The most forceful push back against law enforcement’s quest for easy access to cellphone-call data and content is not always coming from privacy groups, but from the manufacturers of the phones and the telecommunications companies that have grown in popularity. Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo are, to varying degrees, saying no to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and others who claim the need to easily trace calling and receiving locations and to be able to search stored communication content.
The companies say that their customers want the assurance of privacy, especially overseas customers where the who-cares-what-everyone-knows attitude has much less of a following and where governments may be aggressive in identifying troublemakers. Apple, for example, is now earning about two-thirds of its revenue overseas.
In a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, cellphone makers Apple and Google have made it clear that they are pushing ahead with embedding encryption techniques that prevent anyone but the phone owner from determining what was said. The FBI, for one, has responded by saying that those encryption conversion keys should be available to law enforcement.
It was an NSA contractor’s clerk, Edward Snowden, who revealed the breadth of the NSA’s communications scanning, which put the spotlight on the communications companies. After having to acquiesce to the NSA’s demands individually, and secretly, after Sept. 11, the companies now are publicly voicing their opposition to the federal demands.
For them, it is a matter of what the customer wants and, for Americans, the Fourth Amendment.
At the same time, AT&T is now opposing what has been relatively easy for law enforcement to do: gain the approximate location of an individual from phone, text and email signals that are picked up from nearby cell towers. The Journal also reports that easy access – AT&T and Verizon received 265,000 law-enforcement requests in the first six months of 2014 – has triggered a negative reaction from those companies’ CEOs.
Now, a judge can approve the data-search request, rather than issuing a warrant. A warrant, the Journal points out, requires a higher standard of proof, and while the telecommunications companies have not been specific, a warrant could be closer to what they want.
In other conversations about privacy, there have been suggestions that raw phone data should be held by only the telecommunications companies, not law enforcement, and only as long as the companies usually retain it. That could be six months, or three.
Telecommunications companies are masters at generating revenue for themselves through product improvements and pricing, and bit by bit, they are developing databases about our shopping choices and our habits. But in forcing federal law-enforcement authorities to set a higher standard for its intelligence needs, a standard that should include far fewer phone users, the companies deserve praise. Their motivations may be largely financial and to protect their own credibility, but the spinoff is a benefit to all.
