Sprint Tells Police Where You Are

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A blog posting by Christopher Soghoian reveals that Sprint served up customer location data over 8 million times to local police forces during the course of one year. The shocking part is that this was done without any warrant from the courts. Soghoian learned this while he was a college student at Indiana University, and attended a surveillance industry conference in Washington DC.

According to an audio clip posted by Soghoian, a manager at Sprint’s “Electronic Surveillance” division (hello, 1984) described how his company provides GPS location data to police forces, without a warrant or any approval from the courts. The police are able to get this data automatically, through a web portal.

Soghoian alleges that using loopholes in surveillance laws that aren’t modern enough to include electronic media, the US Government and various law enforcement agencies are routinely getting the electronic data of US citizens. The forms of data listed by Soghoian include web browsing history, e-mail and IM history, numbers dialed from a cell phone, queries input into a search engine and, your location, based on GPS history.

Although the 8 million request number may seem high, keep in mind that police are using a web portal to retrieve the data and Soghoian’s audio doesn’t make clear if that includes refreshing – so if cops are following a person of interest, and jamming Ctrl+F5 every few minutes, that might add up the ‘requests’ quickly. Keep in mind that Sprint only has around 40,000,000 cellular phone customers.

No comment on what other electronics companies use this kind of ‘electronic surveillance’. The ACLU is investigating, although, according to tech blog Ars Technica, this type of surveillance is perfectly legal under current US laws. If you’ve had enough – write your Congressmen.