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Are Communications Records of Americans Retained Forever? (seattletimes.com)
An Illinois prosecutor announced Friday that a Seattle man was wrongly convicted in 2012 of the abduction and murder of a 7-year-old girl in 1957, reports the Seattle Times. It was believed to be the nation's oldest cold case, but reader Trachman raises an interesting concern:
He finally got an an alibi, which was a telephone call which he made in 1957. While it surely is a good thing that an innocence has been proven, the case is also an evidence that American's communication records are retained infinitely.
You really have to ask?
by the fact that they were doing it 60 years ago. Even before touch-tone phones.
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My understanding from reading several articles on this case is that the phone call alibi was investigated at the time and those records were part of the original case file. The change is in the testimony and credibility of witnesses who had previously undermined that alibi. They did not just now uncover records of a phone call from 1957. This does not answer the question of what records are retained by who and for how long.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
They are not retained forever or infinitely, because that's impossible.
Can us little people see please? I'm be pretty interested in the stacks of transcribed phone-calls between my grandfather and his mistress.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Now that we know that it's morally fine to do, let's all do it!
I'm a hoarder of information, I admit it. At work, I retain all the bits and bytes that I can, because once in a while, it's useful. I keep all of my emails except the spam. I keep all my paper bank statements and print out all of my tax returns every year to add to the pile. And I expect people I work with to do the same. There's nothing quite so enraging as going to ask someone, what happened on day X and getting back a shrug: "I dunno, we deleted all that data".
I'm more surprised by the fact that they were doing it 60 years ago. Even before touch-tone phones.
Its just the phone company billing data, which phone companies have been collecting for about as long as they have been sending bills to people. All that has happened is that someone dug up the phone company billing data from 1957. Want to know what phone call "metadata" is? Look at your phone bill.
As for touch-tone dialing, dialing information was detected mechanically long before that with rotary phones. It was just a matter of counting "clicks" rather than recognizing the frequency of tones.
It still amazes me that people think they have any expectation of privacy when they had communications over to a third party. Let's clear this up. Once you've paid the carrier they don't give $.02 about you. Now or ever.
Although the meaning was not lost, really, folks, and my dear slashdot editors, the word you want in this case is indefinitely. This concludes today's lesson, when you mean that there is no time limit.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Remind me, in the future, when some politician preaches about forgiveness, that the forgetfulness part is on hold indefinitely.
Nobody ever reads the fine print in their service contracts. At least not the sections related to the rights the carrier asserts when it comes to your phone activity. I think a lot of people just want their phone activity to be so private that they cannot be billed. I also think a lot of people do not know the difference between privacy and anonymity. Unless you are willing to drop off the grid you will not be able to live anonymously in the modern world. And it is not the collection and storage of call meta data that threatens your privacy. If you live in the US and have filed tax returns the government has all the information it needs to deconstruct all the important details of your life. IRS data collection makes the NSA look like a bunch of pikers. So far there has been no case in the US prosecuted because evidence was collected by the NSA and the accused thinks their rights were violated. On the other hand the IRS prosecutes millions of cases using the information they have collected on you.
Means that all of the calls a senator makes to a hooker with a new phone will be recorded indefinitely.
As will the calls from his staffer to The Washington Post to "leak" a story
And the call from his hooker to the drug dealer to supply drugs for their get together...
I'm not sure Washington knows what it is unleashing here....
I think a lot of people just want their phone activity to be so private that they cannot be billed.
I doubt that's the case. Once the billing period is over, the utility of those call records for billing purposes reaches its end and the records could be wiped out. In the US, it's been at least 5 years, probably closer to 10, since I paid a phone bill based in any part whatsoever on what calls I made. With the exception of international calls, long distance charges haven't been a thing for a long time, and billing per minute isn't common anymore. Even the phones from Wal-Mart have a flat rate unlimited plan, who you call or how often doesn't affect your bill at all.
So far there has been no case in the US prosecuted because evidence was collected by the NSA and the accused thinks their rights were violated.
That we know of. It's not like the NSA notifies you when your phone records are examined.
according to my phone company (sonic.com which is pretty good about privacy). They say they keep them that long, then toss them. There's some confusion about whether that 18 month rule applies only to toll calls, or if it's for all calls. Sonic has a flat monthly rate for (US) nationwide calling, so in that sense one could say none of its domestic calls are toll calls. That means maybe they don't have to retain any records. The CEO said a year or so ago that he'd have the company's lawyers look into it, but I don't think anything came of it.
Excellent point. Never thought of it that way. What business rationale is there for call metadata if long distance billing is irrelevant? Aside from the obvious government surveillance angle, I'm guessing marketing.
That's when the first telephone exchange in the US was started, per wikipedia. Somewhere in some warehouse these record from the very first commercial exchange are probably sitting, transcribed by hand. This is AT&T, they keep records of EVERYTHING, even before the FBI started asking them to.
No phone records were produced to clear his name. It was an old FBI report, and (from the FBI's POV) his alibi had been established while investigating the case in 1957. At that time the FBI had either requested and examined the phone records and verified the collect call. While conducting a preliminary investigation an FBI agent may have simply called the phone company and requested the information, noting it in the report. They would not have requested a paper record of the call unless it established his guilt and they needed to introduce it as evidence. For some reason the FBI walked away and let the prosecutor nail him to the wall.
So no, this does not suggest phone records were retained. The call (without the name) would have shown up on his parents' paper phone bill if they had managed to keep it.
