Monday, July 09, 2012

Wireless Firms Are Flooded by Requests to Aid Surveillance

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. The data, which comes in response to a congressional inquiry, documents an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the wireless carriers turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests. The cell carriers’ reports also reveal a sometimes uneasy partnership with law enforcement agencies, with the carriers frequently rejecting demands they considered legally questionable or unjustified. Carriers even referred some inappropriate requests to the F.B.I. The statistics represent the first time data has been collected nationally on the frequency of cell surveillance by law enforcement. The volume of the requests reported by the carriers — which most likely involve several million subscribers — even surprised some officials who have closely followed the growth of cell surveillance. AT&T alone now responds to 230 emergency requests a day nationwide — triple the number it fielded in 2007, the company told Mr. Markey. Law enforcement requests of all kinds have been rising quickly among the other carriers as well, with annual increases of 12 percent to 16 percent in the last five years. Sprint led the way last year, reporting more than 500,000 law enforcement requests for data. ..more

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