American Civil Liberties Union

Last week’s Washington Post report that the CIA had requested that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev be placed on a terrorist watch list raises an interesting point about total surveillance societies: in addition to all their negative implications for citizens, they actually bring some disadvantages for the authorities as well.

It’s not clear what information the CIA’s request was based upon, but reportedly it came from Russian authorities. It is also possible that Tsarnaev’s communications were flagged by US agencies such as the NSA. Either way, it seems as though there’s a real possibility that Tamerlan’s name came to the attention of the authorities through some dragnet-style surveillance technique.

If so, the conundrum for the authorities is this:

Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road.

The government does not have the unchecked authority to place individuals on a secret blacklist without providing them any meaningful...

Wow.  Sometimes one word says it all.  The New York Times reports that in response to letters from Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), mobile phone providers disclosed that they received approximately 1.3 million law enforcement requests for customer records last year alone. What an extraordinary number: more than a million accounts subject to at least some level of law enforcement investigation just in 2011. As we have discussed elsewhere, beyond what is reported by carriers in these letters, there is absolutely no reporting or tracking regarding how these numbers are handled.  

Even more amazing, as you dig into the article and read the underlying letters it becomes clear that this is actually a vast undercount of the number of Americans who have been affected by this tracking.  Sprint disclosed that it received approximately 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 (a subpoena is a written request for information from law enforcement that isn’t reviewed by a judge) and that “each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers.” In addition, several carriers disclosed that they sometimes provide all the information from a particular cell tower or particular area.   Metro PCS for example charges:

$50 for Cell Tower Dump per tower for a 2 hour period

$100 for an Area Dump (if you know the location but do not know the cell towers that affect the area) for a maximum of 2 cell towers for a 2 hour period per cell tower search

Everyone whose phone has been used by a particular cell tower over a particular time period—likely hundreds or thousands of people—could have their data examined by investigators.  And these dragnet data requests are on the rise.  Verizon estimates that over the last 5 years it has seen an average increase of 15% annually, and T-Mobile reported increases of approximately 12%-16%.  This has also led to at least some possible abuse; T-Mobile disclosed that in the last three years it has referred two inappropriate law enforcement requests to the FBI.