Attention Thieves: Check The Auto-Upload On Those Phones You're Stealing

Stupidity

from the pic-or-it-didn't...oh,-it-happened dept

Well, it’s time to catch up on the latest iteration of dumb criminals being dumb with technology. Past stories, including frat brothers portraying their crimes on social media, criminals attempting to pass off ice blocks as iPads, and robbers bragging about their exploits on YouTube all enjoy the commonality of the criminals being tripped up by their own hubris rather than the trappings of misunderstood technology. Not so in this latest example.

In this case, we have a couple who have built their relationship around love, the fraternity of unfortunate looks, and the ability to be nabbed for stealing a smart phone by its auto-uploading feature. Victoria Brodsky of Brooklyn was at a street fair when her phone and wallet were lost to pickpockets. Having once planned to cancel her credit cards and phone service, she felt the spurs of Cowboy Justice at her sides when the alleged thieves began using her phone to engage in a little amateur self-porn, not realizing that the photos were automatically uploaded to Brodsky’s Dropbox account.

“It’s one thing to steal, but they’re celebrating,” said Brodsky of the 26 pictures and one pornographic video that showed up in her account between August and September.

The photos started innocently enough with pictures of the woman and the man, but then a batch of racy selfies appeared on Sept. 1. The man and woman make kissy faces in some, and then disrobe. They lie naked on a mattress, staring into Brodsky’s phone.The final post of the day was an X-rated video of the couple half-heartedly engaged in a hardcore sex act.

So, hey, you know that whole “pics or it didn’t happen” thing? Yeah, don’t go looking into the articles for these pictures. Just…don’t. They aren’t appetizing. But they do teach all of you would-be phone-thieves out there a valuable lesson. Before you go snapping off horrible photos of you snapping off on one another with that cell phone you just stole, you might want to poke around the account settings so that your, ahem, exploits aren’t uploaded to your victim’s account.

Filed Under: brooklyn, crime, smartphone, theft, victoria brodsky

Cell Phone Unlocking Bill Passes, Bad Last-Minute Changes And All

Copyright

from the anticlimactic-and-anticonsumer dept

In an evening session just a few minutes ago, the House of Representatives voted 295-114 in favor of H.R.1123, the “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act”. As we discussed this morning, though it started out as a reasonably good bill intended to address the use of the DMCA to squash activities that have nothing to do with copyright, last-minute changes introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte poisoned its intent by introducing a possible future exception for bulk phone unlocking.

Unfortunately, the changes were so last-minute that the reaction and withdrawal of support by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo was not enough to turn the tides. Though the problematic text is carefully worded for plausible deniability — allowing the House to claim it hasn’t technically taken a side — I doubt it would take long before phone companies and their lobbyists started using this oh-so-obvious bit of leverage gifted to them in the bill. For now, it falls to the Senate to pass their version of the bill, so there’s still a chance we’ll see these problems addressed.

Filed Under: anna eshoo, bob goodlatte, congress, dmca, unlocking, wireless, zoe lofgren

Blackberry CEO 'Outraged,' Scolds T-Mobile Like A Child For Simple Sales Pitch To Blackberry Users

Wireless

from the surely-you-have-better-things-to-do dept

Blackberry CEO John Chen has a lot to worry about. At the moment his company continues a head-first plunge into potential irrelevance, being incapable of offering compelling products that prevent Apple and Google from eroding its wireless market share (don’t tell that to the company’s loyal fans, though). A long line of executives keep getting shuffled in and out like party decorations on a sinking ocean liner in the hopes that somebody can fix this, but generally speaking Chen isn’t having all that much fun, and most analysts aren’t too sure the company’s fortunes will ever get turned around.

With all of this on Chen’s plate, it’s curious then to see where Chen’s attentions are focused. T-Mobile last week apparently sent a promotion to Blackberry users that simply offered users an iPhone 5S for no money down if they switched to T-Mobile. For a company that has been writing some uncharacteristically (for wireless) hilarious press releases with a CEO who spends much of the day brutally mocking AT&T on Twitter — T-Mobile’s promotion is tame and barely worth attention. Still, it was apparently enough to “outrage” Chen, who took to the company blog to scold T-Mobile as if they were a milk-spilling toddler:

“I want to thank our loyal customers for your commitment to BlackBerry. By expressing your outrage directly to T-Mobile ‎through tweets, calls and comments in the media and on blog posts, you sent a powerful message that T-Mobile could not ignore. Your partnership with our brand is appreciated by all of us at BlackBerry, and draws a sharp contrast with the behavior of our longtime business partner.

