U.S. Mobile Phone Provider Received Some 8 Million Requests for Geo-Locational Data

Chris Soghoian has an interesting blog post from December. While attending the ISS World conference (Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering), Chris heard some surprising things. Counsel for the US telecom company Sprint Nextel indicated in a presentation that, within the space of a year, the company had received some 8 million requests from law enforcement for geo-locational data associated with mobile phones on the company’s network. In the comments on the post, one person conjectures that those don’t represent requests on 8 million distinct individuals, and that supposition is corroborated by another Sprint representative. This makes sense since typically police will want to know a single suspect’s location at various times throughout the course of an investigation. They may even want to check location continuously at regular intervals, say, every 1-2 minutes, in order to essentially track the suspect’s every move. Given the price lists associated with obtaining this information from telecoms (see Chris' post), a question for economists is whether that kind of electronic tracking is more cost effective than simply assigning a police officer to tail the suspect. The answer may depend on the particular level of crime incidence within the police force’s jurisdiction. Where crime incidence is higher, it may be more “economical” to assign officers to walk the beat and be available for incident response as opposed to conducting surveillance. It’s also unclear whether the +/- 8 million requests include emergency calls, where the location of the caller is revealed in the event that he or she is unable to give locational details verbally. But another interesting revelation related to the 8 million or so requests concerns how those requests were made and processed: evidently, Sprint has set up a special network interface to allow police agencies to submit geo-locational queries via computer.