But naturally all of you are such good sheep that this is just another conspiracy theory ................
As privacy and security researcher Christopher Soghoian
revealed in 2009, "Sprint Nextel" and other telecom giants "provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009."
Soghoian wrote that this "massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers," a service eagerly provided our political minders by the telecoms as the secrecy-shredding web site
Cryptome revealed with their publication of
dozens of
Online Spying Guides.
As we now know, secret state agencies such as NSA and the FBI routinely grab customer records from the telecoms to obtain dialed telephone numbers, text messages, emails and instant messages, as well as web pages browsed and search engine queries in addition to a staggering mountain of geolocational data, oftentimes with a simple, warrantless request.
The NSA's so-called "President's Surveillance Program" for example, vacuums-up huge volumes of "transactional" records gleaned from domestic emails and internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel itineraries and phone records from other secret state satrapies as well as banks, credit reporting agencies and data-mining firms.
As
The Wall Street Journal reported more than three years ago, "the NSA's enterprise" is linked to "a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light."
Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman revealed that "the effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed," the tip of a vast surveillance iceberg.
But such programs could not function without the close, one might argue incestuous, collaboration between the secret state and their corporate partners as
The Washington Post disclosed last year in their
"Top Secret America" investigation.
In fact, as Soghoian and other researchers have learned, internet service providers and the telecoms "all have special departments, many open 24 hours per day, whose staff do nothing but respond to legal requests. Their entire purpose is to facilitate the disclosure of their customers' records to law enforcement and intelligence agencies--all following the letter of the law, of course."
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24597