through their cell phones and you would think they would need to get a search warrant first. He mentioned an article in the New Your Times. Somebody submitted that the last way to communicate in privacy was by letter because it cannot be electronically data mined and that once Congress finishes off the USPS then the only means of communication by the citizens will be potentially subject to government tracking and/or surveillance. It was interesting and i had never looked at the Post Office from that perspective.
Explosive Increase in Mobile Data Requests Means Congress Needs to Act Now on Digital Privacy
Mobile phone providers responded to at least 1.3 million government requests for user data last year alone, reports the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. The figures reflect data released to Congressman Ed Markey by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, MetroPCS, Cricket, U.S. Cellular, Tracfone and C Spire.
The actual number of people swept up in the cell phone surveillance could be ten, twenty or thirty times higher than 1.3 million because many of the law enforcement requests for data were for "tower dumps" -- meaning police received subscriber information for all people who were in a cell phone tower's range of reception during the time period for which they sought records. In urban areas that could be thousands or tens of thousands of people per targeted request, meaning the real number of people affected by this often warrantless surveillance could easily reach into the tens of millions.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10252-explosive-increase-in-mobile-data-requests-means-congress-needs-to-act-now-on-digital-privacy
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