I can assure you that we are outraged too. What puzzles me more is that T-Mobile did not speak with us before or after they launched this clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion.”

Granted T-Mobile (who barely sells any Blackberry devices) wouldn’t be trying to poach your customer base if you were creating products and services a broader audience actually liked. The comments below Chen’s post are somewhat of a treat as well, with Blackberry fans insisting Chen is “pure class” and “the man” for swatting T-Mobile on the nose like a puppy that has pooped on your favorite slippers. T-Mobile CEO John Legere responded to Chen on Twitter in just the way we’ve grown accustomed to. All of this faux outrage simply wound up making waves in the press and giving an otherwise entirely-uninteresting T-Mobile promotion — and Blackberry’s ongoing failures — a huge bath of free publicity.

Filed Under: iphone, john chen, wireless
Companies: blackberry, t-mobile

OSHA To Cell Carriers: Maybe Somebody Could Better Equip And Train Cell Climbers So They Stop Dying?

Wireless

from the this-shouldn't-be-happening dept

Cellular tower climbing is one of the world’s most dangerous professions (in terms of death rate per 100,000 employees), and every time there’s a push to upgrade gear quickly, safety guidelines start to get ignored and contractor pressure builds, resulting in the death rate spiking accordingly. With cell carriers all rushing to outpace one another in terms of LTE upgrades, there has been yet another jump in deaths during the last year. According to the latest OSHA statistics, there were 13 cell tower worker fatalities in 2013, a total that was larger than in the previous two years combined. 2014 isn’t off to a much better start, with four worker deaths occurring in the first five weeks of 2014.

As such, OSHA this week fired off a letter to cell carriers (via PBS), urging them to do a better job in, well, not letting their employees die:

“OSHA has found that a high proportion of these incidents occurred because of a lack of fall protection: either employers are not providing appropriate fall protection to employees, or they are not ensuring that their employees use fall protection properly. As a result, communication tower climbers are falling to their deaths…I am writing to remind you that it is your responsibility to prevent workers from being injured or killed while working on communication towers

That this is something that companies need to be reminded of is fairly sad, especially since they get reminded of it every several years or so. That doesn’t seem to be improving training and subcontractor hiring practices all too much, especially at certain companies. A ProPublica and Frontline investigation from 2012 found that between 2003 and 2011, 50 climbers died working on cellular sites, half of the 100 total number of deaths on all communications towers and ten times the average for general construction work. The report noted the deaths were usually because technicians “were shoddily equipped or received little training before being sent up hundreds of feet.” Some companies’ track records on this front were better than others:

“One carrier, AT&T, had more fatalities on its jobs than its three closest competitors combined, our reporting revealed. Fifteen climbers died on jobs for AT&T since 2003. Over the same period, five climbers died on T-Mobile jobs, two died on Verizon jobs and one died on a job for Sprint.

AT&T’s biggest spike came as the company rushed to address problems post-2009 about the iPhone’s impact on the ill-prepared AT&T network. The OSHA letter doesn’t single out companies for the rash of 2013-2014 deaths, though carriers bury themselves in layers upon layers of subcontractors to minimize cost and liability. With the billions being made each quarter by the wireless industry (particularly with the recent migration to pricey, low-cap, shared data plans) the steep human cost of bit transfer is inexcusable.

Filed Under: cell tower, osha, wireless

Investors Whine As T-Mobile Finally Forces Verizon Wireless To (GASP) Compete On Price

Wireless

from the boo-hoo dept

For several years now, Verizon Wireless has tried to make the argument that they don’t have to compete on price because their network is just that fantastically awesome. The position wasn’t entirely unsupportable, given that Verizon Wireless tops most customer satisfaction studies, has the largest LTE network, and hadn’t to this point been seeing many customer defections. The result has been some of the highest wireless prices (and profits) in the industry, with Verizon getting away with offering the occasional, cosmetic promotional offer. The problem for Verizon is that real price competition (a rarity in U.S. telecom markets) isn’t something you get to just wish away (at least not without some form of potent voodoo).

