Anyone can buy cell records

[ovidsen]

I know my life's an open book, but I didn't know the book was so available and so cheap.

Anyone can buy cell records

January 5, 2006

BY FRANK MAIN Crime Reporter
Advertisement


The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official.

Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often.

And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-privacy05.html

[Poll_Blind]

1. Ok this law sucks but how can we use it to our advantage?

Holy shit, I just realized- all you need is the cell number of anyone and you can get the numbers of everyone they've called. Then, everyone they've called. That's fucked. But I guarantee our enemies are using this right now- we might as well too, while fighting its existence.

PB

[benburch]

2. Some bright reporter needs to find DeLay's cell number and...

:)

[DoYouEverWonder]

10. There was a list of BushCo cell phone #'s

posted on DU before the election.

[Ezlivin]

3. I want the cell records of the administration on 9/11 and all the

people aboard the four aircraft.

There have been many questions over the possibility of calls made from altitude. Color me extremely curious.

[On the Road]

4. That is a GREAT Thought,

although spoofing might be more difficult with a public figure. And regardless of success, the quickest way to make something like this illegal is to have decisionmakers subject to the same invasions of privacy as everyone else.

As a local telephone company employee, I have to say I'm absolutely shocked that call detail is publicly available on wireless networks. This is very confidential customer data. The local companies do NOT give out information like this without a warrant.

[Wordie]

5. Correction: the local companies do give that info for NSA searches. nt

[On the Road]

6. Can You Expand?

The NSA call data I've heard discussed has been satellite transmissions. If the local telephone companies are giving local call data to the NSA without a warrant, that's a policy change within the last few years.

[Tesha]

9. Why do you think the NSA even needs the companies' cooperation?

The NSA are experts at "signals intelligence". That means if it
moves by radio (as all cell phone traffic does), then they're
all over it like white on rice. If they want your cell phone
conversations, they have them; no warrants needed.

They also have been known to tap long-distance cables as well.

Tesha

[On the Road]

11. I'm Not Disputing It

I just haven't been kept current with all the details over the last week or two. If the telephone companies are handing over call data or allowing phone taps without warrants, shame on them.

[Wordie]

13. There seem to be some suggestions...

I have not yet located any info that says specifically whether the NSA spying was limited to wireless communications, or also included land lines as well. I did find this, from a couple of years ago, which does indicate that the technological capabilities certainly do exist:

And abuse does happen. In the late 1990s the Los Angeles Police Department conducted illegal wiretaps with CALEA technology involving thousands of phone lines and potentially hundreds of thousands of people at a time when the official annual report on wiretaps compiled by the Department of Justice said L.A. was conducting an average of around 100 wiretaps per year. Illegal convictions were obtained, property was illegally confiscated, civilian careers and lives were ruined, yet nobody was punished.

But wait, there's more! CALEA represents mid-90s thinking about electronic intelligence, but now we have the Patriot Act that goes so much further. And we have a program at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency called Total Information Awareness. I am sorry to quote so extensively from a DARPA document (unclassified), but you need to get a sense of the epic scope of this proposal, which sounds like Big Brother to me...

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030710.html

The telcos were required by a law passed in the mid-90s, CALEA, to undergo massive updating of their equipment, creating a new system that gave law enforcement a tremendously increased ability to spy domestically. Of course, in that pre-911 era, it was presumed that spying would be only undertaken with warrants. The new system is plagued with security problems. I can't say whether the system has been abused significantly by the government. The article I cite focuses on criminal breaches of security. My general observation however, is that any time there is improved technology, that there will be the inclination by many to use it, for both positive and negative purposes.

I'm going to continue to look for any specific info I can find about NSA and domestic equipment. I'll report back if I find anything. I suggest everyone read the article I linked, or google for information, as from what I've been reading, there appear to be huge security problems for our domestic telephone system, whether or not they are related to the NSA story.

[Wordie]

15. Found it...and it's amazing!

Well, after searching all over for the answer to your question, which I wanted to discover for myself as well, I returned to one of my favorite bloggers (eriposte), on one of my favorite sites (the leftcoaster) and voila!

(btw, SDRC=the Shills for Republican-Dictators Coalition... - formerly known as "Conservatives")

King-George-gate takes an unexpected turn

...Setting aside this new garbage, it looks like the real story may be even more appalling and unfriendly to the SRDC. Via the indispensable Laura Rozen, we see a different revelation in Slate by Shane Harris and Tim Naftali (emphasis mine):

A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.

