8 ms·

Virginia Police Have Been Stockpiling Private Phone Records

240 points by driverdan 12y ago

dmix 12y ago
There are police "fusion centers" all over the US doing similar data acquisition. The DHS is not only militarizing local police forces, they are turning them into mini-intelligence agencies. I highly recommend reading this investigation by a redditor into Fusion centers: https://pay.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1h3pc2/how_police_track_your_driving_police_agencies/caqnx3c https://pay.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1h3pc2/how_poli...
- snsr 12y ago
  A list of "fusion centers" from the DHS itself - http://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-information http://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-infor...
- Spooky23 12y ago
  This document from Michigan talks somewhat about how the fusion centers interact with the Feds, and use a Federal-provided system (run by a private company?) to do their work. http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cybersecurity/MichiganCyberInitiative2011_365631_7.pdf http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cybersecurity/MichiganCybe...
- MichaelApproved 12y ago
  You no longer need to link to pay.reddit.com to use their secure website. Reddit now has security implemented on the main domain https://reddit.com https://reddit.com
- mattlutze 12y ago
  Fusion centers weren't put in place to militarize the civilian police forces or turn them into mini-intelligence agencies. The fusion centers (those that work -- many of them have communication "issues", according to congressional investigations IIRC) were designed to simplify collaboration between law enforcement agencies around the US. There's a lot of interesting things that go on in the big (and little) cities in the country, but it's incredibly difficult for individual agencies to know what's going on in any of the others, except what they read in the newspaper. Using DHS as a service bus, they can better understand trends and collaborate on actions to deter or disable larger criminal networks. Yes, Homeland Security gets easier access to local police intelligence and stats as well, but DHS and FBI I think have jurisdiction to get that anyways. The point of these, though, is ultimately providing better information to police agencies so they can make better-informed decisions.
pdabbadabba 12y ago
I find this creepy, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what's so interesting about it. Various police departments within a discrete area of Virginia (and who, I'm sure, often coordinate in other totally legitimate ways) are simply sharing information that they have obtained through supposedly legal processes. I for one am completely fine with law enforcement agencies sharing evidence that they have lawfully obtained (and they do this routinely with, e.g., the NCIS fingerprint database). That law enforcement agencies around the country do this with other information, including phone records, in so-called "fusion centers" was, I thought, already widely known. Is this somehow different? Of course, here, there is good reason to be concerned about the way that many of the records have been obtained, and certainly this revelation provides further illustration of the unsettling ways that law enforcement can use phone records. Accordingly, it provides further reason to scrutinize the original collection of those records. But is there reason to think that this sharing is illegal in itself?
- DaFranker 12y ago
  IANAL. Also I haven't read Virginia's code of law. However, in most american states, "obtained legally" != "legal to archive" != "legal to look at whenever you want" != "legal to share" != "legal to use for any purpose other than that which it was originally obtained for". Which means, while the gathering of the data may have been done legally, the archival and preservation of the data beyond their original purpose may be itself illegal, let alone sharing it, looking at it for reasons unrelated to the original cause, and using it for other purposes.
  - pdabbadabba 12y ago
    Ah! A very good point. Does anyone else know more about this than, apparently, I do? Edit: After a bit of Googling, it looks like this may be OK under Virginia Law. In short, it appears that the governing law is the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, which provides an exception to retention and sharing restrictions for "criminal intelligence information." Here is a somewhat off-topic but informative opinion from the Virginia AG about retention and sharing of license plate reader information. http://www.vachiefs.org/images/uploads/docs/AG_Opinion_LPR.pdf http://www.vachiefs.org/images/uploads/docs/AG_Opinion_LPR.p...
higherpurpose 12y ago
Even the police is becoming a mini-NSA now. The worst part is they are encouraged to do this from the top-down (DHS, FBI, DOJ).
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  Wasn't one of the major findings after 9/11 and big complaint that law enforcement wasn't communicating enough and purposefully too siloed?
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Sharing information have with other agencies within the legal boundaries (warrants generally) and in a transparent way is fine. What is not fine is: 1) encouraging the police to do illegal mass surveillance of citizens, too, with Stingrays and other methods 2) use information obtained in an illegal way (such as NSA spying on Americans) to do parallel construction by telling cops exactly who to stop at check points because they already know through illegal spying that he committed a crime, and then using that in Court, and saying they find out about his crime at a regular traffic stop.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    No, that was propaganda.
    - res0nat0r 12y ago
      Why is everything government related on HN now propaganda or fueled by conspiracy theory?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        res0nat0r 12y ago
        Read the 9/11 Commission Report.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
room505 12y ago
The Washington Post has detailed information on the States. Here's Virginia: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states/virginia/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Balgair 12y ago
Honestly, looking at my state's centers (as linked in another comment) they all look pretty benign. Like, just regular inter-agency communications. But after reading the WIRED article, it seems much worse than that. Assuming that you buy that the NSA needs to look at my texts to my wife about buying milk for national security, that the local cops need to beggars belief. Especially when they are elected officials and fellow citizens that are here to enforce laws and public safety. Are drug dealers and bored teenagers THAT big of a threat? How can I relate to the local constabulary at the PTA meeting when they know all my private medical issues and marital problems? The power differential is too great.
trhway 12y ago
i somehow feel that all the attempts to legally regulate/restrict the data gathering by government is like an attempt to board a train that has already left the station - just a mental refusal to accept new reality. World has changed (or has been disrupted in SV lingo). We have to adapt to new conditions. Just like taxi cabs and regulators have to adapt to Uber/AirBnb, we have to adapt to NSA/Palantir.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > Just like taxi cabs and regulators have to adapt to Uber/AirBnb, we have to adapt to NSA/Palantir. If only someone like you were around 200+ years ago to tell Washington, Jefferson, and Adams that they should accept new reality and adapt to the British seizing our ships, blockading our ports, burning our towns, and spilling our blood.
  - trhway 12y ago
    on the other side Native Americans didn't adapt to the fire weapons used by colonists and used bows/arrows and horse mounted front attack tactics far too long. One can also argue that Washington et al. did accept the reality and thus didn't insist on some new laws/rules restricting British Crown power in the colonies.
    - spacemanmatt 12y ago
      Just how can one adapt to gunfire? Grow a shield?
  - shitlord 12y ago
    Don't be hyperbolic. trhway has a valid point. A lot of things around us are out of our control, so we have to adapt. Let's be honest, the political system is not within our control. Very, very little political change will come out of our complaints. Instead of repeatedly trying and failing to bring about meaningful change, we should adapt -- because that is the reasonable thing to do. We can't change the government's behavior, so let's change ours; something has to give.

