Australian Police Use Telcos For Cell "Tower Dump" of All Connected Users' Data 60
AHuxley (892839) writes The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Australian federal and state police are using a no warrant cell phone tower metadata access technique called a "tower dump".
A "tower dump" provides the identity, activity and location of all cell phones that connect a cellphone tower(s) over time (an hour or two). The metadata from thousands of phones and numbers connected are then sorted. Australian law-enforcement agencies made 330,000 requests for metadata in 2012-13.
AHuxley links to some U.S. views on the same kind of massive data grab: The Wall Street Journal says they caputure innocent users' data; the Chicago Police Department is being sued for information on its purchases of equipment associated with this kind of slurping; and the EFF asks whether warrant protection for users' data will be extended by voice-comm companies as it has been for ISPs. I wonder what people would think of an occasional "postal zone dump" employing the same kind of dragnet but for communications on paper.
WSJ (Score:4, Funny)
You know, I'm sure the WSJ did not fucking say that, because for all the money they make they at least spend some of it on a decent spell-check or even, gasp, a human editor. I mean holy motherfuck. Here I am combing the streets, looking for work. You're making hundreds, maybe thousands. maybe even tens of thousands of dollars per hour from the traffic on this site. You can't even spell capture? I mean, in google-chrome-stable it shows me even in this box right here when a word supposedly mis-spelled, though often it's just saying that it's not a word in the dictionary, such as motherfuck. Motherfucker, though, that passes.
And don't bother blaming the submitter since this part came after his quotation section. You fucking douche bags. Get it together. I don't care about beta; it's your site. But as a thinking person I'm offended that your hacker mentality has not permeated over into the literate part of your fucking brain: never stop improving, motherfucker. I wouldn't be half as good at writing code now if it weren't for the self-criticism and absolute discipline that my early days as a fiction writer instilled in me.
You fucking turd, seriously. When do we get to start rating the actual posts? Or is this whole feedback thing just a marketing technique for you, totally out of tune with Rob Malda's vision?