Enter T-Mobile, which in recent months has been a rare disruptive force in the market, working to eliminate long-term contracts and ETFs, while slashing prices and embracing a number of new, pro-consumer policies (like free international data when roaming overseas) that heretofore had been quite foreign for a largely duopoly-controlled industry. T-Mobile’s shenanigans have resulted in investors whining for months about the possibility of Verizon and AT&T *GASP* actually having to compete on price, as this recent, unintentionally-hilarious Reuters report illustrates:

“The most disappointing thing is that AT&T is reacting to T-Mobile,” said Jefferies analyst Michael McCormack. “How long is it before Verizon reacts?”…McCormack (is) worried about the implication that industry revenue could be cut by $20 billion. “That’s clearly not a healthy sign.”

Yes, how disappointing and unhealthy that a government-pampered duopoly has to suddenly compete on price, eroding artificially-inflated revenues resulting in better, cheaper service for everyone! McCormack’s hellish, truly-Lovecraftian fears came true this week, as Verizon finally buckled to T-Mobile pressure and started competing more seriously on price. The company began offering loyalty discounts to existing customers, and unveiled a suite of new data options that boost data allotments for many users. While still not in range of T-Mobile’s pricing, it’s a start of something more closely resembling real competition in the wireless space.

The horror. The horror.

Filed Under: broadband, lte, wireless
Companies: at&t, t-mobile, verizon

Sprint Seemingly Shocked That Nobody Wants Them to Kill Off Price-Disruptive and Competitive T-Mobile

Wireless

from the your-surprise-is-somewhat-surprising dept

Roughly two years ago, when fighting AT&T’s ham-fisted acquisition attempt of T-Mobile, Sprint lobbyists and lawyers were busy telling anybody who would listen that the United States wireless industry isn’t truly competitive unless you’ve got four distinct companies competing. That’s something that United States regulators have generally agreed upon, especially given the massive size and power of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and their domination of both the retail and special access markets. Fast forward two years after the FCC and DOJ blocked AT&T’s attempted acquisition, and those opinions appear to have been justified by T-Mobile’s sudden resurgence.

The company has not only become great entertainment via snarky CEO Tweets and amusingly mocking carriers like AT&T at every opportunity, but their price disruption has been a truly welcome thorn in the side of larger carriers. From T-Mobile’s free international roaming data offer to their war on long-term contracts, the company is leeching customers from AT&T in real price competition, a rarity for United States telecom markets.

Enter Sprint, who now owned by acquisition-hungry Japanese carrier Softbank, is eager to obliterate all of this progress with a T-Mobile acquisition of their own. Regulators have made it clear for years they want four competitors, and every meeting Sprint and SoftBank have had so far has resulted in regulators clearly expressing doubt at the consumer benefits of such a deal. Consumers too have made it clear they loathe the idea as well, given that Sprint has fallen to last place in customer satisfaction rankings and last place in most LTE network speed and latency tests. As such, it’s rather curious to see Sprint and SoftBank executives “surprised” this week by the cold shoulder they continue to get from regulators (Wall Street Journal, reg. required):

Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son and Chief Executive Dan Hesse, who met with officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission in Washington in recent weeks, always knew a deal would be a tough sell, the people said. But the men were surprised by the level of opposition and its very public nature, one of the people said.

They really shouldn’t be. Trying to acquire the wireless industry’s sweetheart just as they’re gaining headlines for being disruptive? Two years after arguing about the sanctity of maintaining four competitors? Sprint has argued that combining with T-Mobile will make a stronger third competitor to AT&T and Verizon Wireless, though telecom consolidation often doesn’t work that way, and Sprint has shown little to no ability to mirror T-Mobile’s price aggression and consumer-friendly policies (like cell unlocking) in recent years. Though not without problems of its own, the FCC and DOJ will also likely prefer T-Mobile get acquired by someone like Dish in order to retain four distinct competitors. It seems like Sprint might want to save everybody involved a lot of time and money, and for the moment focus on learning to properly run the network they already own.

Filed Under: competition, doj, fcc
Companies: at&t, spring, t-mobile, verizon

Bad AT&T Ideas Are Contagious: UK's Vodafone Wants To Try 'Sponsored Data' Idea

Business Models

from the ridin'-them-pipes-for-free dept

AT&T poured napalm on the network neutrality debate here in the States back in 2005, when then CEO Ed Whitacre proudly proclaimed in an interview he “wasn’t going to let Google ride his pipes for free.” Ed and most telco executives quite honestly believe that historically-pampered phone companies are entitled to an additional “troll toll” by content companies simply for the honor of touching the ISP network. Never mind that consumers and content companies already pay for bandwidth and (like Google) invest in infrastructure of their own, telco logic dictates that content companies get a “free ride” and must pay more. You know, because.

