By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, July 9, 2012 9:50 EDT
U.S. law enforcement agencies are tracking more
cellular devices than ever these days but obtaining fewer wiretapping
warrants, according to
a report by Eric Lichtblau, published in Sunday’s New York Times.
That’s thanks in part to a proliferation in location-based
technologies and flexible communications providers that turn over
information based on police claims of an ongoing “emergency.” Comparing
numbers from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to
figures shared by
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the
Times
found that law enforcement requests to track devices come fast and
furious every single day for the major mobile carriers, but very few
included court approval.
The exact number of mobile devices spied upon since 2007 is not yet
known, mostly because a single request can often involve multiple
callers or whole areas on the map, potentially revealing thousands of
peoples’ locations at once. But Rep. Markey, who chairs
the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus,
asked carriers to look into the matter, discovering that mobile phone
tracking requests are at an all-time-high and still growing.
The
Times added that AT&T by itself accounts for
“more than 700 requests a day,” and roughly “230 of them” are
“emergencies” that don’t require a court order — more than three times
the number the carrier recorded in 2007. All carriers combined, the
Times noted that 1.3 million requests were placed last year alone, the vast majority of them lacking any kind of court approval.
That’s in stark contrast to the total number of actual “wiretap”
requests, where police actively eavesdrop on conversations with the
permission of a judge — in all, there were just 2,732 wiretaps
authorized by judges in 2011,
the most recent annual U.S. Wiretap Report claimed. Interestingly, that figure represents a decline of 14 percent over 2010.
Even if these sorts of requests were ever ruled to be surpassing
police authority, the telecoms would not be held criminally or civilly
accountable thanks to a law passed in 2008 that gave them
retroactive immunity for helping government agents spy on Americans in the years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
President Barack Obama, as a U.S. Senator from Illinois,
voted for an amendment to that bill
which would have stripped telecom immunity, but it did not pass. And
while he’d also pledged to filibuster the bill — much like his opponent
at the time,
then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) — Sen. Obama ultimately voted for it with immunity attached, and as president his Department of Justice
has defended it in court.
——
Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.
Stephen C. Webster
Stephen C. Webster is
the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He
previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in
Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace
movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also
contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The
Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The
News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.
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