Which Telecoms Store Your Data the Longest? Secret Memo Tells All

Wired - The nation’s major mobile-phone providers are keeping a treasure trove of sensitive data on their customers, according to newly-released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms.



The single-page Department of Justice document, “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers,” (.pdf) is a guide for law enforcement agencies looking to get information — like customer IP addresses, call logs, text messages and web surfing habits – out of U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

The document, marked “Law Enforcement Use Only” and dated August 2010, illustrates there are some significant differences in how long carriers retain your data.

Verizon, for example, keeps a list of everyone you’ve exchanged text messages with for the past year, according to the document.  But  T-Mobile stores the same data up to five years. It’s 18 months for Sprint, and seven years for AT&T.

That makes Verizon appear to have the most privacy-friendly policy. Except that Verizon is alone in retaining the actual contents of text messages. It allegedly stores the messages for five days, while T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint don’t store them at all.

The document was unearthed by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina via a Freedom of Information Act claim. (After the group  gave a copy to Wired.com, we also discovered it in two other places on the internet by searching its title.)

“People who are upset that Facebook is storing all their information should be really concerned that their cell phone is tracking them everywhere they’ve been,” said Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney. “The government has this information because it wants to engage in surveillance.”

The biggest difference in retention surrounds so-called cell-site data. That is information detailing a phone’s movement history via its connections to mobile phone towers while its traveling.          More

Court Victory on Warrantless Tracking of Cell Phones

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday (pdf) that the government must turn over information from criminal prosecutions in which federal law enforcement agencies obtained cell-site location information without a warrant. The suit, filed as part of EFF’s FLAG Project and in conjunction with the ACLU, sought the release of the case numbers and case names in which the government had tracked the location of a person’s cell phone without obtaining a warrant.

The Court’s decision is the latest victory in the fight to stop the government from tracking citizens’ movements without a warrant. The D.C. court’s ruling follows on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to review United States v. Jones – a case challenging the constitutionality of law enforcement’s warrantless tracking of a suspect using a GPS device. The decision also follows the introduction of several bills in Congress that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before tracking someone’s location through their cell phone. Those bills were introduced in response to calls for location privacy reform by the Digital Due Process coalition, a diverse group of civil liberties groups like EFF and the Center for Democracy and companies like Google and Microsoft, that are pressing Congress to update electronic privacy law for the 21st century. And, of course, EFF has been fighting in the courts against warrantless cell phone location tracking for years, with much success. All of these developments are part of a growing trend toward greater public scrutiny, accountability, and transparency when it comes to law enforcement’s location tracking practices – a need that the court acknowledged in Tuesday's decision.                  More