AT&T’s attempts to double dip aren’t just domestically dumb, predatory and dangerous, they seemingly have an infectious quality for overseas telcos looking for ways to make additional money for doing nothing, but who aren’t gifted with AT&T’s knack for truly obnoxious ideas. We’ve seen it in the way European telcos mimic AT&T’s rhetoric in claiming content companies ride their pipes for free, and therefore really ought to pay an additional tax to the phone companies (again, you know, just because). Despite being such a bizarre, fundamentally flawed assumption, the concept carries a lot of traction in telecom circles, thanks largely to hired think tanks and PR flacks who go to great, great lengths to frame it as entirely reasonable.

Yet oddly, the “hey, give me more money for doing nothing” approach hasn’t worked well, resulting in AT&T recently introducing their “sponsored data” idea. As we recently discussed, sponsored data involves certain large companies paying AT&T an extra fee to have their content not count against wireless consumer caps. While framed by AT&T as “free shipping” or a “1-800 number for data,” it’s simply more of the same idea, and potentially devastating for smaller companies and startups that can’t afford to pay AT&T to get preferred listing in AT&T’s promotional materials. AT&T’s effectively imposing entirely arbitrary caps (based in no way on real-world economics or network congestion), then charging multiple times for the same bandwidth.

Not too surprisingly, AT&T’s latest brain child has again had an infectious impact on overseas telcos. UK’s Vodafone now says the company is interested in trying the sponsored data idea as well:

Vodafone is looking at offering sponsored data to its customers. The move would see customers agreeing to receive sponsored data on their devices in return for lower data bills. CEO Vittorio Colao revealed Vodafone’s interest in sponsored dat this week. The CEO said he is closely watching US operator AT&T’s recent move to allow sponsored data.

What Colao is watching for specifically is the regulator response to AT&T’s sponsored data. If FCC boss and former wireless and cable lobbyist Tom Wheeler signs off on sponsored data as a form of “pricing innovation,” that opens the door to the possibility that overseas regulators can be conned into thinking this is actually an innovative idea as well. It’s worth noting that AT&T wanted to acquire Vodafone’s wireless assets, but it’s largely believed that AT&T’s incredibly cozy relationship with the NSA has soured European regulators on the idea — for now. After the European Parliament elections in May, it’s very likely AT&T and Vodafone will merge to become one company, which can further help spread AT&T’s bizarre and predatory logic worldwide.

Filed Under: data, sponsored data, uk, wireless
Companies: at&t, vodafone

EA: You Can Only Rate Our Dungeon Keeper App If you Give It A Perfect Rating

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the not-how-it's-supposed-to-work dept

When they write the future tome discussing how to run a video game company in such a way as to piss off as many customers as humanly possible, it seems quite likely that it will be titled The Electronic Arts Guide To Business. Between doing the old customer demand flip-flop when it came to SimCity, attempts to lock their games down from the modding community, and their practice of shutting down games in which real customers have spent real money, the company at times appears to be some kind of macabre performance art piece on how to be as anti-customer as possible. Word of mouth has supplied a reputation for EA that is less than desirable, leading some to wonder how they might be able to turn their PR ship around.

Jeffrey Nonken writes in about one method EA has come up with to combat the perception of their games from customers. It’s a delightfully cynical plan to try to convince customers that they can only rate EA games in the marketplace if they agree to give a perfect review.

Dungeon Keeper sure has a high rating on the Google Play Store for a game loathed by many. Its 4.5 star average of over 84K user reviews suggests that people are really liking EA’s microtransaction-heavy affair. Only there’s one thing this rating system isn’t telling you: customers are only given the option to rate the game if they say they’ll give it five stars.

See, on Android you’re given the option to rate the Dungeon Keeper after a certain period of play. Only instead of tapping the appropriate number of stars you think it deserves, you’re asked if you think it should receive “1-4 stars” or “5 stars”. As reported by PocketGamer, selecting the latter option takes you to the game’s Google Play Store where you can rate it, while the former option simply takes you to a new “feedback” prompt asking “What would it take to make Dungeon Keeper a 5-star game?” Your options: “email us” or “not now.”

Ah, it’s so simple! If you want to make sure your games are highly rated, attempt to convince customers that they can only rate the game with a perfect rating! More beautifully, while you can still rate the game whatever you like after promising a 5 star review, this method allows for the wonderful practice of forcing your customers to lie in order to do so. It’s like an evil multiplication machine!

