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 ·Frontier Communi..
| reply to MxxCon
Re: What circumstances is a tower dump required said by MxxCon:Police monitoring a drug house and want to hear/know about all the phone calls coming to/out of it...?
This.
A tower "dump" (which it isn't really; they are just monitoring which mobiles are connected to that tower) wouldn't be very effective for tracking a single user. It could prove to be very effective at gaining insight into an ongoing criminal enterprise. |
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 ThalerPremium
join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA
kudos:3 | said by Crookshanks:A tower "dump" (which it isn't really; they are just monitoring which mobiles are connected to that tower) wouldn't be very effective for tracking a single user. It could prove to be very effective at gaining insight into an ongoing criminal enterprise.
Unless you were to have tower "dump" requests of all towers within a target area. (ie. if LAPD paid for access to all towers in Los Angeles, it'd be a fair means to wiretap any citizen in the area).
Granted, each cell tower would cost ~$25k a year to get these access rights...so that'd be a large amount of change to get constant surveillance on a city of any size. |
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Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| said by Thaler:Unless you were to have tower "dump" requests of all towers within a target area. (ie. if LAPD paid for access to all towers in Los Angeles, it'd be a fair means to wiretap any citizen in the area). It's not a "wiretap" though, it's a list of the cell phones connected to a particular tower and which numbers they are calling/texting. It's more analogous to a pen register than a wiretap and quite probably necessary to investigate ongoing criminal enterprises in the era of mobile phones.
Mind you, I don't like it anymore than you do, but let's just be clear on what it is we are discussing. A law enforcement agency receiving the meta-data on calls and texts is quite different than that same agency receiving the actual content of those communicates. |
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ThalerPremium
join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA
kudos:3 | Um, wasn't one of the option add-ons listed in the article to also get audio of the calls? |
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