Law Enforcement Cell Phone Tracking Rampant

By Jeralyn, Section Civil Liberties
Posted on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 08:32:00 AM EST
Tags: wiretapping, cell phone surviellance (all tags)

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Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times writes about a report from cell phone carriers in response to a Congressional Inquiry about law enforcement requests cell phone tracking warrants, subpoena and informal requests.

The report was received by Co-Chairs of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Committe., as a response to a letter written In March, 2012 to AT&T asking for information.

The reports notes a huge upswing in use of cell-phone surveillance.Even some members of Congress were suprised. [More...]

Lichtblau says the reports "document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests." Also:

The reports also reveal a sometimes uneasy partnership with law enforcement agencies, with the carriers frequently rejecting demands that they considered legally questionable or unjustified. At least one carrier even referred some inappropriate requests to the F.B.I.

Which law enforcement agencies are using them? All of them, all over the nation:

[T]he widened cell surveillance cut across all levels of government — from run-of-the-mill street crimes handled by local police departments to financial crimes and intelligence investigations at the state and federal levels

We're also paying a hefty price for the records turnover:

AT&T, for one, said it collected $8.3 million last year compared with $2.8 million in 2007, and other carriers reported similar increases in billings.

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Law Enforcement Cell Phone Tracking Rampant | 48 comments (48 topical)

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Cell phones aren't "real" phones... (5.00 / 1) (#5)
by unitron on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 08:02:57 AM EST

...so we don't need "real" search warrants.

And those secret rooms where land lines are tapped.

We don't talk about those, so you shouldn't either.

And besides they don't really exist and that's our story and we're stickin' to it.

If the terrorists win, you won't have a 4th amendment then, either, so kwitcher beefin'.

We had to destroy it in order to save it.

I guess I will start (none / 0) (#1)
by TeresaInPa on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 05:56:16 AM EST

saying hello to the "cops" whenever I talk on the cell phone. What can we do? Anyone have any ideas? Elect more democrats to congress again and have them fail to do a damn thing we care about?

: I always did that (none / 0) (#4)
by jbindc on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 06:56:46 AM EST

During the Bush years when I would talk to my sister and we would discuss politics and talk about how much we hated Bush. I would always end with "And for the NSA folks who are listening, my name is __ and I can be found at ____. Thought I'd save you the time!"

Dreaming of a perfect cell phone movement grid (none / 0) (#2)
by LeaNder on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 06:17:02 AM EST

For instance, when a police agency asks for a cell tower "dump" for data on subscribers who were near a tower during a certain period of time, it may get back hundreds or even thousands of names.

I know, I should be ashamed, but it is my ideal scenario for longer now. The idea to have the precise movements of the cellphones of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin on 2/26/12.

Cell Phone Towers and Antennae in Sanford Florida

No idea how precise they would be in time and space. Unfortunately I think they may not be precise enough. ;)

Unfortunately? (5.00 / 1) (#9)
by sj on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 09:38:15 AM EST

Unfortunately? Really? You want to know for essentially prurient reasons. And for that you would be just fine with "someone" having the ability to exactly map the movements of every. single. cell. phone. user.

I don't care that you would give up your own privacy, but stay the he!! away from mine.

You know you should be ashamed, but are you?


I don't know how accurate gps (none / 0) (#12)
by Militarytracy on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 09:53:19 AM EST

is on smart phones, but my husband loves to watch himself drive down the street on his. As far as I can tell, the only thing lacking is the constant reporting of your location but for all I know that is stored someplace if your gps abilities are active on your smart phone.


You should be ashamed ... (none / 0) (#13)
by LeaNder on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 10:05:35 AM EST

You know you should be ashamed, but are you?

Look, dear sj, I started my note with exactly that, and for precisely that reason.

Let's consider the facts: I neither have the knowledge, technical or otherwise or the power and ability to invade your or anyone's privacy, so why are you so indignant about my little mind game?

I admittedly was a bit irratated myself in the post 911 universe, when my emails suddenly doubled, tripled or quadrupled in my mailbox without any easily recognizable pattern. But once they handled their technical issues, whatever they were, it stopped as suddenly as it had started. Up to that point I studied with quite a bit of curiosity the slightly different path the multiplied mails took through the net in the email headers. Around the same time frame a really urgent mail of mine needed close to 30 hours to travel 300 miles, something I would have loved to have a technical explanation for too. But in the end, I only hoped that the technicians that have to do the "combing" have bloody good programs or tools. Imagine the masses! So why should I be concerned? Besides ever worked in a field were it is easy to see that the mass is stereotypically similar and ultimately boring?

