Anyone can buy a list of your incoming and outgoing phone calls

[phantom power]

Anyone can buy a list of your incoming and outgoing phone calls, cell or land-line, for $110 online
by John in DC - 1/07/2006 03:21:00 PM

And the best part? Congress and the Executive branch have known about this problem for half a year or more and no one did a damn thing to fix it.

In a nutshell, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story two days ago about a Web site that sells phone records, for cells and land-lines, for $110 a pop. The company boasts on its own Web site:

Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

So I went to their site, plopped down $110, and within a day I had a list of every single phone number that called my cell, or that I called from my cell, for the month of November. I even had the dates the calls were made, and for a premium I could find out how long the calls were.

I called Cingular and they were shocked by what I told them - yeah right.

And the best part? The article from the Sun-Times makes clear that the FBI is aware of this problem, the Chicago Police Department, one of the top two electronic privacy groups in the nation (EPIC), and even the office of Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). EPIC apparently has known about this problem for a long time, and Schumer didn't seem very surprised either.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/anyone-can-buy-list-of-your-incoming.html

[ovidsen]

1. Links to the Sun-Times stories on illegal phone record sales

Here's the original, which ran last Thursday 1/5/06:

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

And the followup, one day later:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-cell06.html

We're all for sale. And cheap, too!