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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the let-the-companies-do-the-data-collection dept.

T-Mobile quietly reported a sharp rise in police demands for cell tower data – TechCrunch

T-Mobile has reported a small decline in the number of government data requests it receives, according to its latest transparency report, quietly published this week.

The third-largest cell giant in the U.S. reported 459,989 requests during 2018, down by a little over 1% on the year earlier. That includes an overall drop in subpoenas, court orders and pen registers and trap and trace devices used to record the incoming and outgoing callers; however, the number of search warrants issued went up by 27% and wiretaps increased by almost 3%.

The company rejected 85,201 requests, an increase of 7% on the year prior.

[...] For 2018, the company received 70,224 demands for historical call data, up by more than 9% on the year earlier.

Historical cell site location data allows law enforcement to understand which cell towers carried a call, text message or data, and therefore a subscriber’s historical real-time location at any given particular time. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this data was protected and required a warrant before a company is forced to turn it over. The so-called “Carpenter” decision was expected to result in a fall in the number of requests made because the bar to obtaining the records is far higher.

[...] The cell giant also reported that the number of tower dumps went up from 4,855 requests in 2017 to 6,184 requests in 2018, an increase of 27%.

Tower dumps are particularly controversial because these include information for all subscribers whose calls, messages and data went through a cell tower at any given time. That can include the data of hundreds or thousands of innocent subscribers at any time.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:04PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:04PM (#867607)

    The fact that this data is being collected and stored for any significant length of time at all is abusive in and of itself, regardless of what the data is used for. Just like with the NSA's mass surveillance. We need to stop focusing on exactly how they're using the data (almost always difficult to find out), and force them to stop collecting it in the first place.

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  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:01PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:01PM (#867661) Journal

    force them to stop collecting it in the first place.

    Good luck with that. How are you ever going to verify they've stopped? Only by accident, or a leak, or if it's used against you. But until then you will never know what they collect. The microphone is always hot.

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:19PM (#868094)

      How are you ever going to verify they've stopped?

      You can't, or at least not perfectly. The key is to have severe punishments when they are found to have violated the law, unlike the wrist slaps they get now. But, good luck with that, since the same government that would be enforcing such a law also happens to love mass surveillance...