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Cops To Congress: We Need Logs of Americans' Text Messages
Dainsanefh tips a CNET report about a number of law enforcement groups who have put forth a proposal to the U.S. Senate to require wireless providers to keep logs of subscriber text messages for a minimum of two years.
"As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as 'staggering.' Chuck DeWitt, a spokesman for the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which represents the 63 largest U.S. police forces including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, said 'all such records should be retained for two years.' Some providers, like Verizon, retain the contents of SMS messages for a brief period of time, while others like T-Mobile do not store them at all. Along with the police association, other law enforcement groups making the request to the Senate include the National District Attorneys' Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, DeWitt said."
We'll start using encrypted apps instead of SMS
Makes me more willing to put up with the flakiness of their service in some areas now. Dunno why they don't store SMS messages, don't care. The fact they don't, and have some of the best tethering plans in my area make me happy.
No.
... SMS is overpriced anyway. That will give me another excuse to tell friends to stop texting me.
These messages shouldn't be archived. If the police need to see the communications, they should be required to get a warrent, and only be able to intercept communications as their happening - as would happen with a wiretap.
Law enforcement should not be able to go back through prior communications that occurred before they got a warrant.
Does the USPS need to scan all letters? Do cell conversations need to be recorded and stored? Do emails need to be retained by the host?
Is this April 1st?
Already being done. All communication is waveform data, all waveform is available 'on the ether', NSA/CIA cracked this years ago.
Just contact them, they'll hook you up...
This is in violation of the US Constitution and they can be considered showing intent to violate it. They should lose their jobs as clearly they are not acting in accord to the public they are supposed to serve, Neither are the politicians who will likely pass it.
Take your paycheck, go home safely, and do not infringe upon civil liberties.
The dumb crooks will be caught and tie up legal resources, the smarter (higher value) ones will adapt and cover their tracks. This is analogous to laying out traps for varmints.
Then there's the small issue of the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights (unreasonable search and seizure).
Wife to self: "Hun, buy some sugar before you come home"
Cops to self: "This is obviously code for methyl-p"
Self to cops: "No it's not - she's making some icing for a carrot cake"
Cops to self: "Ho ho, merry christmas and save me a slice"
Code need not be complex.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Read that Constitution thing.
No good deed goes unpunished.
But keep your perfectly safe guns
First it was folders full of women now it's logs of Americans, where will this end?
Gives me extra comfort in switching to t-mobile like I am currently planning to do.
By the way, anybody in the Phoenix area (east valley especially) care to comment on the quality of service t-mobile offers here? I like how cheap their plans are, and Sprint has very well pissed me off lately so I'm in the process of ditching them.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
They don't even hold onto documents relating to their own wrong doing, why should they ask for ours.... Fix the police and maybe I won't mind... Corruption now adays is staggering, I've heard that 9/10 police violations are now covered up by the internal affair officer and the chief of police of most police departments.... Fuck the police.
Yes, because communication companies can always be trusted to secure their user's data. Ignore those black-suit guys with the sunglasses and the CIA/FBI/NSA badges working in the Farraday cage room with biometric security, they are NOT streaming your text messages to Langley/DC/Fort Meade for analysis. There are not Exabytes of storage capabilities at said facilities in order to "protect national security".
Nothing to see here folks. /sarcasm
sudo make me a sandwich
"As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years..."
Hey, everybody! Have you heard about this thing called Texting. You type out letters on your phone it and sends them to a friend. How rad is that!
Man, I love living in 2001.
Encryption, atleast for use by the public, will be illegal soon.
Fuck the Po-lice.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How about complete audio recordings of all phone calls, and copies of every piece of mail delivered?
Or did you try that before, and ran into some trouble with the Supreme Court, the Fourth Ammendment, and a planet full of Ewoks over forty years ago?
Why not require cops to put video/audio recorders in all their cars and require them to keep the tapes for 2 years. Make any missing tape a felony so that the incentive to "lose" them disappears. That would do more to make our country a better place than keeping SMS messages.
Do you have ESP?
If they use obvious encryption, they will flag themselves to be investigated by other means.
The hell they do.
Texts need to be treated the same as verbal communications. Law enforcement needs to acquire permission to wire tap a persons phone ahead of time. Then, and only then should the texts be logged or stored. Or should the phone companies be expected to keep a recording of all conversations over their networks for two years also?
Sure we can give you the texts... for a price.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Whenever companies like Facebook or Google do things with our data that raise serious privacy concerns, the majority of slashdotters' reaction is "meh, if you don't like it, then don't use it." Oh the irony that you complain about this then.
