Tuesday, June 20, 2006

No Warrants Needed, Just Buy Phone Records

Serious head scratching followed the story today that law enforcement at every level - local, state and federal - have been buying up phone records via numerous private companies, with a $30 million dollar pricetag, though the AP story reports these companies don't charge law enforcement.

I mentioned this in January of this year.

And then the House approved legislation to make it a crime to sell such records without notifying the customer. That legislation disappeared. Poof! Gone.

Now law enforcement says they are simply making use of a legal business - of course it's legal because the legislation meant to outlaw it ... missing in action.

As Alice said in Wonderland, "Curiouser and curiouser!"

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous7:12 AM

    Man, its hard to dwell too much on this kind of stuff without going all tin foil had, or at least Gattica, but its ugly. The Real ID act is the icing on the cake, because the .gov will have the biggest assed database imaginable, with all the fun that entails.
    Ug. Phone records. At the same time Gonzalez is strongarming the ISPs into not only keeping records of internet traffic, but to hand it to DOJ.

    ReplyDelete