Remember when cops had to get warrants?

Christopher Soghoian has written what should be considered an instant internet classic. His subject is government access to your internet trail and your telecommunications records. A few samples:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

Seems to me that a competing cell phone service could clean up by promising greater privacy.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics -- since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

In other words, putting Democrats in the White House and in Congress has not made the situation better. In fact, it just keeps getting worse.

"[Service providers] have, last time I looked, no line entry in any government directory; they are not an agent of any law enforcement agency; they do not work for or report to the FBI; and yet, you would never know that by the way law enforcement orders them around and expects blind obedience."
-- Albert Gidari Jr., Keynote Address: Companies Caught in the Middle, 41 U.S.F. L. Rev. 535, Spring 2007.

Here are some numbers which may seem, at first, re-assuring:

The number of electronic intercept orders, which are required to intercept Internet traffic and other computer assisted communications is surprisingly low. There were just 10 electronic intercept orders requested in 2008, and only 4 of those were from the Federal government -- which was itself a massive increase over the one single order sought by the entire Department of Justice in both 2006 and 2007.

Don't breathe easy. There were 700 electronic intercept orders in 1998. Soghoian argues that these probably focused on fax machines. So why, in the post-9/11 world, is the number so low -- even though we know that ISPs and Google have been handing over information routinely?

The answer is obvious: The feds are getting what they want without procuring an electronic intercept order.

Turns out the feds don't need an electronic intercept order if they do not eavesdrop live.

However, communications or customer records that are in storage by third parties, such as email messages, photos or other files maintained in the cloud by services like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Facebook and MySpace are routinely disclosed to law enforcement, and there is no legal requirement that statistics on these kinds of requests be compiled or published.

How often does this happen?

Only Facebook and AOL have publicly disclosed the approximate number of requests they receive from the government -- 10-20 requests per day and 1000 requests per month, respectively.

Are there any fishing expeditions in those requests? Almost certainly. And you have no way of double-checking.

Sprint has 35 employees handling subpoena compliance. The GPS locator is now automated and on the web -- cops and feds can log on and get location information about anyone they want for any reason they want. The following two quotes come from Paul Taylor of Sprint NexTel:

We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests.

We do have logs, we can go back to see the IP address that used MySpace. By the way - MySpace and Facebook, I don't know how many subpoenas those people get, or emergency requests but god bless, 95% of all IP requests, emergencies are because of MySpace or Facebook...

I keep telling people to avoid Facebook and MySpace. Eventually, folks will listen.

Of course, we all know how apologists will justify this intrusion: The governments needs to catch terrorists and child pornographers. Come off it. There aren't 8 million terrorists and child porn enthusiasts in this country. Welcome to Orwell country.

Or, to paraphrase something Natalie Portman once said: This is how democracy dies -- with shrugs and easy rationalizations.

(Thanks, once again, to lambert.)