Slashdot Mirror
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
No.
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...
Ya as a geek I refuse to buy into the texting scam that the cell phone providers have going. I think I can found the number of texts I've sent over the years on two hands.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbLCHeXU694
*waves lighter in the air*
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.
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 ;)
I spend $5/mo for unlimited texts.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
...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
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.
Ya as a geek I refuse to buy into the texting scam that the cell phone providers have going. I think I can found the number of texts I've sent over the years on two hands.
That's what I said until I got divorced and started dating again. Thousands of text messages. Yes, thousands. You don't tell a hot chick to switch to gtalk, just because it's free. Nope, you're better off being a man and spending that $10 a month for unlimited text without mentioning it. I'll never regret that choice.
Anyway, check out Virgin Mobile's prices. Unlimited text comes with just about every plan and I've cut my monthly payment in half over the best plan for me on Verizon.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but do you actually know any people?
I didn't use SMS for years, simply because most of the people I knew didn't use it so there was no point -- it's not like I was going to text myself.
Over the last few years, it's one of the primary ways I set up things with friends. It's easier, and someone can always choose to respond to a text or not -- which is easier than phoning someone.
I even get texts from my mother from time to time, so I'd definitely say a lot more people are using it nowadays.
I barely do voice calls on my cell, mostly just texts.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A free society is nearly impossible without encryption. It's always been that way.
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.
Which is $5/mo more than it costs them to provide the service.
horror vacui
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?
since the federal government uses funding state programs to create dependency and to control the states. this is of course unconstitutional, but the average citizen now views the federal government as the saviour, protector, guide. Add to that the fact that the federal government is under control of large mega-corporations, and you can see how we are sliding into a fascist police state.
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
That's what I said until I got divorced and started dating again. Thousands of text messages. Yes, thousands. You don't tell a hot chick to switch to gtalk, just because it's free. Nope, you're better off being a man and spending that $10 a month for unlimited text without mentioning it. I'll never regret that choice.
You make a damn good point.
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.
This.
I didn't get a cell until I got separated. That's how people talk and arrange parties, dates, etc.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
or keep both.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
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.
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
> 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?
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).
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 ;-)