[Vision2020] Are the police tracking your calls?

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  !   <http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/22/opinion/crump-cellphone-privacy/>
    *Are the police tracking your calls? *
By Catherine Crump , Special to CNN
updated 3:23 PM EDT, Tue May 22, 2012
 CNN.com

Are the police tracking your calls?
 [image: Whom you text and call and where you go can reveal a great deal
about you, says Catherine Crump.]
Whom you text and call and where you go can reveal a great deal about you,
says Catherine Crump.

Editor's note: Catherine Crump is a staff attorney with the American Civil
Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

(CNN) -- 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?

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.

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.

As far as the cell phone companies are concerned, the less Americans know
about it the better.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


w.

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