Like the pressure applied to ITT a half-century ago, our source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on. The NSA would not comment on the issue, saying that, "We do not discuss details of actual or alleged operational issues."

There's more at Slate about the NSA operation, but, as Laura says:

The NSA getting access to all of this domestic telecommunications information from private companies ahead of September 11th didn't stop the big terrorist attack.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/3436

You can also read more information about all this here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/politics/04nsa.html?hp&ex=1136350800&en=7709e127186eb686&ei=5094&partner=homepage
(NYT article, which I myself have not checked out as it requires a subscription)

...and here:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/003396.html (Laura Rosen)


Here's some from the Slate article (Jan. 3, 2006) on this issue:

Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy
Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope.
By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2006, at 6:30 AM ET

Fifty years ago, officers from the Signal Security Agency, the predecessor to the National Security Agency, visited an executive from International Telephone and Telegraph and asked for copies of all foreign government cables carried by the company. The request was a direct violation of a 1934 law that banned the interception of domestic communications, but Attorney General Tom Clark backed it. Initially reluctant, ITT relented when told that its competitor, Western Union, had already agreed to supply this information. As James Bamford relates in his book The Puzzle Palace, the government told ITT it "would not desire to be the only non-cooperative company on the project." Codenamed Shamrock, the effort to collect cables sent through U.S.-controlled telegraph lines ultimately involved all the American telecom giants of the era, captured private as well as government cables, and lasted nearly 30 years. Like other illegal Cold War domestic snooping programs —such as the FBI's wiretaps without warrants and the CIA's mail-opening operations—it collapsed under the weight of public reaction to the abuses of executive power revealed by Vietnam and Watergate.

Today's generation of telecom leaders is similarly involved in the current controversy over spying by the NSA. The New York Times reported in December that since 9/11, leading telecommunications companies "have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists." Citing current and former government and corporate officials, the Times reported that the companies have granted the NSA access to their all-important switches, the hubs through which colossal volumes of voice calls and data transmissions move every second. A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.

Like the pressure applied to ITT a half-century ago, our source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on. The NSA would not comment on the issue, saying that, "We do not discuss details of actual or alleged operational issues."

The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."

http://www.slate.com/id/2133564/ (Shane Harris and Tim Naftali)

[On the Road]

17. Thank You, Wordie,

The snooping seems to have early and often and taken multiple forms. I am really upset by this. Telcos have no business turning over customer records without a warrant. And I'm sure we don't know the whole extent of it.

[AndyTiedye]

7. Wouldn't You Like to Know Who Karl Rove Has Been Calling?

[hootinholler]

8. around November 2, 2004, Yes. n/t

[patcox2]

12. The government would need a warrant to do a "pen register."

A list of all calls made, without any info on what was said in the call, is called a "pen register" if its a landline, and the police need a warrant to get this info.

However, in a civil case, these records can be subpoenaed.

It appears that here, some company is either committing fraud or bribery to get the info. Either one is already illegal (fraud and bribery).

[sarcasmo]

14. I want Gannons/Guckerts cell phone records to see how many times

he has called the White House or the White House has called him.

[pinniped]

16. Privacy, what privacy?

Luckily there are a few cell services available for those who don't want their phone records all over the planet. These companies aren't usually as good as the major players.

I don't use it, but at MetroPCS you can use any name to sign up for service.

If this stupid DB lets you buy and search by phone numbers, that's no good.

People that constantly find new ways to fuck with our privacy need to be locked up. This includes * and the cabal.

[CornField]

18. In a way, I find this hysterical

The local police department (and I'm guessing many others) gave up police band for cellular phones a few years ago. It had the effect of blocking journalists from critical information. For instance, you might hear dispatch tell car 14 to phone the chief, but you wouldn't know what it was about. Of course, this change was made for the 'security' of the towns they served. Police bands had become so commonplace that now criminals had them and the exchanges there would tip such bad people off before raids and whatnot. :eyes:

So, while I don't appreciate having my cellular phone records available for a price, I do rather like the little checks and balances that technology is providing.

[merwin]

19. kick

[adolfo]

20. Your phone records are for sale

"The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts."

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-privacy05.html

[Maine-ah]

21. thats funny

I just got a telemarketer on my cell phone. fuckers.

[Crazy Dave]

23. And....

when your phone is turned on, they, somebody, can tell where your at as far as location.

[Mabus]

24. Which is why I stopped using cell phones n/t

[Maine-ah]

25. n/t

[rumpel]

22. Lawlessness and abuse starts at the top. Thanks for the info.