It of course changes everything fundamentally if you are either a terrorist, a member of the organized crime or any other of several professions that have to be concerned about privacy issue, like e.g. a lawyer or a journalist to pick out just two.


Why am I indignant? (none / 0) (#14)
by sj on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 10:20:25 AM EST

Because the more an idea is casually verbalized the more that idea is normalized. And I think when the idea is offensive -- and I find this idea offensive in the extreme -- it shouldn't be casually accepted.

I realize this is a facile example, but the overt racism of many of our parents or grandparents was acceptable because everybody accepted it. It needed pushback and when that finally happened the racism became less overt and more covert. And with time and generations who never experienced that overt racism, maybe it can finally go away.

But police state survealliance should never be wished for in a free society. I think it should be in the interest of every member of a society to be concerned about privacy issues.


I think you are being a bit harsh sj (none / 0) (#17)
by ZtoA on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 12:10:06 PM EST

LeaNder has said that s/he is an artist, and artists have been writing/composing/visioning hellish scenarios for a long time. Bosch did, tho it can be argued that he painted literal visual depictions of colloquialisms (like "rot in hell"), both Dore and Blake illustrated Dante's Inferno, kurt Vonnegut, Philip Glass, and many more envision dystopia. GPS gridding is not such a radical idea also. It might easily be added to evidence displacing DNA as the new evidence.

Also, racism cannot be solved by going back to a mindset before racism. Same with the surveillance state. We'll have to find new solutions (I don't know, scattering devices giving false reads, expensive privacy security services for phones, whatever.) If hell can be pictured (think Dante) it can be traversed.


: I don't think so (5.00 / 2) (#20)
by sj on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 12:40:01 PM EST

I think you are being a bit harsh sj
I don't know LeaNder from Adam. S/he came via Zimmerman and I ignore those threads like the plague. And frankly although I do tend to give more leeway to artists, I'll stick with my "harsh" response.
This is not an artistic creation. I'm not reading a short story or a novel or watching a movie about a dystopian society. This thought was injected as a secret wish for our very own world. That idea can't be normalized. People should be horrified at this suggestion.
I completely agree with you on this:

Also, racism cannot be solved by going back to a mindset before racism. Same with the surveillance state.
Since a society can't ever really go back, any suggestion of the advancement of the surveillance state needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. It's likely the losing end of the tug-of-war between the elites/not-elites, but I can't shrug my shoulders at the implications of Leander's "ideal scenario".

sj - how about a paradox? (none / 0) (#28)
by LeaNder on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 05:21:28 PM EST

I admittedly register a strong resistance to deal with these matters lightly.

I also feel a tension between the overpowering Dystopian moment in your comment, the bracket of the first and the last paragraph-the surveillance-control-police state-around the hesitantly optimist center, a linear history progressively advancing towards a Utopia. For me Utopia and Dystopia are interrelated in complex ways.

Like many of my generation I was influenced by Dystopia novels like e.g.: 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, or, why not, Zamyatin's We. The respective political ideologies they mirror, I surely do not need to mention in this context? They are on your mind.

The only phrase that I can deeply connect with is this one:

It needed pushback and when that finally happened the racism became less overt and more covert

I would probably prefer racisms, I follow Elisabeth Young Brühl in this context. They may have overlapping characteristics, but they surely have different origins, histories and dynamics.

My core problem is twofold, we may have overcome the specific shapes these matters took under the reigning ideologies for our grand-parents and parents, but there is no guarantee we won't develop our own ideological blind spots, or pseudo-sciences like The Bell Curve. I don't like generalization about whole past generations, and I do not completely trust a clear linear model, it's an advance that sometimes by checks and errors, solutions that create new problems.

But were exactly on the linear racism time axis into the better future would you locate Islamophobia?

But I guess, at the risk of completely misunderstanding you, here lies my core problem:

Because the more an idea is casually verbalized the more that idea is normalized.

I do not believe in any kind of censorship. Fact is, if it would exist such technical data would convince me quite a bit, provided it would be reliable and precise. That's a thought I can surely suppress as you suggest I have to, but I can't keep my mind from thinking about it.

I don't fool myself, we have been "glass citizen", transparent citizen for much longer now, and the development gains speed. We are to a large extend by administrative bio-political processes, the space of privacy is constantly shrinking. Germany plans to commercialize the register of residence data, you may have that already. ...

True total surveillance surely would be an ideal totalitarian tool, but so is censorship. How do you crack that paradox?


