[Vision2020] Big Brother

[Art Deco]

Yes.

And can anyone remember a time when most law enforcement agencies had a lot
more integrity.

w.

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Donovan Arnold <
donovanjarnold2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Wasn't there something in a document somewhere that says we have the right
> not be searched by the government without a warrant? I hope someone
> recycles the paper it is on as the ink on it appears to  be meaningless.
>
> Donovan J. Arnold
>
>   *From:* Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
> *To:* vision2020 at moscow.com
> *Sent:* Monday, July 9, 2012 8:30 AM
> *Subject:* [Vision2020] Big Brother
>
>  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
>  July 8, 2012
> More Demands on Cell Carriers in Surveillance By ERIC LICHTBLAU<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/eric_lichtblau/index.html>
> WASHINGTON — In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone
> carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands
> for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking
> text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of
> investigations.
> The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional
> inquiry, 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.
> 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.
> The information represents the first time data have 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 — surprised even some officials who have
> closely followed the growth of cell surveillance.
> “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<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/police-tracking-of-cellphones-raises-privacy-fears.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all>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<http://markey.house.gov/issues/bipartisan-congressional-privacy-caucus-0>,
> made the carriers’ responses available to The Times.
> While the cell companies did not break down the types of law enforcement
> agencies collecting the data, they made clear that the 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.
> 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, the company said. Law enforcement requests of all kinds
> have been rising among the other carriers as well, with annual increases of
> between 12 percent and 16 percent in the last five years. Sprint, which did
> not break down its figures in as much detail as other carriers, led all
> companies last year in reporting what amounted to at least 1,500 data
> requests on average a day.
> With the rapid expansion of cell surveillance have come rising concerns —
> including among carriers — about what legal safeguards are in place to
> balance law enforcement agencies’ needs for quick data against the privacy
> rights of consumers.
> Legal conflicts between those competing needs have flared before, but
> usually on national security matters. In 2006, phone companies that
> cooperated in the Bush administration’s secret program of eavesdropping on
> suspicious international communications without court warrants were sued,
> and ultimately were given immunity<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04nsa.html>by Congress with the backing of the courts. The next year, the F.B.I. was
> widely criticized for improperly using emergency letters to the phone
> companies to gather records on thousands of phone numbers in
> counterterrorism investigations that did not involve emergencies.
> Under federal law, the carriers said they generally required a search
> warrant, a court order or a formal subpoena to release information about a
> subscriber. But in cases that law enforcement officials deem an emergency,
> a less formal request is often enough. Moreover, rapid technological
> changes in cellphones have blurred the lines on what is legally required to
> get data — particularly the use of GPS systems to identify the location
> of phones.
> 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.
> With the rising prevalence of cellphones, officials at all levels of law
> enforcement say cell tracking represents a powerful tool to find suspects,
> follow leads, identify associates and cull information on a wide range of
> crimes.
> “At every crime scene, there’s some type of mobile device,” said Peter
> Modafferi, chief of detectives for the Rockland County district
> attorney’s office in New York, who also works on investigative policies and
> operations with the International Association of Chiefs of Police<http://www.theiacp.org/>.
> The need for the police to exploit that technology “has grown tremendously,
> and it’s absolutely vital,” he said in an interview.
> The surging use of cell surveillance was also reflected in the bills the
> wireless carriers reported sending to law enforcement agencies to cover
> their costs in some of the tracking operations. 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.
> Federal law allows the companies to be reimbursed for “reasonable” costs
> for providing a number of surveillance operations. Still, several companies
> maintained that they lost money on the operations, and Cricket, a small
> wireless carrier that received 42,500 law enforcement requests last year,
> or an average of 116 a day, complained that it “is frequently not paid on
> the invoices it submits.”
> Because of incomplete record-keeping, the total number of law enforcement
> requests last year was almost certainly much higher than the 1.3 million
> the carriers reported to Mr. Markey. Also, the total number of people
> whose customer information was turned over could be several times higher
> than the number of requests because a single request often involves
> multiple callers. 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.
> As cell surveillance increased, warrants for wiretapping by federal and
> local officials — eavesdropping on conversations — declined 14 percent last
> year to 2,732, according to a recent report from the Administrative
> Office of the United States Courts<http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/UnderstandingtheFederalCourts/AdministrativeOffice.aspx>.
>
> The diverging numbers suggest that law enforcement officials are shifting
> away from wiretaps in favor of other forms of cell tracking that are
> generally less legally burdensome, less time consuming and less costly.
> (Most carriers reported charging agencies between $50 and $75 an hour for
> cellphone tower “dumps.”)
> 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. The outside provider, Neustar, said it handled
> law enforcement compliance for about 400 phone and Internet companies.
> But a number of carriers reported that as they sought to balance
> legitimate law enforcement needs against their customers’ privacy rights,
> they denied some data demands because they were judged to be overreaching
> or unauthorized under federal surveillance laws.
> Sometimes, the carriers said, they determined that a true emergency did
> not exist. At other times, police agencies neglected to get the required
> court orders for surveillance measures, left subpoenas unsigned or failed
> to submit formal requests.
> C Spire Wireless, a small carrier, estimated that of about 12,500 law
> enforcement demands it received in the last five years, it rejected 15
> percent of them in whole or in part. (Most carriers did not provide figures
> on rejections.)
> At TracFone, another small carrier providing prepaid service, an
> executive told Mr. Markey that the company “shares your concerns
> regarding the unauthorized tracking of wireless phones by law enforcement
> with little or no judicial oversight, and I assure you that TracFone does
> not participate in or condone such unauthorized tracking.”
> T-Mobile, meanwhile, said it had sent two law enforcement demands to the
> F.B.I. because it considered them “inappropriate.” The company declined to
> provide further details.
> Requests from law enforcement officials to identify the location of a
> particular cellphone using GPS technology have caused particular
> confusion, carriers said. A Supreme Court ruling in January further muddled
> the issue when it found that the authorities should have obtained a search
> warrant before tracking a suspect’s movements by attaching a GPS unit to
> his car.
> Law enforcement officials say the GPS technology built into many phones
> has proved particularly critical in responding to kidnappings, attempted
> suicides, shootings, cases of missing people and other emergencies. But
> Sprint and other carriers called on Congress to set clearer legal standards
> for turning over location data, particularly to resolve contradictions in
> the law.
> While the carriers said they always required proper legal orders before
> turning over nonemergency information, their assurances were somewhat at
> odds with anecdotal evidence recently gathered by the American Civil
> Liberties Union from more than 200 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
> The reports provided to the A.C.L.U. showed that many local and state
> police agencies claimed broad discretion to obtain cell records without
> court orders, and that some departments specifically warned officers about
> the past misuse of cellphone surveillance in nonemergency situations.
> 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.
> “The standards really are all over the place,” Mr. Calabrese said.
> “Nobody is saying don’t use these tools. What we’re saying is do it with
> consistent standards and in a way that recognizes that these are tools that
> really can impact people’s privacy.”
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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