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TMCNet: BLOG: Sprint Connection: Slight(ly) paranoia(d) over Sprint's 8 million pings? [The Kansas City Star, Mo.]

[December 02, 2009]

BLOG: Sprint Connection: Slight(ly) paranoia(d) over Sprint's 8 million pings? [The Kansas City Star, Mo.]

(Kansas City Star (MO) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Dec. 2--About 20,000 times a day, Sprint Nextel reveals the whereabouts of some customers' cell phones (and presumably the customers) to law enforcement officials. And it has gotten the web buzzing.

Sprint says it has "pinged" customers' cell phones for official purposes about 8 million times in roughly 13 months.

The public revelation came from blogger Christopher Soghoian, at Slight Paranoia [http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html], who posted an audio clip of a Sprint official disclosing the pinging activity.

Others are picking up on the excitement, including Wired [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gps-data], Gizmodo [http://gizmodo.com/5417225/sprint-to-humans-we-know-where-you-are-and-so-do-the-police] and GigaOM [http://gigaom.com/2009/12/02/what-really-happened-when-sprint-fed-customer-data-to-cops/].

The recorded comment from Paul Taylor, manager of Sprint's electronic surveillance team, was that the telecom company had gotten 8 million law enforcement requests to ping customers' cell phones since offering access through a web interface in September 2008.

It's an automated system that becomes available once law enforcement officials jump through appropriate hoops.

Each ping doesn't mean another customer has been "spotted" for the feds.

Wired quoted a Sprint official saying that the company's automated web system allows investigators to ping the same phone repeatedly and generate "thousands of individual pings" to track one individual.

Matt Sullivan, a Sprint spokesman, said the automated pings can recur every 15 minutes and the feds can get a ping every three minutes if they're willing to sit there and push a button each time.

Sprint's working on a total of how many different customers the cellular spottings involved.

In a comment to this post, Sullivan said, as he did during an interview, that the number of customers is expected to tally in the thousands, certainly not 8 million, which is the total number of times phones were pinged.

Sullivan also said that most cellular devices allow such pings to locate their whereabouts.

He said official requests include not only criminal investigations but also emergencies such as Amber alerts and customer requests, for example, to ping phones left inside stolen cars To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com.

Copyright (c) 2009, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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