Wanna know something cool? Well, by “cool” we mean “terrifying.” Anyway, there’s enough wiggle room in the law for our friends in the law enforcement community to get your cell phone records from wireless carriers without a warrant. What? Sounds crazy? The carriers would surely complain … unless there were some reason for them to stay quiet about it …
If you’re a law enforcement agency of some sort, you have a nice fat à la carte menu of wiretapping, data harvesting, and electronic tracking items to choose from. Here are the going rates as of 2009, broken down by service and then by carrier:
Wiretapping, per target
- AT&T: $325 activation fee, $15 per day for data and audio
- Verizon: $500 flat fee
- Sprint: $400 per market area, $10 per day, $2,000 monthly cap
- T-Mobile: $50 administrative fee, $700 per month
Voicemail and text message access, per target
- AT&T: $150 for voicemail
- Verizon: $50 for text messages
- Sprint: $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voicemail, $30 for text messages
Location information and real-time tracking, per target
- AT&T: $100 activation fee, $25 per day
- Sprint: $30 per month
- T-Mobile: $100 per day
Tower dumps (which provide a list of all numbers accessing a cell tower)
- AT&T: $75 per tower per hour, two hour minimum, rounded up
- Verizon: $30 to $60 per tower per hour
- Sprint: $50 per tower
- T-Mobile: $150 per tower per hour
There are two things that we should probably mention in the carriers’ defense: one is that in emergency situations, they always provide all of this information for free. And two, most of them claim that they’re not actually making any money, just recouping the cost of getting the information out of their system. However, the fees are so varied that you have to wonder if that’s really true, and this is potentially a huge cash cow (especially for T-Mobile, by the looks of it).
Perhaps the most ridiculous part of all this is that AT&T (as one example) apparently still maintains that “we do not sell your personal information to anyone for any purpose. Period.” This is quoted directly from AT&T’s privacy policy, and I guess we just have to assume that “period” really means “except when law enforcement agencies throw piles of cash at us.”
If your phone is on, you can be tracked. Everything that goes through it can be pulled at any time, as you can see, for a price. Not to make you paranoid … just informed.
[Source: DVICE]
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