US wiretapping information release

From Chris Parsons:

“Christopher Soghoian, a PhD Candidate at Indiana University, has released the information on US wiretap/pen register information along with documents received through FOIA that are inquiring into the costs that telecommunications carriers demand for the two aforementioned services. He also has full recordings of sessions from (the closed door) ISS World: Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering. An executive summary of his draft thoughts are below, followed by a link to the full piece he’s written. He has made available his recordings and the responses to his FOIA requests to the public at large, all accessible at the link below.

Executive Summary

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.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at awiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

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.”