New York City Police Amassing a Trove of Cellphone Logs

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/new-york-city-police-amassing-a-trove-of-cellphone-logs.html?hpw

by rpm4321 • 14 years ago

46 36 14 years ago

breckenedge2• 14 years ago

At first, I didn't feel so bad about the police actions described in this article. I've had a phone stolen right in front of me in broad daylight, and it sure would have been nice if the cops had nailed the guy. However, tracking calls would have never led to the guy who stole my phone. I presume my thief had the phone flashed within minutes.

Wouldn't it make more sense to track device stolen S/N or MEIDs, like they do in Europe? I guess that would involve some sort of scary IT investment.

yock• 14 years ago

And it would have much less collateral benefit to police.

pavel_lishin2• 14 years ago

If it was your phone, you could have given the police access to your call records, couldn't you?

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Surely there's a form of personal insurance that would get you a new phone in less time than it would take for the police to retrieve yours (if they ever do).

breckenedge2• 14 years ago

Actually, i had insurance. Took about 24 hours to get a replacement on my doorstep.

ams61102• 14 years ago

A question arrising from this is, is this database of cell phone records also provided to any federal agencies, FBI, etc? My guess would be that it is, or is easily available to them on request.

rosebush2• 14 years ago

I live & work in NY. NYC is a police state. You as a citizen have no rights until you retain a lawyer and you can be searched without probable cause (via stop & frisk). The police along with TSA (in some cases) setup subway checkpoints. If they pull you out for a bag search and you refuse, you cannot enter the subway. If you do, you will be arrested. There is no law on the books that says they can do this, but it is their policy and you must obey. The data they collect will be used by other government agencies. They will also collect facial data as well.

ams61102• 14 years ago

On balance, how do you feel about this compared to say, the 1970s when muggings in NYC were so commonplace they were almost expected. NYC has transformed from at least a somewhat unsafe city to one of the safest big cities in the world. Is it worth the price?

e40• 14 years ago

Is there cause an effect here? That is, could the relative safety have been achieved with just a police presence?

sneak• 14 years ago

There is very little crime in North Korea, as well.

Source: lived in NYC, visited DPRK

w1ntermute4• 14 years ago

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

brown9-2• 14 years ago

Much of this dramatic reduction in crime happened before stop & frisk and the subway checkpoints, which have only come in recent years.

cobrausn• 14 years ago

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I normally hate people who just throw quotes up to answer a question, but this one seemed appropriate.

I will never live in NYC (though I do travel upstate quite a bit). There are plenty of large cities in the world that are safe or safer without also being police states.

rosebush2• 14 years ago

When you live in fear, you will always attract the worse society has to offer. NYC in the 70's was good and bad, probably a little better today however. When the police turned their eyes on the sources of crime, late 70s-80s (also The Guardian Angels) things improved. Then the NYC government + private business started the rebuilding of Times Square (Large commercial entities) and other areas. This brought in more jobs and most crime (various kinds) moved out and into other areas/neighborhoods.

But alas a new type of crime moved in (white collar - bankers etc..) So who is watching them now? NOBODY.

  Now the police cannot stop somebody from flying a plane into a building, that is the responsibility of our Federal Government agencies.  Today, the police are more of a danger to society than they ever have been.  This I compare to the NY Police in the 70s,60s, 50s...(corruption - Watch/Read about Frank Serpico for example).  The bad cops were afraid of getting caught.  Now today they can get away with murder.

The NY Police and in fact most of the police foces in all of the USA have been militarized in the name of terror. They have been given powers to detain and arrest for almost anything. Look at them the wrong way.

Nothing is worth the price of losing your ability to assemble, speak and to travel. You cannot do this anymore without being considered a potential terrorist or similar. We are not innocent and are all potential threats the all seeing eye of the Police State.

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

I lived in NYC in the '70s and '80s. It was an adventure, to be sure. But the crime started going down once the police started nailing people for so-called quality of life crimes. They busted turnstile jumpers and such, which gave them the chance to check for DATs and outstanding warrants. That helped them find people with unregistered guns and lock up actual criminals.

The current stop and frisk and TSA searches are perhaps not doing all that much to increase safety over what was before. It's not a choice between police state and crime sprees.

driverdan• 14 years ago

> Police officials declined to say how many phone records are contained in the database, or how often they might have led to arrests.

> Police officials would not say if detectives had used the call records of any cellphone theft victims in the course of investigating other crimes.

Why can police refuse to answer these questions? This information should be publicly available by default. There is absolutely no risk to any criminal investigations by releasing this info.

This is one of my biggest problems with government agencies. Laws should require them to be open and transparent by default. They should have to take additional steps to make something not available to the public and should have to justify this action.

ben1040• 14 years ago

A few months ago here in St Louis, a woman was murdered in broad daylight in an armed robbery attempt.

Police started looking at other recent street robberies reported in the area. It turned out that a week before the murder, a person was robbed at gunpoint just a few blocks from where the murder took place, and their cellphone was taken. After that theft, call records for that stolen phone started showing showed a woman's phone number.

Upon tracking down that number, they got to a woman who said her boyfriend was involved in the murder. That led to two men being arrested for this and at least one other previously unsolved armed robbery.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cellphone-played-bi...

However, the NYT article says it can take weeks for a subpoena to be issued and acted upon by the phone company. So I question whether a database like that would really have even been helpful in a situation like this, since they'd need the data a lot sooner after an incident.

Seems to me that this might be more of an attempt to mine phone records on a larger scale and look for drug networks or other emerging patterns.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

If everybody was forced to have the mic and camera on all the time on their cellphone, I bet the police could catch even more criminals. That is obviously a strawman, but there is a point: there will always be a tradeoff between privacy and safety. I'd rather not give up my privacy to combat what are essentially black swan events.

With my base opinion out of the way, I will say I would be comfortable with the kind of tracking you mentioned if there were strong protections on what the police could do with that data. For instance, the phone's owner should be protected from prosecution in similar ways to evidence gained from an illegal search. This data should also have a maximum lifetime. Finally, it should be clear when the records are being requested so the owner of the number can turn it off if they move the number to a new phone.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine these kinds of laws being passed, so, until they do, I'll stick with my default of believing the government should require more effort, not less, to snoop in my life.

twmb• 14 years ago

The problem is when they don't use this to track drug networks and murder crimes and instead use it to lock up peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, or other political dissidents.

mseebach• 14 years ago

"When a cellphone is reported stolen in New York, the Police Department routinely subpoenas the phone’s call records, from the day of the theft onward. [...]

But in the process, the Police Department has quietly amassed a trove of telephone logs, all obtained without a court order, that could conceivably be used for any investigative purpose."

Isn't a subpoena a court order?

contingencies• 14 years ago

How many of the same records wind up at AMDOCS/Mossad?

New York City Police Amassing a Trove of Cellphone Logs

Related Stories