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Cell Carriers Responded Last Year To 1.3M Law Enforcement Data Requests

Posted by timothy on from the surely-it's-because-the-requests-were-well-formatted dept.

Stirling Newberry writes "The New York Times reports: 'In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a daunting 1.3 million demands for subscriber data last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.' One stinging statistic: AT&T responds to an average of 700 requests per day, and turns down only 18 per week. Sprint gets 500,000 requests per year. While many requests are backed by court orders, most are not. Some include 'dumps' of tower data, which captures everyone near by at a certain time."

5 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. In Soviet ... by xtal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Damn, it's not funny anymore.

    --
    ..don't panic
    1. Re:In Soviet ... by pitchpipe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It hasn't been funny for a while. The law enforcement class is becoming a separate body from the average citizen class. (I know this through personally speaking with a friend who is a law enforcement officer, he has changed in a way that separates him from the way your average person thinks. It has made him paranoid of your average person.) It is becoming more of an enforcing arm of the aristocracy, bringing in funds for the state and prisoners for the aristocratic owners of the private prisons. If things keep heading down this path I fear they are going to get seriously out of control. I wish the ruling class could see this, and had the will to do something about if before that happens (because god damn, voting doesn't seem to do anything anymore). I don't want to live in those kinds of "interesting times".

      --
      Look where all this talking got us, baby.
  2. More Prisons! by fullback · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Aren't 25% of all the prisoners in the world already in American prisons? The police are just trying to stimulate the economy by improving the top line in the prison and criminal court industry.

    Hey, it's not personal; it's business. Wars, invasions, thousands of otherwise unemployable feeling you up at airports (and bus and train stations soon!), militarized police forces, small town sheriffs with tanks and full battle gear and tens of thousands of people listening to all of your conversations and reading your email.

    Land of the free, my ass. Land of the pansies who won't stand up to anyone.

  3. Millions of crimes. by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The PATRIOT act doesn't trump the fourth and fifth amendments. Any one of these "requests" that isn't an actual warrant issued by a neutral magistrate is a crime, and every government obedience enforcement operative (I will not call them "law enforcement" officers when they're breaking the law), has participated in depriving people of their civil rights under color of authority, which is a federal crime.

    Anyone who votes for either Ruling Party candidate this time around, keep this in mind.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  4. Re:the survellience state is totally out of contro by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a surprisingly common problem, unfortunately. People with the nucleus of an actual point 'Yo, the onrushing surveillance state is bad, m'kay', then encounter some sort of strange cognitive hiccup that causes them to latch onto the nearest potentially-hostile object like a belligerent drunk at closing time, rather than something much more plausible that doesn't make them sound like a drooling nutcase.

    Had the grandparent poster simply ranted about the CALEA(which did include some direct state funding of infrastructure 'upgrades' to support wiretapping, and obviously serves to bundle buying telecommunications services with paying for wiretapping infrastructure) and has been in play since 1994 he would have been on totally solid ground.

    If he wanted something a little more sweeping, he could have discussed the 1970's and earlier situation(which, while technologically crude, was so bad that FISA, in 1978, counted as 'reform'...), then gone on to FISA, ECHELON should probably show up somewhere, possibly given the whole 'Clipper' situation a nod, then done CALEA, and then finished with an overview of how post-2001 has been an energetic sprint downhill, with substantial(but largely classified) evidence of extralegal surveillance, despite generous boundaries for what constitutes 'legal', the 2008 retroactive immunity bill, and so forth.

    It Isn't. That. Bloody. Difficult. While parts are formally classified, or just-not-talked-about in public, large swaths of the US surveillance apparatus were simply built right in the open, with publicly available laws, phone-tapping technology advertised on the vendors' web sites, and NSA datacenters too large to hide from orbital observation. And yet, no matter how easy we make it, people just will not be satisfied without some sort of shadowy conspiracy that makes them sound totally nuts...