[cite] And he was not permitted to present police and FBI reports from the 1957 kidnapping investigation that indicated he was questioned and cleared from the list of suspects because he had an alibi.
The reports indicated that McCullough spoke with military recruiters in Rockford, about 40 miles away, about the time Maria was taken from the street corner in Sycamore. They also seemed to verify his story that he made a collect call home, asking for a ride. Phone records at the time, long since lost, indicated that a collect call was placed from a pay phone in Rockford to the Tessier family home in Sycamore at 6:57 p.m. by someone giving his name as âoeJohn Tassier.â The call lasted two minutes.
Illinois law does not allow police reports and other documents as a substitute for witness testimony at trials. But in this case, almost all of the FBI agents and police investigators had died, and McCullough's defense sought to introduce the reports as "ancient documents" or public records more than 20 years old. Hallock, the trial judge, rejected that argument.
âoeThe judge's decisions to prohibit Jack McCullough from introducing FBI records prepared at the time of the offense, despite their status as ancient documents and public records and their probative value in establishing Mr. McCullough's alibi, and to prohibit Mr. McCullough from presenting testimony showing another man committed the offense, amounted to gross abuses of discretion denying Mr. McCullough his fundamental right to present a defense,â the appeal stated.
By blocking the defense while allowing prosecutors to introduce âoeirrelevant, but highly prejudicial evidence,â the judge violated McCullough's right to a fair trial, the appeal stated, before delivering a final salvo: âoeNo rational trier of fact would have found the defendant guilty.â
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You're looking at this wrong. The issue isn't correctly cast as "man exonerated because saving phone records is good thing" -- the nature of he problem, and what very much needs to be addressed, is "US justice system far too easily wrongfully convicts innocents."
Because if in fact the guy didn't do it, then whatever they had that resulted in a conviction was utter shite. Which is a 100% clear and unequivocal indication that the thresholds for conviction are too low by far.
And it would appear that in fact, he didn't do it. And THAT provides the critical indicator here. Just think about it: He didn't do it; but the court system managed to convict him on entirely wrongful (or lacking) evidence. Is that what you want if YOU end up in court? Speaking from deeply unfortunate personal experience, I really don't think you do.
The only way a conviction can occur of someone who is actually innocent is via lack of evidence, or fabrication of evidence, because there cannot be any evidence that actually indicates the person is guilty. A red sock is not a blue sock because it's not a yellow sock. It's a red sock if, and only if, it's a red sock.
So rather than screw us all (further) as to our privacy, we should stop screwing people in the courts. We can do that by setting the thresholds differently (and we should), or we can wait for technology to solve it by actually reading "did it" or "didn't do it" right from the accused person's mind. But if we do the latter, a whole lot of innocent people are going to to grievously suffer as a result.
Please agitate to fix what's actually broken. Don't consider a horrible mechanism "the answer" because it resulted in illumination of some other horrible mechanism.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"an an"
Well done Slashdot. Again.
Fucking American idiots.
One of my business locations is fed by an optical data line, which aside from the (awesome) network connection, also provides the only standard telco POTS line brought into the business, sourced directly from the box where the optical connection comes in from outside. Switchhook dialing absolutely does not work. DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency), or you get nothing.
I asked about it when we got the optical interface; they told me straight up, "no."
Being a suspicious type, I connected a Hayes modem which hangs off my classic 6809 system, told it "ATDP xxxyyyy", watched as it agreeably pulsed away... and nothing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Lack of proof that you did" s/b "lack of proof that you didn't"
Sorry. Proofread, but... fail. And no post-posting editing because it's still 1990 here on Slashdot. New owners or not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
His mother told his sister, while dying on her deathbed, that she knew he killed that girl, and did something terrible to two others. Then she died. The sister testified that. Of course that is actually hearsay and should never have been allowed in court, but the judge who found him guilty(not a jury) went with it.
The phone record was from way back then when he was investigated by the FBI and found to have a valid alibi. The FBI did their homework as they were ordered by the president. This case was a big deal at the time apparently. There were boxes of stuff from the FBI's investigation, all ignored by the judge. The case hinged on that. Plus an overzealous prosecutor that needed a conviction evidence be damned.
Testimony of a delirious old woman doped up on her death bed convicted him.
All these newfags claiming 'surprise that it's been going on for so long'.
These are the same people that call the 'old people' crazy conspiracy theorists for stating this fact for decades.
Snowden revealed nothing new. He simply rubbed your noses in it. Bulk data collection(spying, call recording...) has been going on since at least World War II. The only thing new is the speed, storage capacity, and ease of access.
Call transaction metadata is used internally for billing, satisfying current legal obligations, marketing, transaction analysis, and trending analysis. The last two reasons allow the carrier to plan for infrastructure upgrades to meet projected future demand. When you sign your service agreement you are effectively giving the carrier the rights to use your data for all of the above reasons.
for every phone you and your family use. In the late 80's, my dad was going to travel abroad with classified materials and had to receive a courier type of clearance (he already had top-secret clearance--missile defense work). At some point in that process, he tells us (family) to be careful what we say on the phone. Apparently during an interview for the clearance, he was asked about a phone conversation he had at least 25 years earlier. So from that point, we assumed every conversation was recorded.
The alleged testimony. We do not know what his mother said. Maybe his sister hated him.
IANAL, but I've read that hearsay testimony can be admissible if it's from the deathbed. There are requirements that the person giving the testimony realize that she's going to die, and that she does die.
Why was this a conviction by judge? The guy had the Constitutional right to a jury trial.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes