This afternoon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation brings our attention to some work by Christopher Soghoian, who claims to have attended an “ISS World Conference” (Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering) this October as a graduate student at Indiana University. These conferences, according to Soghoian, are not open to the general public, but are meetings between representatives of government spy agencies and the communications corporations that the spy agencies use to collect information.
There’s a great deal to read over in Soghoian’s report, but this information leaps to the top of the reading: Soghoian claims to have an audio recording of Paul W. Taylor, Manager of Electronic Surveillance at Sprint Nextel, a company that provides wireless service for voice, text, GPS and a number of other features. That recording includes the following statement of concern about government spying programs Taylor has had firsthand experience with:
“We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.”
Here’s a summary of what you need to know to understand this paragraph:
- GPS (global positioning system) data reveals almost exactly where a person carrying a GPS-enabled device, such as a “smart” cell phone, is, using satellite tracking systems.
- Some people have claimed that the government couldn’t possibly get GPS data on cell phone holders from communications corporations, because the satellites don’t transmit that information back to Earth. Apparently, that isn’t true, as Sprint Nextel admits having access to the information. I’m no wireless expert, but it’s certainly plausible that after satellites transmit location information to GPS-enabled devices, the data can then be transmitted to corporate databases through the devices’ own wireless capabilities.
- Sprint Nextel was getting so many requests from government spy agencies for information about the GPS data of its clients that it had to set up an automated web interface so that government spies could go ahead and log requests themselves, without having to talk to a human representative from Sprint Nextel.
- Sprint Nextel’s automated system to help the government spy on people more efficiently then worked so well that law enforcement requests for people’s GPS data swelled to 8 million separate requests. These are just the requests to Sprint Nextel for GPS. Other wireless companies, and other data types, are not included in this number.
- These requests took place without a search warrant specifying the particular place to be searched and the rationale for the seizure of information, as is required under the Fourth Amendment.
- This was happening during a period that’s mostly within the Obama Presidency, so it’s not just a problem that disappeared when George W. Bush left office.
This is a secret program, so the details are difficult to analyze. It’s possible that the government sought information on the GPS-identified location of 8 million individuals. It’s more likely, however, that some of these requests were repeated many times for certain people being spied on by the government.
However, even if this is the case, and every single person tracked under this system had their location identified 2,000 times in a year – six times every day of the year – then there would still have been 4,000 people tracked by the government in this way, and that’s just through Sprint Nextel, saying nothing of Verizon, or the other wireless networks.
What on earth could justify the government’s nearly constant spying on that number of people, even if the spying was only taking place through Spring Nextel, which Soghoian’s report indicates is not at all the case?
Keep in mind that, as this has been going on under Obama as well as under Bush, the Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress has been seeking to reauthorize the Patriot Act without adequate reforms, and has not been attempting to reform the FISA Amendments Act at all. The Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act are the two laws that could be used to justify the kinds of spying programs described by Soghoian, although without specific knowledge of these classified programs, it’s impossible to know which aspects of these laws are being used, or which government spy agencies are using them.
Do the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate know about these numbers? If not, the Obama Administration has some explaining to do. If so, the Democrats in Congress have some explaining to do.
The “smart” thing to do would be get rid of our Sprint-provider cell phones. See how fast they change their policies when NO ONE WANTS THEIR SPY-LADEN CRAP. After losing billions of dollars in revenue, they’d likely stop doing it, or go out of business. There are phone companies that don’t provide this data – switch to one of them might be another good idea.
ARE there other phone companies that don’t provide this data? I doubt that.
If they are refusing to provide the data, they’re violating either the Patriot Act or the FISA Amendments Act, depending on what sort of data is being grabbed.
It’s no longer a marketplace consideration. The government requires compliance. Of course, if people gave up their GPS-enabled devices, wireless companies would lobby hard… but then, people like their toys too much to let Big Brother worry them.