Irreal

If you’re a fan of cop shows and the like, you undoubtedly know that the police can ask your mobile carrier for a record of your location information. Mostly, they’re supposed to get a warrant but often the phone companies will hand over the information without one. Regardless, this is something most of us know and accept as normal law enforcement activity.

It turns out, though, that the carriers have been selling your location information to “data aggregators” who in turn sell it to anyone willing to pay. They’re getting the information from cell towers so it doesn’t matter what phone you’re using or what apps you use. The article at the link provides an example of how the reporter was able to pay a bounty hunter $300 and get the location of a random phone. The carriers for their part swear they only sell it to “legitimate” users and reselling it to those not entitled to it is strictly against their policies. The truth is that everyone in the industry knows this is going on but they don’t care because it provides a revenue stream.

Except that after the Motherboard article the carriers are falling all over themselves to clean up their act before the regulators get involved. Already AT&T is promising to stop selling the data to anyone and the other carriers are jumping on the same bandwagon. We here at Irreal have a deep and abiding cynicism about almost all government action and would be normally be the last to suggest they get involved but, really, the carriers are out of control and this needs to be made illegal. Otherwise as soon as the outrage dies down, the carriers will be right back to selling our information.

Five years ago, I wrote a series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4] on the U.S. Government’s actions against Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect who had just completed her PhD at Stanford. You can read the details in the above posts or by following the links in them but the TL;DR is that Ibrahim had been placed on the “No Fly List” and although she was allowed to travel to Malayasia for a visit, she wasn’t allowed to fly back to the U.S.

After a decade of litigation in which the government repeatedly and provably lied in court and made preposterous claims—claiming, for example, that certain information was too secret to be allowed in court even though the information was publicly available to anyone—she finally prevailed and had her name removed from the no fly list. The final irony was the she had been placed on the list by mistake, a fact the government knew for years but failed to reveal. Attorney General Eric Holder even signed an affidavit in which he swore to have personal knowledge that revealing the reason Ibrahim was placed on the no fly list would harm national security.

Now after another five years, Ibrahim has won another victory. After winning the original case, her lawyers asked for 3.9 millions dollars to cover legal costs—there was, remember, a decade of litigation—but the trial judge reduced the award to \$454,756.07 making the absurd claim that there was no evidence the government had acted in bad faith. The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the judge’s ruling, ordered that he recalculate the fees, and made clear that the result should be closer to the \$3.9 million than to the initial half million.

If you’re a U.S. citizen—or even if you’re not—this case should suggest some questions. Here’s a couple that occurred to me:

1. Why haven’t the government officials been disbarred and fired? That doesn’t include the FBI agent who made the original mistake mainly because of a poorly designed form, but all the lawyers who knew the truth and nonetheless persisted in their false claims about Ibrahim in a court of law.
2. Why isn’t Holder in jail? He swore to the court that he had personal knowledge that revealing the reason for placing Ibrahim on the no fly list (it was a mistake) would cause significant harm to national security. If Holder’s defense is that he was lied to by the FBI, then why isn’t that person in jail?