wide each. 6 x 60 = 360. I guarantee you they can tell from which sector antenna your cell ping is coming from. They can locate you fairly well from one tower.