Who is talking censorship? (5.00 / 1) (#29)
by sj on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 06:18:37 PM EST

You long for a state of affairs for prurient reasons. You express that thought. I am horrified by the implications of that thought not only mentioned but desired. I express my own thought.

You say something horrible. I push back.

Letting your comment be without responding would have been tantamount to granting permission to giving that horrible thought airtime with no rebuttal.

You wished for a state where a person's exact whereabouts could be pinpointed. I was nauseous at the thought and strongly objected to normalizing the police state and constant surveillance. Neither you nor I were censored.


I'm enjoying the exchange between you two (5.00 / 1) (#31)
by ZtoA on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 07:26:35 PM EST

Its a grey area, what to say and what not to say. If it can be imagined, then probably others are imagining it too and someone's going to say it. We have all sorts of monsters of the mind that when brought forth we can do battle with.

The notion of a surveillance state is not at all new, in the inquisition they even had belief police, and it goes on from there. Very revolting, I agree sj and I admire your pushback against this hell. But I read a different tone in LeaNder's first comment. It felt ironic to me, like "perfect" actually meant a combination of inevitable, useful and horrible, like Vonnegut might feel about ice nine.

LeaNder, I liked your reference to sj as an optimism sandwich. That's great. My mother is like that and I admire it so. I'm much more a ragout, as you might be too with your non linear stuff and all.

And, as an aside a work of art can be pretty much anything these days as we are many decades past a urinal made by anonymous working class people presented as great art to glorify an individual artist, and a blog comment is as concrete as anything. The next crop of MFA students might read about this. God, I hate MFA programs. :)

Also, I wish Rush would suppress himself.


ZtoA - Duchamp - sj (none / 0) (#36)
by LeaNder on Tue Jul 10, 2012 at 06:37:57 AM EST

ZtoA, the most important story about the urinal is that its choice as work of art was a protest against the new exhibition rules by Duchamp. I would need to look up the special show in 1917. I don't remember. He didn't sign it with his name, after all. The rules opened the exhibition for everyone, everything submitted, or in other words everyone submitting something.

Facebook: I have been trying to get out of it close to 2 years ago. The advise is, never click on a link that is automatically sent you when someone who has you on his list posts something. I am told it is still there, although I carefully obeyed all the rules to make it vanish, they are not easy to find, I remember, according to them after half a year it should have been gone. Not so, obviously. Seems one needs a lawyer to make it go away.


: Duchamp (an aside) (none / 0) (#45)
by ZtoA on Tue Jul 10, 2012 at 12:44:33 PM EST

I think submitting Fountain to that show was a bit of a performance piece since he was on the board, submitted anonymously and knew it would be rejected as a prank and then got to resign. Fountain was probably not his idea either and the name R Mutt was used by an artist friend of his. The original urinal was lost or destroyed.
Not only was he an extremely interesting thinker, he was very savvy. So, after he protested "retinal art" and materialism, but saw artists like Rauschenberg making lots of money, he began to officially authorize certain curators to make replicas of Fountain in the 50s and in the 60s he himself issued a limited edition. So then Fountain became a commercialized product which can be and is owned. Talk about ironic. (or basic human nature) Also, the link is to a site where there is retinal enjoyment of the many iterations of the urinal.

sj (5.00 / 1) (#33)
by ZtoA on Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 08:20:57 PM EST

Who is talking censorship?

Oddly I am not a purist anti-censorship proponent. It gets tricky with copyright laws. And blowhards like Rush and his ilk really do nothing to add to communication, conversation or whatever. I think Jeralyn's blog rules promote a long blog life. I really like your push back and it fleshes out the horridness of the dystopia.

It may not surprise you that I feel a similar reaction to a surveillance state as you. I was asking my 20 something daughter and a bunch of her friends if they had any thoughts about this. Or Facebook's invasiveness, or commercial profiling or any of it and each just shrugged like it had never occurred to them to care. I tried, a bit, to scare them, but they were affectionately annoyed.

I googled LeanDer's reference to that psychologist and found a site that seemed rather interesting (Yale University Press) when up popped a box. I hate it when boxes pop up. It wanted to know if I would like to "SHARE" this site with an array of social media and when I clicked I got to a page that was a form to "DO NOT TRACK". The genie is already out of the bottle. Amazon.com already knows me better than pretty much anyone.


: Financial Times has that, too (none / 0) (#34)
by sj on Tue Jul 10, 2012 at 12:14:51 AM EST

That pop-up with a notification. Moreover, by closing the box one agrees to permit their tracking cookies. Every n