US reports spike in cellphone surveillance

law enforcement agencies for their customers' phone records and the requests are on the rise, writes Canada.com.

This is according to data gathered as part of a congressional inquiry into cellphone surveillance.

Representative Edward Markey released data on Monday from nine wireless carriers revealing the number of requests in 2011 for cellphone records.

Neither law enforcement nor companies are required to report such requests, making the inquiry and release of information from the companies the first public accounting of law enforcement's use of cellphone surveillance.

The data provided include callers' locations, text messages and call logs among other information, Pakistan Observer reports.

“We cannot allow privacy protections to be swept aside with the sweeping nature of these information requests, especially for innocent consumers,” Markey noted.

The report revealed that Verizon Wireless as US number one carrier has seen a 15% increase a year in requests over the past five years, with almost 260 000 requests last year. This is while AT&T says it “responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day,” three times the number of requests in 2007.

One of the strangest aspects of the obtained records was the massive number of requests received by America's third largest carrier, Sprint, Axis of Logic says.

Sprint reported that they received around 500 000 requests, meaning that Sprint alone received almost as many requests as the top two largest carriers combined.

T-Mobile, on the other hand, refused to report the number of requests they received and merely said that the number of requests have grown at around 16% per year over the past decade.