phone records
Latest
Warrantless searches of Americans’ data spiked 28 percent in 2018
An annual transparency report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows warrantless searches of Americans' data jumped 28 percent in 2018. According to the report, the National Security Agency (NSA) conducted 9,637 warrantless search queries of Americans' calls, texts, and emails in 2018. That's up from 7,512 searches in 2017, and it's more than double the 4,672 warrantless searches the NSA made in 2015.
The NSA says it's time to drop its massive phone-surveillance program
The National Security Agency (NSA) has formally recommended that the White House drop the phone surveillance program that collects information about millions of US phone calls and text messages. The Wall Street Journal reports that people familiar with the matter say the logistical and legal burdens of maintaining the program outweigh any intelligence benefits it brings.
LogAnalysis maps the structure of gangs using phone records
It's no surprise that law enforcement agencies use mobile phone records to investigate criminal activity, but a platform called LogAnalysis could facilitate some of the most sophisticated analysis for all that raw data. Developed by Emilio Ferrara and his team at Indiana University, the software uses call records and other info to map hierarchies within criminal organizations according to "social network theory." (Hint: Those who make the most calls are usually at the bottom, while those in charge tend to communicate the least.) And by automatically importing call records and removing ambiguous or redundant information, LogAnalysis streamlines the process of analyzing that data. In a paper, Ferrara and other researchers describe how LogAnalysis processed call records for a group convicted of several robberies, drug trafficking and extortion. By clustering together calls based on the time and date, the software revealed which numbers traced back to gang members involved in a particular robbery or murder. The data also clumped calls together in 14 different subgroups, revealing individuals (or at least phone numbers) involved in specific crimes. As the MIT Technology Review points out, many of the researchers behind this paper are based in Sicily, so it's likely that some of the call data in this case comes from Italy. If that's true, we have a pretty good idea what criminal organization they're talking about here.
WSJ: NSA collects data from less than one-fifth of all cellphone records
The National Security Agency might be busy collecting your Angry Birds high scores, but our previous notions that the government is collecting all of our phone data may be over-exaggerated, according to the Wall Street Journal. The publication reported this morning that in reality, the agency actually collects less than 20 percent of all call data. So what's going on? There appear to be a few factors that have formed a bit of a roadblock for the NSA's collection efforts: The rapid growth of phone use has made it hard for it to keep pace, and it's also struggled to find ways to remove location data (which is illegal to collect) from phone records; this information contradicts December reports that the NSA collects 5 billion phone location records per day.Lastly, the NSA's orders to US operators don't cover a vast majority of the cellphone records available, and its collection efforts have also been slowed down due to demands on the agency to respond to criticisms from US courts. If these sources are to be believed, apparently the NSA's collection program isn't as widespread as we originally thought. Of course, this might be one reason why it's resorting to World of Warcraft to get information.
