Graduate Student Unveils Sprint's GPS Sharing With Feds > This "story" is Tabloid style garbage

This "story" is Tabloid style garbage

Agreed.

Triangulation tracking has been around since AMPS, built-in GPS transceivers on phones just makes it easier and accurate where direct line of sight and EVDO is possible and available. Anyone with remote common sense would know, even hope that enforcement would use these tools.

Anyone worried about big brother intrusion needs to wake up. This is a post 9/11 world.

reply to noname10

quote:

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Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.

The manager also revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated “pings” to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone.

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reply to Network Guy

People are as ignorant as much as their short-term memory.

Do you need another set of towers to fall to get you to wake up? You need another Obama spending your tax money on stupid shit?

This country is fucked up by the same people who elected our constituents.

WAKE UP

Take off the tinfoil hat, man. Sheesh, you need to wake up.

All this crap has been going on for centuries. Doing what the Bush administration did isn't going to make things all better. There more than like still will be more terrorist activities.

As for Obama spending my tax dollars, yes, go for it. It's better than wasting trillions on a useless war that Bush made up. Obama is trying to save the jobs of millions of American's. Would you like to continue to have a job?

My eyes are open and have been so. Take your own advice.

Obama needs to spend our tax dollars wisely. The first stimulus payment to get people spending was a dumb idea. How were people going to feel confident in their situation with a one-time rebate on their tax return when those same people are facing a layoff or reduced hours?

How is first-time home buyer tax credit helping the real estate problem? Are people still stupidly buying homes they can't afford? Or are people now snapping up foreclosed homes?

Easy answer.. Neither

Banks aren't lending and banks prefer sitting on foreclosed property hoping and betting the bubble will inflate again.

The war is a waste. At least we agree on that.

reply to fatness
Read the rest of the article and you will see the update and how it got blown out of proportion.
Tabloid Bloggin at it's best
»www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/su···lion-law

"The comments made by a Sprint corporate security officer during a recent conference have been taken out of context by this blogger. Specifically, the “8 million” figure, which the blogger highlights in his email and blog post, has been grossly misrepresented. The figure does not represent the number of customers whose location information was provided to law enforcement, as this blogger suggests.

Instead, the figure represents the number of individual “pings” for specific location information, made to the Sprint network as part of a series of law enforcement investigations and public safety assistance requests during the past year. It’s critical to note that a single case or investigation may generate thousands of individual pings to the network as the law enforcement or public safety agency attempts to track or locate an individual."

Btw I read the entire article yesterday and I knew it would get this result here.

reply to Network Guy

reply to imrf
What does Obama's wasting our taxpayer money and pushing the unemployment rate up to 10.2% on his watch have to do with fighting terrorism?

You brought up wasting tax dollars, and I just figured you were going to derail the train and talk about him using tax dollars to float companies that provide jobs to a lot of people.

Obama didn't push unemployment up, the craptastic economy did that, and that started under Bush's regime.

And that fighting terrorism thing is just a joke and excuse. It's not going to solve or change anything. If it helps you to sleep better at night, fine, believe in it. But it's not going to do anything.

reply to grydlok

reply to Network Guy

reply to NOVA_Guy

reply to fatness

reply to grydlok
I cannot explain specific uses, but it is very useful to give a sprint phone to an officer to carry for an instant and cheap GPS tracker when they are not in a vehicle.
In one such use, we tracked 20 of these phones every 15 seconds for 7 days; so we accounted for 10% of those pings with just that one use. In another such use, using a different portal than the one mentioned in the article but using sprint devices, we generate 130,000+ pings per day every day, over 36 million per year for just our department. Not a single one of those is tracking a civilian.

reply to Network Guy

reply to fatness
I do agree with you. I knew when I read this last night and saw how the authors failed to correct information or provide additional sources to validate the story.

reply to Network Guy

reply to Network Guy