So, basically they are saying something like this:
"But you want us to stop those dirty, nasty people that want to sell your little angel a bag of crack, and who want nothing more than to destroy our way of life, right? Well, in order to do that any better than we alread are, because those people are adapting to the changing flow of technology, we will have to have access to those mediums!"
We should reply in kind:
"Text messages should be intercepted live, and not recorded in advance. Your convenience is not worth our privacy. Get a warrant for a wire tap, monitor the transmissions of your suspect, and either arrest or not arrest based on the messages you collect duing the surveylence window. We will *not* write you a blank cheque."
Of course, that isn't how this will pan out. My cynical nature screams at me that the police will kick their feet, balk, whine, and throw a PR hissyfit with the press about those mean, dirty people with their dirty secrets wanting to hurt innocent people and children in order to protect themselves from justice, by supressing the motion.
The whole "only those with something to hide" rhetoric.
Nevermind the famous cardinal richelou quote: "give me 5 written lines from the most pious man alive, and I will find something to hang him." (Paraphrased)
We don't demand security and privacy from the police because we are crooked ourselves, or to protect crooked people. We do it to protect the innocent from those in power, who are above the law. (Like said cardinal was.)
As long as there is a "thin blue line", they can never have what they are asking for.
What exactly is the legal difference between this and demanding that all conversations be recorded and available for police perusal. I am not only talking about phone conversations but making it mandatory to have an app running on our smart phones recording everything and transmitting it to a police server. Is somehow text exempt from the 4th amendment.
The police seem to think that they have some magical right to eat away at our rights in order to do their jobs. Well what about an appliance salesman, shouldn't he have the right to examine your credit / banking information so that he can more efficiently sort out potential customers from posers; isn't he just doing his job?
You might think this is some hyperbole but years ago I did some work for a local phone company. In their technology sales department they regularly looked up customer phone records to see if potential customers were talking with other technology companies. Were these guys just using the tools at hand to do a good job? Seems victimless, until you consider the huge imbalance against the other technology companies. Would the solution have been to give the same records to the other technology companies? Or maybe there should be a constitutionally enshrined right to privacy.
Personally I would want to see the rights to privacy only be violable in the more significant of crimes; murder, kidnapping, etc. Not for drug offenses or anything as silly as a divorce. Plus the penalties for violating privacy should be huge. If the phone/credit card company sells my records to a "trusted third party" I want to see some executives do some jail time.
Can't wait to sniff everyone's bank info and passwords then.
I'm guessing that a healthy percentage of "text messages" in the US don't even go through the wireless system as SMS. Of course, then the cops can just go to Apple and get everything....
I would help the cops more if the microphone was always on a complete recording of everything in ear shot of the phone was kept in storage for when it was needed. Seems silly, just wait for bandwidth and storage costs to drop a little more.
Whose phone is it? Who is paying for the service? Why does my phone have to serve the usage of the police? Why can't it do what I want, send and receive messages with no record?
Why is there the assumption that because it can be done it must be done? ((... "for the sake of the children"...))
Why can't we have devices that serve the user?
That is awfully close to storing, say, a copy of every letter for two years, isn't it?
Alright, so it's only "up to 160 characters". So compare it to storing every telegram sent for two years. Or every tweet. Oh wait, that's already being stored indefinitely, by some unaccountable commercial party. Including every supposedly "private" tweet. Hm. Does that justify giving all that to law enforcement? Yes? No? Discuss.
Apple is not a "wireless provider". Is the same law going to require Apple to archive all their messages? What about all the other alternative messaging apps you can get for your smartphone?
This doesn't work unless we declare that any provider of text communication between two individuals be archived, just in case the authorities want it.
------RM
I have no problem with the carriers having 1 year retention of SMS messages if law enforcement have no problem with getting a court ordered warrant before they can access them. The warrant needs to be narrowed to a particular phone number and for a specific date/time range and not a blanket "everything in this zip code during the month of July".
More than 1 year retention required by Law enforcement and they aren't doing their jobs properly. And sorry Columbo, no peeking without probable cause.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.uwho.utext.sms&hl=en
It's not a solution for everybody. From the page: "This app is incompatible with all of your devices." It only works if both ends of the connection have Android phones, smartphone plans, and a copy of this paid application. I imagine that some privacy-minded people use prepaid "burner" phones. But in the United States market, smartphone service can cost seven times as much as dumbphone service (source: virginmobileusa.com). A lot of carriers will not activate an Android phone on a dumbphone plan (in the case of CDMA2000) or will upgrade a dumbphone plan to a smartphone plan if the SIM is inserted into an Android phone (in the case of GSM/UMTS).
