| Title | Virginia Police Have Been Secretively Stockpiling Private Phone Records | |
| Date | Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:35AM | |
| Author | azrael | |
| Topic | ||
| from the go-back-to-sleep-and-let-us-take-care-of-you dept. | ||
Wired reports of another secretive database of phone records which has gone largely unnoticed and without scrutiny:
The database, which affects unknown numbers of people, contains phone records that at least five police agencies in southeast Virginia have been collecting since 2012 and sharing with one another with little oversight. Some of the data appears to have been obtained by police from telecoms using only a subpoena, rather than a court order or probable-cause warrant. Other information in the database comes from mobile phones seized from suspects during an arrest.
The five cities participating in the program, [...], are Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Suffolk, according to the memorandum of understanding that established the database. The effort is being led in part by the Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, which is responsible for a “telephone analysis room” in the city of Hampton, where the database is maintained.
The unusual and secretive database contains telecom customer subscriber information; records about individual phone calls, such as the numbers dialed, the time the calls were made and their duration; as well as the contents of seized mobile devices. The information is collected and shared among police agencies to enhance analysis and law enforcement intelligence. ...
All over the U.S., local police agencies are collecting vast stockpiles of private information from people—some of it from people who have not been convicted of crimes but were merely stopped by police.
As an example of the amount of data being collected, in the first-ever transparency reports released by major telecoms earlier this year, AT&T revealed that between January and June, it received nearly 80,000 criminal subpoenas for customer records from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, while Verizon disclosed that it had received over 72,000 subpoenas from law enforcement during the same period.
IMHO, USofA is beyond just a police state, is becoming a secret police state (I grew in one, I see the signs).
As Boston Globe put it: vote all you want, the secret government won’t change.
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printed from SoylentNews, Virginia Police Have Been Secretively Stockpiling Private Phone Records on 2024-04-23 22:44:22