Eight Million? Eight Million?!?!
Chris Soghoian, who we’ve mentioned here extensively in the past, has posted some new research around just how much electronic surveillance is really going on here in the US.
Sprint 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.
And that’s just Sprint. (Who btw also keeps logs of all IP access for 24 months, including in many cases full URLs).
You really need to read the full article because he has so much data, as usual, Chris sums things up nicely:
As the information presented in this article has demonstrated, the publicly available law enforcement surveillance statistics are, at best misleading, and at worst, deceptive. It is simply impossible to have a reasonable debate amongst academics, public policy makers, and members of the public interest community when the very scale of these surveillance programs is secret.
and
As for the millions of government requests for geo-location data, it is simply disgraceful that these are not currently being reported…but they should be.
Per Chris’s request the full data dump has been was mirrored here as well, but the link rotted away.
It is good work, but I think incomplete. It is worth noting that the 8 million requests appear to reflect thousands and not millions of individuals. A Sprint representative clarifies some of this on Chris’ site.