With a single wiretap, police collected 9.2M text messages
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
However, warentless wiretapping was up 25%:
The ODI's transparency report (the article's only citation, from which I have obtained every fact in this post) says that indeed went up from 129K targets in 2017 to 165k targets in 2018, but the article never mentions that. Instead, it talks about searching the recorded communications of those targets for communications related to US people who aren't being wiretapped themselves.
Except in the case of voluntary handovers, situations where the communication provider hands over data without the need of a warrant. A cop can purchase the same location or other data any advertiser can.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/police-get-location-data-witho...
There is also no evidence that voluntary handovers are increasing.
The current location is known by necessity. There is no technical reason to keep a history of past locations.
Considering both of these terms are anachronisms originally created to describe distict devices which haven't been used in decades, getting bent out of shape over the difference between the two doesn't seem like a productive direction to steer the conversation.
As you allude to, seeing the forest instead of the trees reveals that people who are upset don't care how any of it works and they don't care which terms are assigned to which concepts. They care that their privacy is being violated. And no, they certainly don't care about court opinions concerning metadata not being data or call records not deserving privacy. The distinction between wiretaps, pen registers, and any other bullshit they dream up is not important to most people, so dragging the conversation into the weeds over the differences between the terms is not productive because it's a distinction without a meaningful difference (unless you're inclined to hassle privacy advocates.)
If somebody says "That man assaulted me; he punched me right in the face" the correct response is not "Actually that's battery, not assault"
(I don't know [or care] if that 'correction' is true or not, but it's one that's been repeated online ad nauseum.)
How come Julian Assange has second amendment protection?
Are you wondering whether this is interpreted to mean that Assange as an Australian has the right to own weapons in the US? Or did you mean to refer to some other amendment?
Average character count per text is probably low. Median character count could be something like 3.
That’s all rank speculation on my part. Would be interesting to see actual data on this though!
I somehow doubt that very much.
The comment above reached a figure of 700 per day per person. For my teen self, that's about two or three hours of conversation per day. It's certainly sustainable for months. Hell, I was known as the outlier in my teen circles because I liked to send longer messages (actually combining full sentences into one message) from time to time.
That may not be what its author intended, but it's what they wrote. Twice.
Nowhere did I say that rate would be sustained for 24 consecutive hours.
It is the ultimate in moving goalposts to take my response to a claim of 700/day being insane, to recast the debate as if it were over sending 17,000 texts per day.
https://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/what-teens-do-with-th...
But when did I ever say many?!
I think this horse is now dead, and or has come to enjoy the beating.
The numbers stated work out to suspiciously close to a transmission every 30 seconds, which may suggest this is a capture including both routine cell-tower transmissions and texts, with the former dominating the data.
I doubt the accuracy of the story as reported, though whether that's a misstatement in the report or a misunderstanding by the reporter isn't clear.
The report in question:
https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/wiretap-report-2...
It states:
The federal wiretap with the most intercepts occurred during a narcotics investigation in the Southern District of Texas and resulted in the interception of 9,208,906 messages in 120 days.
XLSX tables with underlying data are provided.
My read is that intercepts are not limited to user-initiated comms, and include automated telco service messaging
Or were they targeting 45 but actually collecting for vastly larger numbers (eg entire cell towers' throughout) ? Would make sense of the suspects had many phones or kept switching phones.
4 x 30 (just easy rounding) = 120 days against 149 individuals.
This is not a small-scale surveillance operation and all of that time, money, and effort amounted to zero arrests? Then what was the justification for the warrant that was used to enact the wiretap, in the first place? "We kind of think that something maybe kind of sort is happening, potentially, with this possible group of possibly known individuals..."?
This doesn't add-up.
Aren't warrants supposed to be used to investigate for evidence of crimes where other evidence is presented with the warrant application that a crime has possibly been committed and, thus, such gathering is necessary to further collect information directly pertinent to the investigation?
This just sounds like rubber-stamping surveillance to maybe catch individuals that may be involved in some possibly nefarious actions that some officers suspect is going on but don't really have anything else to go on...
Otherwise, how can you go to a court and say, "Based on 'x', we think these 149 individuals are involved in 'y' crime and we need to gather evidence in support of that...", waste so much time, resources, man-hours, etc. and still come up empty-handed; especially, when you were supposed to have sufficient enough evidence against at least one individual to have the warrant granted in the first place?
The way this unfolded, it seems like it was more of a fishing expedition than anything worth-while and that is the most disconcerting part.
~2210 messages per person per day on average? (~138/day hour) That's either really impressive, or something doesn't add up...
If you’re outside the EU, you might want to consider getting involved in the political process of your country so that one day you too may have legal protections for your data.
The existence of this backdoor (in combination with the fact that iCloud and iMessage are operated by a PRC-controlled business in China) is likely the reason iMessage is not blocked in China.
But that's not a great solution for a common e2e.