Ryan Singel reports that despite the rather lax standards
required for
wiretaps, some FBI agents seem to have decided that they
could skip
procedure:
The revelation is the second this year showing that FBI
employees
bypassed court order requirements for phone records. In
July, the
FBI and the Justice Department Inspector General
revealed the
existence of a joint investigation into an FBI
counter-terrorism
office, after an audit found that the Communications
Analysis Unit
sent more than 700 fake emergency letters to phone
companies
seeking call records. An Inspector General spokeswoman
declined to
provide the status of that investigation, citing agency
policy.
The June 2006 e-mail (.pdf) was buried in more than
600-pages of
FBI documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, in a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The message was sent to an employee in the FBI's
Operational
Technology Division by a technical surveillance
specialist at the
FBI's Minneapolis field office -- both names were
redacted from
the documents. The e-mail describes widespread attempts
to bypass
court order requirements for cellphone data in the
Minneapolis
office.
Remarkably, when the technical agent began refusing to
cooperate,
other agents began calling telephone carriers directly,
posing as
the technical agent to get customer cellphone records.
Federal law prohibits phone companies from revealing
customer
information unless given a court order, or in the case
of an
emergency involving physical danger.
Singel's report is at:
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/
2007/12/fbi_cell
You can read the actual document:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/minneapolisema
il.pdf
It's worth noting that a lot of what's going on here is
device
and call tracking, not content capture, so even if you have
end-to-end
crypto in your handset, it's only of modest value.
-Ekr
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