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Cell Carriers Responded Last Year To 1.3M Law Enforcement Data Requests
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."
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230*24*365=2,014,800. TFS says they the industry responded to 1.3M. Can they possibly have that many pending? Where are Verizon's stats?
Damn, it's not funny anymore.
..don't panic
230 per hour is 2 million requests a year. Obviously its wrong, if all the carriers handle 1.3 million per year. Per the article, it is 230 "Emergency" requests per day, with 720 Lawful (Subpoena, court order, etc).
Not to mention its a partial article, "This article has been truncated pending paywall integration."
Hate to say it, /. quality is seriously starting to flounder.
Not to sound dismissive of the situation, but I have to be kind of curious -- does anyone have the statistics/numbers for how the increasing number of requests to carriers for subscriber data aligns with the increasing number of people using cellular devices (and that some people now have multiple cellular devices)? It would be useful to to understand if the rate of increase of requests is far in excess of the rate of increase in subscriber growth (and perhaps decrease in land-line usage), mimics it, or is smaller than it. (I am assuming it is exceeding the subscriber growth rate considerably, but it would be nice to have the breakdown.)
Sprint gets 500,000 requests per year.
Are each of those requests for data from one user each? Or is it something like one request per SMS message? Could they be trying to collect whole conversations one request at a time?
I'm just trying to figure out if these 500k requests mean 500k individuals being investigated or of it's more like 1,000 people across the whole country.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully Obamacare will provide adequate quantities of haloperidol for you.
Most means more than 50%.
You could have 660,000 requests of the 1.3 million not backed by court orders, and that would be just over 50%, so it would be "most."
The rest, 640,000 or so, would still certainly qualify as "many." Even if there were only 100,000 requests backed by court orders, that would still be "many." It may be way way too few, but that's beside the point.
I don't know what the real numbers are in this case, but technically, you are incorrect.
...they responded to a daunting 1.3 million demands for subscriber data...' One stinging statistic: AT&T gets 230 requests for data per hour, and turns down only 18 per week.
The summary is mistaken. From the article:
AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How can many have court orders but most do not? Shouldn't it be some and most? I went to read the article to find the answer and was not shocked to find out the summery is misleading. Of the 700 requests per day, 230 were without court order or about 33%. A lot less than "most".
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.
You know how to boil a frog..you put him in cold water an slowly raise the temperature until he's boiled.. well.. if they didnt want us to know this, we wouldnt. Its just another step in boiling the frog, and I gotta tell ya.. Im seein bubbles down here..
From someone who just went through TSA hell today, this country is done. Not because the TSA stomped all over me after I did something big; rather, because the TSA displayed an amazing level of fascist arrogance at a slight thing. I chuckled when the agent went through my credit cards, individually, in my wallet. He said, "Is something funny?" (in that cop-talk, fascist fashion). I just turned, and went to collect my stuff.
I'm prepared to turn my back on my country, because this is not what I signed up for. I do want the police around - to enforce laws that don't violate the constitution. I don't want them to display a complete fascist power-corruption. I'm scared. I'm truly scared, that this is pre-war Germany, all over again.
This cell carrier thing just reflects the overall sentiment in this country to just go along with illegal government activities. Maybe they're scared too. I certainly didn't stand up to the TSA agent. Should I have? I don't know. But I don't like where this is heading. I'm starting to think that this will lead to a violent revolution Certainly that would be better than slipping into a fascist country, though I think we're already there.
Laws are so broad now that EVERYONE is a criminal. Or, certainly exposed to being prosecuted and convicted, and thrown into jail for decades, though they've done nothing wrong.
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."
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...