Electronic Surveillance Occurs Off the Books

Requests by law enforcement agencies for traditional types of surveillance such as wiretaps are reported to U.S. Congress as mandated by U.S. federal law.  Modern types of surveillance (electronic surveillance methods) like accessing stored data from email, IM’s, and cell phone locations require no such reporting.

A paper published by Christopher Soghoian, Indiana University Bloomington – Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, titled “The Law Enforcement Surveillance Reporting Gap” explores the issues:

“Third party facilitated surveillance has become a routine tool for law enforcement agencies. There are likely hundreds of thousands of such requests per year. Unfortunately there are few detailed statistics documenting the use of many modern surveillance methods. As such, the true scale of law enforcement surveillance, although widespread, remains largely shielded from public view.”

Via PCWorld, Jeremy Kirk goes on to highlight the growing number of requests by law enforcement for stored communications:

• In 2006 AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.
• In 2009, Facebook reported receiving 10 to 20 requests from police per day.
• Sprint was so overwhelmed for cell phone location data that it set up a website to give police direct access to this data which was then used more than 8 million times in one year.

Expect privacy concerns and legal issues of proper reporting and use to mount as surveillance methods, be they in the form of video from IP cameras or tracking electronic data, continue to expand.