Oh, and that ability to lie and review at less than five stars? That’s what makes this sneaky attempt to garner favorable reviews a-okay, according to EA.

“We’re always looking at new ways to gather player feedback so that we can continue to improve our games. The ‘rate this app’ feature in the Google Play version of Dungeon Keeper was designed to help us collect valuable feedback from players who don’t feel the game is worth a top rating. We wanted to make it easier for more players to send us feedback directly from the game if they weren’t having the best experience. Players can always continue to leave any rating they want on the Google Play Store.”

Right, except you aren’t being upfront about that with your customers, whose feedback you so greatly desire. Unless that feedback is a low rating in the marketplace, in which case your customers can either figure out they have that option on their own, or they can suck it. Meanwhile, of course word about this devious attempt will make the rounds, cementing most folks’ opinion of EA as being as consumer un-friendly as possible.

I guess they’re still vying for that “Worst Company” three-peat.

Filed Under: android, dungeon keeper, video games
Companies: ea, electronic arts

Congress Moves to Ban In-Flight Cell Calls, Blowhards at 30,000 Feet

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the that-guy-in-seat-17C-simply-won't-shut-up dept

For many, many years electronics were banned during take off and landing and below 10,000 feet, purportedly to protect avionics from possible interference — even if evidence of this interference threat was — for the vast majority of devices — non-existent. While it took years of tests followed by even more years of bumbling bureaucratic stumbling and repeated recommendations, back in October the FAA announced they were easing restrictions on in-flight electronics rules, allowing the use of things like e-readers during all phases of a flight. If you’ve flown since you’ve probably noticed the changes, even if flight attendants remain occasionally confused about the magical plane-crash protecting abilities of your iPad’s airplane mode.

Last month FCC boss Tom Wheeler then took things further by proposing to eliminate the FCC ban on in-flight cellular phone calls (see the FCC FAQ), and the FCC is still fielding comments on the rule changes (mostly negative). While Wheeler and the FCC took a lot of grief from consumers annoyed that they’ll be inundated with chatty cathys at 30,000 feet, Wheeler rather correctly argued that with tests showing no interference, the FCC’s role as a technical regulator was complete, and it would be up to the FAA, Congress or the airlines to institute new guidelines protecting you from that annoying chatterbox in 17C:

“I do not want the person in the seat next to me yapping at 35,000 feet any more than anyone else. But we are not the Federal Courtesy Commission… Technology has produced a new network reality recognized by governments and airlines around the world. Our responsibility is to recognize that new reality’s impact on our old rules.”

Since then, the Department of Transportation has hinted that they might create new rules, and the CEO of Delta has tried to win consumer brownie points by issuing a public letter stating they’ll never allow in-flight phone conversations. Fast forward to this week, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has approved a bill (HR3676, pdf) banning in-flight cellular (or VoIP) calls. House Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) insists it’s “common sense” to keep in-flight calls off limits:

“In our day-to-day lives, when we find someone’s cell phone call to be too loud, too close, or too personal, we can just walk away,” he said. “But at 30,000 feet, there’s nowhere else for an airline passenger to go. Under this bill, passengers will be able to use their mobile devices to stay connected, through getting online, emailing, texting, and more. During flights, it is common sense and common courtesy to continue keeping cell phone calls on the ground.”

Even if by some strange chance Congress can’t work together to pass a bill (there’s a similar bill winding its way through the Senate), there’s a good chance that in-flight calls could be so expensive as to be of limited appeal (remember $5 per minute calls via Airfone?). While some airlines could follow Delta’s lead and step in to block phone calls, it seems like only a matter of time before an airline comes up with the “innovative” idea to charge a fee if users want to sit in the soundproofed section of the aircraft.

