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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."

10 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. Re:In Soviet ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      In Soviet ... Damn, it's not funny anymore.

      Anymore?

      You're young, so we'll forgive it. It really was funny, once.

      There once was a time in which American history books touted the United States of America as a free nation, and among other things, they cited per-capita incarceration rates as a statistic.

      It was around the 80s, which would have been about the time Yakov Smirnov created the comedic character of a (Cold-War era) Russian visitor to the United States.

      Alpha site: DDR. (Failed. A surveillance state implemented in paper reports and in meatspace-based informers, it collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy)
      Beta site: PRC. (Great firewall, YHOO selling out dissidients, testing grounds for CSCO, Nagios gear, etc.)
      Production-ready: USA. (Redacted.)

      "Funny once", said Mycroft.

  2. More lousy editing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:the survellience state is totally out of contro by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hopefully Obamacare will provide adequate quantities of haloperidol for you.

  4. Re:Strange math by Bob9113 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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
  5. 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.

  6. 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."
  7. 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...

  8. Re:Frog's Almost Done by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clearly you aren't doing it correctly...

    If the frog jumps out of the pot, you taze its amphibian ass, charge it with resisting arrest, zip-tie its limbs and dump it back in the pot.

    And if the frog turns out to have a decent lawyer, you lose the tape and plant a dimebag from the evidence locker on it.