This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror.<p>No doubt it's basic premise, that putting a substance into one's own body is a "crime", is a pernicious lie.<p>The War on Terror's pernicious lie is twofold: Terrorism isn't a crime, and thus isn't subject to any laws, that this war is eternal, and the whole world is a battlefield.<p>Certainly in practical effects the Drug war is worse: Minorities whose communities are regularly raided by soldiers, depopulated, and placed into our glorious, humane prison system with the highest incarceration rate in the world, than stripped of voting rights and essentially blackballed from employment afterwards, would think surely so...<p>My natural tendency has so far been to see the war on Terror as worse, this may be me I, like many HNers with dissident political opinions, am more likely to see myself as an actual target in the War on Terror. That, and being an Orwell fan...
It doesn't surprise me the government would be able to find people swapping out phones on a regular basis using this data.<p>I once worked in the fraud department of a major US mobile carrier. At that time analog was on its last legs, and the new money-making opportunity was bog-standard identity theft. People would sign up for new phones using stolen information and then rent out minutes to immigrants from the back of a van until we found them out and shut down the phone. We had a system that "fingerprinted" usage patterns such that we knew with a fair degree of certainty when a new account was fraudulent based on his usage patters and the people he called.<p>I don't see any reason why the same technology wouldn't work to identify criminals with boxes full of prepaid phones.
So assuming worst case scenario that the DEA actually was able to make a whole bunch of arrests based on this historical data, would we really want to pay to jail that many more inmates? What could be the point of this?
Interesting to note here is that the ATT _gave_ those records "on its own", versus being subpoena via DEA by a judge, something that 99% of judges in their sound mind would have never ever ever agreed on, even in today's world.<p>I had a hard time believing that ATT would have done something like this out of their own free will, as they would have never done anything that could undermine their sales and bottom line (potentially) so severely.<p>I put "on its own" in quotes because knowing the way Government thugs are conducting themselves, most likely the ATT had been heavily blackmailed under the table this or another way and at some point they have given up (Wikipedia: tyranny). Don't be surprised if in couple of years from now the administration will change, and the management of ATT will change, and then you will see some tiny PR-lawsuit surfacing that yes indeed ATT were pushed by DEA and now they are "suing".
So AT&T kept records for 26 years and counting. Information that includes location of caller. I am very happy drug dealers were caught, but 26 years? There is some serious potential for abuse.
Now it makes me wonder what the turnover rate will be once all those drug dealers learn that AT&T is bad for their business. I wonder if anyone is even measuring those stats to know.<p>This is by far not free and I really wonder what AT&T is getting out of the deal. They're devoting a small but significant amount of internal resources for what? Does the DEA overlook their transgressions or just the CEO? I have a hard time believing that AT&T would do this "out of the kindness of their hearts." I wonder now that this is exposed and the real costs of this project will come to bare if they'll keep it up. They certainly have enough money to throw at it, though.
I think a total boycott of ATT would be a good start, since it appears ATT actually was out in front of Verizon and T-Mobile and Sprint on this. I'd probably trust T-Mobile and Sprint more than either ATT or Sprint based on corporate history, too. Still totally untrustworthy, but there probably is a difference.<p>It's getting to the point where a good alternative to how cellphones work might be worthwhile, to keep location data more confidential. A broadcast "ping", and then some form of tunneled return connection, rather than routine registration with location.<p>Doing it all in a way which doesn't touch PSTN and thus doesn't call under a sane interpretation of CALEA, plus a provider willing to challenge the constitutionality of CALEA and at minimum require full warrants for all cooperation, probably would be a good deal better, too.
Interesting. At first glance, this feels wrong, but thinking about it more, the only significant issue I really have with it is that it seems strange for the DEA to be allowed to issue its own warrants.
DEAT&T would have dominated the FTC RoboCall Challenge <a href="http://robocall.challenge.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://robocall.challenge.gov/</a> if they would have entered. $50K to boot.<p>When a phone spammer uses fake Caller IDs, the FTC would subpoena the records through DEAT&T to find out the real caller, then $fine$ them into oblivion.<p>Actually, AT&T should offer a service "WhoReallyJustCalledMe" so I can track down and sue the spammers myself. I'd even pay a % of my winnings.
As a meta-commentary on this category of issues, I tend to be against these sort of substance bans (PEDs[1] in sports is another timely example), and I often see that people who support such measures tend to talk about what things would be like if these substances were completely gotten rid of[2]. To me, this is complete fantasy because there's never been a substance ban that has been very effective at reducing usage of a popular substance, instead such bans simply create black markets out of open markets. But when there's this idea, mostly but not exclusively on the pro-criminalization side, that we can completely stamp out markets where there is inelastic demand through bans/criminalization and enforcement, then you get justifications for more and more extreme measures from the enforcement side. In reality though, we tend to see hugely diminishing returns accompanying these measures, and the numbers in the article demonstrate these diminishing returns well (i.e. the program is incredibly broad, yet the spoils being bragged about are incredibly paltry compared to the size of the related markets).<p>The assumption that bans/criminalization can significantly reduce demand for substances with inelastic demand is completely unreasonable given the track record of such measures. For example, demand for PEDs in professional sports is particularly inelastic because the rewards for even marginal increases in performance are so high and the penalties are so rare and low as to easily be subsidized by the increased salary resulting from use of PEDs, not to mention the cognitive and social biases that favor optimizing short-term over long-term performance.<p>In discussing such issues, I think that actual outcomes of previous and current banning/criminalization policies has to start being favored as the baseline effect of future policies rather than this pie in the sky idea that these sort of policies can have at or near 100% efficacy. Then perhaps we can move on from the inane moralizing that tends to accompany such discussions to a point where we can have results oriented discourse grounded in reality on these topics.<p>[1]Performance Enhancing Drugs, actually used more broadly to label all performance enhancing substances including human hormones and blood oxygenation.<p>[2]this really isn't a straw man, I've been involved in a few discussions in the last couple months in which the ban/criminalization proponents (about 4 or so different people) were arguing their position from the assumption that bans/criminalization can lead to reduction of substance usage to negligible levels.<p>[edited to fix formatting and to clarify footnote 1]
This "dropped phone" search in interesting. This could be the most dangerous aspect of this program.<p>Chances are little scientific research was done on the accuracy. What is the false positive rate? Are there policies and procedures in place to determine if the phones actually matched the individual? This can't be done without the voice data.<p>Are the analysts savvy enough about the limitation of the underlying algorithms?<p>If these questions have not been addressed, it's possible innocent people have been prosecuted.
One readily inferred tip on changing burner phones is to physically change locations* before using a new one (battery removed when not making/expecting a call, of course). * Say the tube at rush hour.