Ride the Lightning

Verizon Says Government Requests for Phone Records Rising

August 31, 2017

Naked Security reported on August 24^th that Verizon's latest transparency report for US government requests for phone records show that they were up for both individuals and large groups in the first half of 2017.

Government requests for mass "tower dumps" of every caller who connected to an individual phone tower as they passed by were way up. To try to identify a suspect of a crime, the government may apply to a court for a warrant or order compelling Verizon to provide a 'dump' of the phone numbers of all devices that connected to a specific cell tower or site during a given period of time.

For the first half of this year, Verizon says that it's received approximately 8,870 warrants or court orders for cell tower dumps. The number has been surging: there were 3,200 warrants or orders for cell tower dumps in 2013. Three years later, in 2016, that number shot up to 14,630.

The total number of demands for customer data was 138,773 in the first half of this year.

Out of the 97% of requests it went along with so far this year, there were 68,237 subpoenas, 722 wiretap demands, and 3,963 "trap and trace" orders that let law enforcement see the numbers of a target's incoming calls in real time.

Verizon also says it got 27,478 emergency requests, or demands from police for information in matters of "the danger of death or serious physical injury." The extremely vague number of national security letters Verizon can report was between one and 499. Could that be any vaguer?

Verizon says that it's compelled to hand over contents of communications – as in, text messages or e-mail content – to law enforcement "relatively infrequently." Verizon only releases stored content to law enforcement when they come with a probable cause warrant in hand. Law enforcement can't get at it with a general order or subpoena. During the first half of 2017, Verizon says it received 4,436 warrants for stored content.

Verizon hands over its subscribers' location information only in the case of a warrant or order, not in response to a subpoena. US laws differ on what law enforcement needs to get at people's location data, depending on what area of the country you're in. In some cases, law enforcement needs a court order, and in some cases they need a warrant – in either case, a judge has to sign off on the demand.

In the first half of this year, Verizon received approximately 20,442 demands for location data: about three-quarters of those were through orders and one-quarter through warrants.

What the report doesn't tell us is precisely what becomes of that data – then again, maybe I don't want to know . . .

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