In August 2011, 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies to ask about their policies, procedures and practices for tracking cell phones.
What we have learned is disturbing. While virtually all of the over 200 police departments that responded to our request said they track cell phones, only a tiny minority reported consistently obtaining a warrant and demonstrating probable cause to do so.I noticed two facts here. First, nearly a half of all police agencies contacted did not respond to ACLU's inquiry. They obviously and correctly feel that they don't have to respond to public inquiries. They are perfectly aware of who they are working for--the One Percent and not the 99 Percent who, according to official mythology, they are supposedly working for.
Second, I noticed that the article contains evidence to suggest that police and cell phone corporations, which are owned by the One Percent, are working in parallel to create this new surveillance state of affairs.
Cell phone companies have worsened the lack of transparency by law enforcement by hiding how long they store location data. Cell phone companies store customers' location data for a very long time. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Sprint keeps location tracking records for 18-24 months, and AT&T holds onto them "since July 2008," suggesting they are stored indefinitely. Yet none of the major cell phone providers disclose to their customers the length of time they keep their customers' cell tracking data. Mobile carriers owe it to their customers to be more forthright about what they are doing with our data.