Tweets, email -- a staggering number of messages sent and received by all of us are passing through the filter of law enforcement.
“I never expected it to be this massive,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who requested the reports from nine carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, in response to an article in April in The New York Times on law enforcement’s expanded use of cell tracking. Mr. Markey, who is the co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, made the carriers’ responses available to The Times. ...Eric Lichtblau, NYT
Though the carriers haven't (yet) looked at precisely who is asking for what information, it's clear that this law enforcement effort occurs at local and state levels in the same way as by agencies of the federal government.
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. That is roughly triple the number it fielded in 2007. ... As cell surveillance becomes a seemingly routine part of police work, Mr. Markey said in an interview that he worried that “digital dragnets” threatened to compromise the privacy of many customers. “There’s a real danger we’ve already crossed the line,” he said. ...Eric Lichtblau, NYT
And because the records are not complete, Lichtblau reports, it's likely that law enforcement is using these tools far more often than we know so far.
To handle the demands, most cell carriers reported employing large teams of in-house lawyers, data technicians, phone “cloning specialists” and others around the clock to take requests from law enforcement agencies, review the legality and provide the data.
With the demands so voluminous and systematic, some carriers have resorted to outsourcing the job. Cricket said it turned over its compliance duties to a third party in April. ... Chris Calabrese, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., said he was concerned not only about officials gathering phone data on people with no real connection to crimes but also about the agencies then keeping those records indefinitely in internal databases. ...Eric Lichtblau, NYT