All it would take is one android/ios app to read/send encrypted SMS messages and this would be defeated. Of course the cops would then try to extract your keys but that couldn't happen near as easy.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Ah... The good old days.
Today:
At the border: Papers Please!
Walking down the road: Papers Please!
http://papersplease.org/hiibel/case.html
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I like the fact that my library (and most others) destroy records of checkouts after you return a book so that the information can't be used in an investigation or trial.
Just because I read some Karl Marx, doesn't make me a commie. Likewise, just because I texted a quote from the Koran doesn't make me a terrorist.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
How did police ever solve crimes when analog technology didn't record every utterance of every person on the planet? Police also support the imposition of a police state with enhanced powers of abuse for police. Not everything the police want is good for society.
There's WAY too much riding on this for it to not pass. And it's a win-win for absolutely everyone (except of course us, the public, but we don't count because we're just consumables meant to be used and thrown away anyway).
Think about it. The legal system gets to go on fishing trips and tag a pile of people for petty crime like people dealing weed or kids bragging about throwing a rock through windows or whatnot. That way, they fill the prisons, or get new ones built, and the prison system just keeps raking it in.
The telephone companies, whom are charging us exorbitantly for text messages despite it *literally* requiring no additional bandwidth (can't remember the terms for where it's sent, but it's attached to data that would otherwise be sent regardless of if there's a text or not) can now absolutely crank the shit out of texting charges, citing this storage business as costing them an arm and a leg. 20 cent text messages (for pay-as-you-go types like me... for both sending AND receiving of course)? HAH! After this goes through, I'll honestly be surprised if they're only 50 cents, or they might just crank it up to a buck a text. For both sending AND receiving, of course. Like they'd give up their legalized double-dipping.
The legal system gets a ton of new small-time offenders that they can fine the absolute living piss out of, so there's a ton of money coming in for that.
And yeah... there's no downside whatsoever to this (again, ignoring the 99% who are actually affected by this, because we're lower caste, and therefore basically not human and can continue being exploited as much as humanly possible).
So therefore, there's no way this won't pass. There's nobody (that counts) that would be negatively affected by this who would complain.
Doesn’t the existence of cheap burner cell phone make all this data logging point less if you are trying to catch criminals. What’s to stop a criminal from having a new phone every couple of hours to text with? All this would do is make it easier to bust non lifetime felons (average folk) and turn more of the working class into the felon class.
it would be unrealistic to record every phone call
I disagree. The capacity of communications networks increases over time, but the user base of voice does not increase as fast because it's already hit saturation. Say there are 300 million cell phone subscribers in a market, and each spends 1000 minutes on the phone per month, and each call is recorded at 8 kilobits per second. 300,000,000*1000*60*8/8 is only 18 terabytes per month. What's the total size in bytes of video uploaded to, say, YouTube per month?
So if this is made into law ... will the logs between cop and snitch be logged too? I hope so ;)
...GET A FUCKING WARRANT FIRST!
And, no, a 'security letter request' or whatever else they are calling it these days it not acceptable. If you think you have need of text logs for an investigation, go through the proper channels.
If you are interested in seeing what is currently being done:
http://www.aclu.org/cell-phone-location-tracking-request-response-cell-phone-company-data-retention-chart
and
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/cellular-customer-data/
I understand what the cops are getting at, creating a standard they can use. However they tried something like this on ISP up here and Canada, and there was a bit of row to say the least. Cops it seems in general will constantaly ask for more and more powers in order to basically make their job easier. I can't really fault them for that, or for trying. However it has to be a balance in personal rights of privacy also. Which means the public has to say "No" at a certain point when they feel it is too much. Up here in Canada I think we do a better job or that. There are a whole lot of crazy laws down in the US that will let the state pretty much arbitrarly spy on you. The usual arguement is you got nothin' to fear if you ain't got nothin' to hide.
I would prefere at least in this case to let companies set their own standards, and let the market figure it out. I know I think I would pick the one with 0 rentention if given the chance.
One could also make the arguement just like the conservatives might say, criminals don't register guns, well if I am going off someone, I think I'll encrypt it using another method if I really feel the need to text it to someone. Of course there dumb criminals also... Then again, cops shouldn't have dificulty catching those ones. Besides, most phones record the information anyway unless your purposly delete it. Get warrent, find phone, etc... Phone encrypted?
http://xkcd.com/538/
So that's about 4.4 trillion messages that they're going to need stored? http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/10323
... the U.S. Post office retaining copies of all letters sent by USPS for two years. Tin foil hat theories aside, it's not workable or affordable. It's a poorly thought out knee-jerk reaction.
Hypothetically speaking her easy way to fix it encryption bans would be to sniff the wifi of congressmen's parents for bank info transfer all of their funds to their neighbor. Move their own to the local indian casino, start planting pron on their computers. Start monitoring their email and publishing it all on wikileaks pastebin and 4chan. or just post their own browser history and book marks. suddenly encryption looks like a great idea
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Since when did local government agencies group together to pander the Federal government for laws and legislation? Doesn't that entirely break the whole Local-State-Federal hiarchy?
Why should Sheriffs in California be pushing for laws that affect residents outside their jurisdiction.
A free society is nearly impossible without encryption. It's always been that way.
any competent illicits dealer knows to use prepaid phones paid by cash.
this will just drive that market even further.
for the US republicans to continue their witch hunt against the current administration. /cynicism
So should we also require that they record 2 years worth of our voice conversations as well? How is recording the content of a text message different than recording the content of a voice call, other than that one requires more space. Heck, who needs laws anyway, the NSA is probably doing both ways already anyway.
I don't do anything illegal, but this kind of police-state crap
makes sick.
Fuck the police. If they want to solve crimes, they can
get off their fat asses and do it the old-fashioned way :
by WORKING.
We need a death penalty for corrupt cops.
go squat on a chain saw, not the Constitution
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yeah.. We got an app for that.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/black-sms-protected-texts/id448049263?mt=8
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
All I can say about this is, if you are stupid enough to use Text, Email or social media for your criminal tendacies, then you deserve to be caught.
Granted, archiving any digital comms is easy technologically but IMHO should bring up the same ethical and privacy concerns. Or are SMS messages considered "public speech"?
4wdloop
It won't matter. Eventually everyone will be using encrypted texting over data anyway (instead of via carrier texting). If you use iMessage, you're already using encrypted texting over your data connection. These can't be collected (legibly) by carriers. You can also get free texting apps that use data rather than carrier networks. Android users can use Google Talk to IM now as well. Carrier texting is on it's way out, eventually.
"That'll never compile."
As long as bank robbers are posting videos of their exploits to YouTube, the cops don't need our text messages. Just sayin'.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Or maybe, this will kill text messaging for everyone except tweens.
If that hasn't already happened.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I support US Patriot act, but with more restrictions. But the reason I supported it, was that it was for chasing those from outside our nation that came in. Sadly, it is easy enough to abuse, and that is why it needs more restrictions.
OTOH, this is about following anybody, esp. citizens, that they want. This can not be allowed.
After all, once this is allowed, then what is to stop them from recording all conversations everywhere?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The longer I live, the stronger my feeling that the world is just a giant McDonald's network.
And we are the cows.
Just like the Telco records all phone calls just in case the police need a warrant one day?
Oh, wait.
A warrant is certainly part of a good (necessary) process for data moving forward, but we don't need to build a panopticon and collect data on *everyone* on a constant basis for future just-in-case scenarios.
The sad news, the request is not a violation of the Constitution. having a requirement that a third party keep a record of a transaction that was voluntarily entered into by the user is all that is being asked. But, the use of the records is where my concern enters.
As it stands right now, the Govt. can obtain records of cell phone use (tolls) for any number it so desires with an administrative subpoena, no warrant needed. This information only shows the numbers called and who called a number with minimal other data.
The request is usually made to bolster a case that may ultimately wind up being a Title III (wiretap). From that point, a warrant is needed to obtain the meat of the SMS and voice conversations.
Keeping the records for two years MAY help solving cold case murders, but good old fashioned police work will do the same. While I am sure that there will be some kind of language that makes a warrant needed to obtain the historic information, I think that we all know that the attorneys will find a way around the warrant claiming public safety as an exigent circumstance. But wait, we already have that. It is called the Patriot Act.
As a detective who calls this his playground, I know there are no secrets that cannot be unearthed. I can use historical data to get a criminal for a crime committed some time ago. If you think about it all crimes are committed some time ago. This will simply lead to invasive surveillance based upon possibility, not probability. That is where the Constitution should be projected and the rights of citizens protected.
C'mon, the comparison to storing a copy of every letter sent by the post office for two years is ridiculous. Texts are already electronic, (they would not need to be scanned, as would letters) and textual data compresses well. This could easily be done with current technology.
Don't look for technical barriers, this will have to be fought in Congress or the courts.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
if the cops only target those that are guilty...
and they only keep track of communications of those that are guilty...
if they keep track of my communications (by proxy of telco's), I must be guilty...
and here I was... thinking I was innocent until proven otherwise...
I'd like to refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_for
Most people I think believe their information is too mundane to worry about. They don't care if the FBI, Police or whoever read it.
The problem is even mundane information unrelated to a crime can be used to convict you. This is true even if you are not actually guilty of the crime! It's the same reason you shouldn't talk to the police (let your lawyer do it for you). http://goo.gl/B12W
The solution to these problesm is to own our telocumminications mediums. We do not, the corporations do, and the corporations love the control of the police and beuracracy of the senate. You are politely corraled and anyone, anyone who can do anything about it, who can create their own networks, and subvert the monopolies, and be self sufficient is considered a threat.
Time to build our own networks and thumb the man. We will be unstoppable if we do this.
> 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as 'staggering.'
The judge obviously doesn't have teenage daughters. Thank god they don't charge me by the message these days.
Which encrypted apps? Is there a PGP for SMS?
They should wear video/audio and continually record everything they do while on duty.
Otherwise, bugger off.
UPSA (United police states of America) doesn't really have the same ring to it. Have you Americans given any thought to what you want the rest of the world to call us when you give up the ruse of being anything other then the police state you are? I would think this is something you would want to discuss as soon as possible, before you need a government issued ID number to post on message boards (a motion already before congress).
Unless i'm under active investigation with a judges approval for a warrant, they have no business even asking for this information to be stored.
Honest citizens should not be tracked. Period.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oops, my fault, you're right. Thank you for the correction. 18 PB per month is closer to the bandwidth that YouTube was using back in 2006.
I want a million bucks and live-in hookers. Does this mean congress should provide them for me?
You just need enough people to send several of their friends a text message of six random words picked from the dictionary every few hours. This will turn anything but plain admissions of guilt into meaningless drivel as far as law enforcement goes, and de-automates the codebreaking measures needed to make certain that some kind of code system isn't being used - since computers aren't good for extracting semantic information out of conversations. On top of that, it would cause a large increase in the amount of data that would need to be stored, making it an unjustifiable financial burden (as well as a nightmare for wholesale data mining).
No.
This is all that needs to be said.
OK not to worry. Obama is responsible this time.
If it was BUSH it would be time for impeachment.
g8t idea ;)
<3 gvmnt
cops rule
xxx
I mean, you have to be stupid to 'confess' (even indirectly) by texting about your crimes. It's common knowledge that texts are saved for a long time, at least several years and in some places for decades, and they're among the first things to be looked at when you become a suspect.
Oh and new legislation isn't necessary - they are readily available with a proper warrant.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Translation: A vast criminal conspiracy.
Do they even think this is legal? W.T.F.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Cops are skilled at perpetrating their protection and service off-camera, so most veterans won't get caught. I'd prefer a lapel cam.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Adherence to protocol is a reasonable substitute for skill and discernment. Just one out of three would make the roads safer.
Since skill and discernment aren't viable options...
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The problem is that it is legal to store any SMS content at all, ever. If Congress wants to require the ability to store the content after a warrant has been issued by a Federal Judge, then they need to do it within the legal framework.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
If a user forgets their password to a website and they go thru the process to have their password emailed to them (or a reset link), are these emails encrypted? Is that even an option? Is any company / community even offering / requiring such a setup? If not, talk of encryption is rather pointless for now.
I just looked for an encrypted SMS app for Android, but nothing came up. It can't be too hard* to take my text, encrypt it with my private key and send it out, can it? The receiver just needs to know my public key and away it goes. Sure, the message is going to get larger because of encoding, but with massive text bundles that's not really a problem.
(* that said, I haven't the first clue about mobile app development, so for me, yes, it's very hard indeed ;-)
What makes this even worse is that it will likely result in another "fee" on our phone bills since the companies will most assuredly balk at footing the bill for the storage (and they should...this is ridiculous).
Of course, the fee will far exceed the actual cost and turn into another revenue line for the companies. Nothing like another way to soak more money out of our already empty pockets. The fact that the companies will be making profit off of it will ensure it will never go away.