Chris Soghoian blogs:
Disclaimer: The information presented here has been gathered and analyzed in my capacity as a graduate student at Indiana University. This data was gathered and analyzed on my own time, without using federal government resources. This data, and the analysis I draw from it will be a major component of my PhD dissertation, and as such, I am releasing it in order to receive constructive criticism on my theories from other experts in the field. The opinions I express in my analysis are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission, any individual Commissioner, or any other individual or organization with which I am affiliated.
All of the mp3 audio recordings & pdf FOIA scans included on this page can be found in this .zip file (100Mb). Please mirror! [OK, Chris, now mirrored here— Dissent].
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Executive SummarySprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.
The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.
It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.
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Read Chris’s fascinating and troubling findings and analyses on his blog. The “Follow the Money” section is particularly intriguing, but the bottom line seems to be that we don’t know what we don’t know because they’re not telling us everything they should tell us and they’re not required to tell us everything we’d want to know to have an informed policy discussion on surveillance.