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<div style class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-title"><font size="6"><b>Are the police tracking your calls? </b></font><br></div>
<div style class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-byline">By Catherine Crump , Special to CNN</div>
<div class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-dateline">updated 3:23 PM EDT, Tue May 22, 2012</div>
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<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Are the police tracking your calls?</p>
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<img alt="Whom you text and call and where you go can reveal a great deal about you, says Catherine Crump." class="cpf-printOut-body-content-img" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120522042956-crump-cellphone-tracking-story-top.jpg"></div>
<div class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Whom you text and call and where you go can reveal a great deal about you, says Catherine Crump.</div>
<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span><span>Editor's note:</span> Catherine Crump is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.</span>
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<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span>(CNN)</span> -- Do you know how long your cell phone company keeps
records of whom you text, who calls you or what places you have
traveled? Do you know how often cell phone companies turn over this
information to the police and whether they first ask the police to get a
warrant based on probable cause?</p>
<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">No, you don't. Not unless
you work for a cell phone company or a law enforcement agency with a
specialty in electronic surveillance. You aren't alone: Congress and the
courts have no idea either.</p>
<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">The little we do know is
worrisome. The companies are not legally required to turn over your
information simply because a police officer is curious about you. Yet
wireless carriers sell this information to police all the time.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">As far as the cell phone companies are concerned, the less Americans know about it the better.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Whom you text and call and where
you go (tracked by your cell phone as long as it's on) can reveal a
great deal about you. Your calling patterns can show which friends
matter to you the most, and your travel patterns can reveal what
political and religious meetings you attend and what doctors you visit.
Over time, this data accumulates into a dossier portraying details of
your life so intimate that you may not have thought of them yourself. In
comparison with companies such as Facebook and Google, which collect,
store and use our information in one way or another, cell phone
companies are less transparent.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">U.S. Rep. Edward Markey,
co-chairman of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, recently
requested that cell phone companies disclose basic statistics on how our
personal data is shared with the government. Let's hope the companies
are forthcoming -- but don't hold your breath.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">To be sure, there can be legitimate
reasons for law enforcement agents to track individuals' movements. For
example, when officers can demonstrate to a judge that they have a good
reason to believe that tracking will turn up evidence of a crime. But
with a surveillance technique this powerful, the public has a strong
interest in understanding how it is used to ensure that it is not
abused. While the details of individual investigations can legitimately
be kept secret, the public and our elected representatives have a right
to know the policies in general so their wisdom can be debated.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Cell phone companies have long
concealed these facts, and they're fighting vigorously to keep it that
way. In California, the cell phone industry recently opposed a bill that
would have required companies to tell their customers how often and
under what circumstances they turn over location information to the
police, complaining that it would be "unduly burdensome."</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">What little has come to light so
far about the companies' practices does not paint a comforting picture.
Addressing a surveillance industry conference in 2009, Sprint's
electronic surveillance manager revealed that the company had received
so many requests for location data that it set up a website where the
police could conveniently access the information from the comfort of
their desks. In just a 13-month period, he said, the company had
provided law enforcement with 8 million individual location data points.
Other than Sprint, we do not have even this type of basic information
about the frequency of requests for any of the other cell phone
companies.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">The poorly understood relationship
between cell phone companies and police raises grave privacy concerns.
Like the companies, law enforcement agencies have a strong incentive to
keep what is actually happening a secret, lest the public find out and
demand new legal protections. More than 10 years ago, the Justice
Department convinced the House of Representatives to abandon legislation
that would have required law enforcement agencies to compile similar
statistics, arguing that it would turn "crime fighters into
bookkeepers."</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">The excessive secrecy has
frustrated the ability of the American people to have an informed debate
on just how much information police should have access to without
judicial oversight or having to show probable cause. It has also
prevented Congress and the courts from effectively addressing these
intrusive surveillance powers. That is not how our system of government
is supposed to work.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">It would not be difficult for the
carriers to tell customers how their data is collected, stored and
shared. In fact, an internal Justice Department document from 2010,
dislodged through a public records request by the American Civil
Liberties Union, showed the data retention policies of all major
carriers on a single piece of paper. The phone companies have all
created detailed handbooks for law enforcement agents describing their
policies and prices charged for surveillance assistance, a few dated
versions of which have seeped out onto the Internet.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">If the cell phone companies can
provide this information to law enforcement agencies, they can and
should provide basic information about their sharing of data with law
enforcement to their customers, too. While law enforcement sometimes
argues that making members of the public aware that cell phone companies
can track them will make it more difficult to catch criminals, it is
too late in the day for that argument now that cell phone tracking is a
staple of television police procedurals.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Why aren't these policies available
on the companies' websites? With such information, consumers could vote
with their wallets and punish those companies that don't protect
privacy. Keeping their customers in the dark about surveillance is
better for business, it seems.</p>
<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">We pay the cell phone
companies to provide us with a service, not keep tabs on us for the
government. And yet the companies that now have access to some of our
most private information refuse to reveal even the most basic facts
about their policies? We deserve better.</p><p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content"><br></p><p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">w.<br></p>
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