Filed Under: congress, department of transportation, fcc, tome wheeler
Companies: delta

NSA, Which Once Claimed It Needed Every Phone Record, Now Claims It Actually Gets Less Than 20%

Failures

from the is-that-supposed-to-be-comforting? dept

Ever since the first Snowden leaks about the way the NSA interpreted Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow it to collect all call records from various telcos, one of the key arguments that has been made by the program’s defenders is that it was necessary to have every single call record to make the important connections between terrorists. Multiple officials have argued that to find the “needle in the haystack” they need to be able to collect the whole haystack. In fact, that was part of the argument made by the few judges who have reviewed and approved this program. In the very first FISC ruling that actually analyzed the legality of the program (as opposed to earlier approvals that never bothered with an analysis), the court clearly indicated that it was necessary to collect everything:

The government depends on this bulk collection because if production of the information were to wait until the specific identifier connected to an international terrorist group were determined, most of the historical connections (the entire purpose of this authorization) would be lost. The analysis of past connections is only possible “if the Government has collected and archived a broad set of metadata that contains within it the subset of communications that can later be identified as terrorist-related.” Because the subset of terrorist communications is ultimately contained within the whole of the metadata produced, but can only be found after the production is aggregated and then queried using identifiers determined to be associated with identified international terrorist organizations, the whole production is relevant to the ongoing investigation out of necessity.

That legal tapdancing aside, it basically argues that the only way this data makes sense is if the NSA has all of it. Similarly, when Judge William Pauley found the program legal late last year, he too relied on the argument that the NSA needed all the data.

And yet… it appears that they’re actually not getting that much data. A new report from the Washington Post claims that the NSA is actually only getting between 20 to 30% of the data. The Wall Street Journal rushed out a quick story claiming it’s actually less than 20%.

Apparently, while the NSA has gotten approvals to get data on landline calls from Verizon and AT&T, it actually hasn’t yet gone after the same data from most mobile phone calls. For example, even though it gets Verizon landlines, it apparently does not collect the data on Verizon Wireless. Nor does it collect the data from T-Mobile. There are somewhat conflicting reports as to why this is, but the Washington Post piece suggests that the incident in 2009 in which FISC chief judge Reggie Walton nearly shut the whole program down over compliance failures has basically stopped the NSA from updating the program, because everywhere they look there have been more (you guessed it) compliance failures, and they’re simply not set up to handle mobile phone data. Update: And some are questioning the whole claim here, noting that the orders that have been revealed do appear to request IMEI and IMSI data — information that is only associated with mobile phones.

“It’s not simply the ability to go to the court and order some vendor to give you more records, but you have to make sure that the [agency’s collection system] is prepared and ready to take the data and meet all the requirements of the court,” the former official said. “You don’t want to turn it on and get hundreds of millions of records, only to find out that you’ve got the moral equivalent of raw sewage spilling into the Chesapeake Bay.”

The process of preparing the system can take months, said the senior U.S. official, adding that mobile calls have different data elements than land-line calls. “That’s a really detailed set of activities where we get sample data in, and we march it through our systems,” the official said. “We do that again and again and again. We put in auditing procedures to make sure it works. So before we turn on that mobility data, we make sure it works. . . . It’s very complex.”

Compounding the challenge, the agency in 2009 struggled with compliance issues, including what a surveillance court found were “daily violations of the minimization procedures set forth in [court] orders” designed to protect Americans’ call records that “could not otherwise have been legally captured in bulk.”

As a result, the NSA’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, ordered an “end-to-end” review of the program, during which additional compliance incidents were discovered and reported to the court. The process of uncovering problems and fixing them took months, and the same people working to address the compliance problems were the ones who would have to prepare the database to handle more records.

Basically, there have been so many compliance problems that the NSA has had to work overtime to try to fix their systems and prepare for an influx of mobile phone data. The Wall Street Journal version of the report says that part of the problem is the NSA can’t figure out how to strip location data from mobile phone data, and because collecting that information might lead to compliance issues, they haven’t been able to figure out how to do it without running into more trouble down the road.

But fear not, surveillance state lovers, the NSA is getting ready and its goal is to get back to collecting nearly every phone record from every phone provider. Once the systems are in place, they appear to fully intend to send over some requests to the FISA court to get all those mobile operators to comply as well. One hopes that, this time, with so much more awareness of what’s going on, at least one of those mobile operators will fight back.

Either way, this whole thing actually shows just how ridiculous the NSA’s claims are that it absolutely needs all this data to keep us safe. The very fact that this report is coming out in both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal at nearly the same time suggests a stupid sort of PR attempt on the part of the NSA, which seems to think that after months of insisting they need it all, they can now placate people by saying “well, we really only collect about 20% of the data (though we’re hoping to collect it all).” Not only does this actually highlight the widespread compliance problems with this data, it further shows that the argument that somehow collecting it all is necessary to keep us safe is just completely wrong.

Filed Under: bulk metadata, cell phones, compliance issues, location data, mobile phones, nsa, phone records, section 215, surveillance