Unwarranted search: who's protecting telecom privacy?

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings

Law enforcement officials are generally able to obtain records of who you have called and emailed and what IP addresses you have visited with a legal demand known as a pen register or trap-and-trace order. This requires a lower threshold for suspicion of criminal activity than the warrant required to dip into real-time communications. And though there is a legal requirement that public records be issued announcing how often the federal government makes such requests, the Department of Justice hasn't issued this data since 2004.

That gap in knowledge inspired Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at the University of Indiana, to find an indirect way of determining how often the government is asking telecommunications companies for such info. When the feds get information from telecommunications companies, they generally pay for the privilege.

Soghoian, who recently helped publicize the fact that Sprint Nextel handed over GPS data to law enforcement agencies 8 million times from September 2008 to October 2009, filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to extract at least 12 different telecom, computer search, and social networking...