No, it didn't.<p>It sent 8 million <i>data points</i> in response to an unknown number of surveillance requests.<p>I agree with the EFF's larger point that this is a power that is likely being abused, but this headline is way over the top.
Having worked on part of the E911 systems, any 911 call in an area that supports the 3rd level of E911 would automatically request and receive the GPS data. 8 Million requests is not hard to believe or surprising, as they have 48 million customers (according to wikipedia, which should be close enough to accurate).<p>Also remember that if your cell phone is on, your location can be pinpointed with a high degree of accuracy without any GPS data. Look up TruePosition, LLC if you have any doubts.
This is basically a dupe: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971207" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971207</a><p>Note that the other article has a useful calculation indicating that the total number of actual law enforcement requests is in the low hundreds.
The problem of easy web access is it reduces the pain of access by the authorities and the setup cost by the telco. Physical wiretaps were better because they could not be provisioned by clicking a mouse.