Cell phones, e-mail, websites, Twitter and the like are handy means for communications of people. However, did you know that communications companies provide information about you to law enforcement agencies? No judicial warrant necessary.

Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing has been gathering data and analyzing data about such surveillance in preparation of his PhD dissertation. He secured and released an audio recording of “Sprint/Nextel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, Paul Taylor, describing how his company has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times. That’s potentially millions of Sprint/Nextel customers who not only were probably unaware that their wireless provider even had an Electronic Surveillance Department, but who certainly did not know that law enforcement offers could log into a special Sprint Web portal and, without ever having to demonstrate probable cause to a judge, gain access to geolocation logs detailing where they’ve been and where they are.” [Source: Ars Technica] You can be certain that other such communications providers, for example AT&T do the same. Perhaps that Garmin GPS travel device in your vehicle can provide the same information to other companies as well.

Soghoian describes how “the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.”

The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain such communications without any real oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn’t. If you think your electronic communications are private, think again. You have a constitutional right to freedom of speech but not necessarily a constitutional right to restrict your speech to just those you may want to hear it.

Sprint/Nextel’s Mr. Taylor said, “[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just [because of] the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.”

“Government agents routinely obtain customer records from these firms, detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time,” writes Soghoian.

In Katz v. United States (1967), the United States Supreme Court established its “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. Katz was a decision that extended the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure to protect individuals in a telephone booth from wiretaps by authorities without a warrant. [See Katz v. United States (1967) 389 U.S. 347]

It appears the information being obtained via these means are pen registers/trap and trace devices. [See Wikipedia for similarities and differences]

Ed Felton, blogger of “Freedom to Tinker” properly points out that “[p]robably, many of these surveillance requests were justified, in the sense that a fair-minded citizen would think their expected public benefit justified the intrusiveness. How many were justified, we don’t know. We can’t know — and that’s a big part of the problem.

“It’s deeply troubling that this has happened without significant public debate or even much disclosure. We need to have a discussion — and quickly — about what the rules for electronic surveillance should be.”