US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages
Soghoian found through his research that law enforcement agencies requested more than 30,000 wiretaps between 1987 and 2009. But the scale of requests for stored communications appears to be much greater. Citing a New York Times story from 2006, Soghoian wrote that AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.
In 2009, Facebook told the news magazine Newsweek that it received 10 to 20 requests from police per day. Sprint received so many requests from law enforcement for mobile-phone location information that it overwhelmed its 110-person electronic surveillance team. It then set up a Web interface to give police direct access to users' location data, which was used more than 8 million times in one year [emphasis mine], Soghoian wrote, citing a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.
Those sample figures indicate the real total number of requests is likely much, much higher, since U.S. law does not require reporting and companies are reluctant to voluntarily release the data.
"The reason for this widespread secrecy appears to be a fear that such information may scare users and give them reason to fear that their private information is not safe," Soghoian wrote.
Newsflash for you: Your private information is not safe. It's not really even private anymore.
1 comment:
Not to be a jerk, but: it was never private. Email has always been sent unencrypted across dozens of servers who, if they cared to look, could read everything they wanted to. It's just the way email works.
If you want privacy, both sides should be using encryption... PGP or GPG recommended. It's a little hard to wrap your head around, but once you've got it, it's really simple.
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