240 points by driverdan 12y ago

dmix 12y ago

There are police "fusion centers" all over the US doing similar data acquisition. The DHS is not only militarizing local police forces, they are turning them into mini-intelligence agencies. I highly recommend reading this investigation by a redditor into Fusion centers: https://pay.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1h3pc2/how_police_track_your_driving_police_agencies/caqnx3c https://pay.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1h3pc2/how_poli...

snsr 12y ago
A list of "fusion centers" from the DHS itself - http://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-information http://www.dhs.gov/fusion-center-locations-and-contact-infor...
Spooky23 12y ago
This document from Michigan talks somewhat about how the fusion centers interact with the Feds, and use a Federal-provided system (run by a private company?) to do their work. http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cybersecurity/MichiganCyberInitiative2011_365631_7.pdf http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cybersecurity/MichiganCybe...
MichaelApproved 12y ago
You no longer need to link to pay.reddit.com to use their secure website. Reddit now has security implemented on the main domain https://reddit.com https://reddit.com
mattlutze 12y ago
Fusion centers weren't put in place to militarize the civilian police forces or turn them into mini-intelligence agencies. The fusion centers (those that work -- many of them have communication "issues", according to congressional investigations IIRC) were designed to simplify collaboration between law enforcement agencies around the US. There's a lot of interesting things that go on in the big (and little) cities in the country, but it's incredibly difficult for individual agencies to know what's going on in any of the others, except what they read in the newspaper. Using DHS as a service bus, they can better understand trends and collaborate on actions to deter or disable larger criminal networks. Yes, Homeland Security gets easier access to local police intelligence and stats as well, but DHS and FBI I think have jurisdiction to get that anyways. The point of these, though, is ultimately providing better information to police agencies so they can make better-informed decisions.

pdabbadabba 12y ago

I find this creepy, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what's so interesting about it. Various police departments within a discrete area of Virginia (and who, I'm sure, often coordinate in other totally legitimate ways) are simply sharing information that they have obtained through supposedly legal processes. I for one am completely fine with law enforcement agencies sharing evidence that they have lawfully obtained (and they do this routinely with, e.g., the NCIS fingerprint database). That law enforcement agencies around the country do this with other information, including phone records, in so-called "fusion centers" was, I thought, already widely known. Is this somehow different? Of course, here, there is good reason to be concerned about the way that many of the records have been obtained, and certainly this revelation provides further illustration of the unsettling ways that law enforcement can use phone records. Accordingly, it provides further reason to scrutinize the original collection of those records. But is there reason to think that this sharing is illegal in itself?

DaFranker 12y ago
IANAL. Also I haven't read Virginia's code of law. However, in most american states, "obtained legally" != "legal to archive" != "legal to look at whenever you want" != "legal to share" != "legal to use for any purpose other than that which it was originally obtained for". Which means, while the gathering of the data may have been done legally, the archival and preservation of the data beyond their original purpose may be itself illegal, let alone sharing it, looking at it for reasons unrelated to the original cause, and using it for other purposes.
- pdabbadabba 12y ago
  Ah! A very good point. Does anyone else know more about this than, apparently, I do? Edit: After a bit of Googling, it looks like this may be OK under Virginia Law. In short, it appears that the governing law is the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, which provides an exception to retention and sharing restrictions for "criminal intelligence information." Here is a somewhat off-topic but informative opinion from the Virginia AG about retention and sharing of license plate reader information. http://www.vachiefs.org/images/uploads/docs/AG_Opinion_LPR.pdf http://www.vachiefs.org/images/uploads/docs/AG_Opinion_LPR.p...

higherpurpose 12y ago

Even the police is becoming a mini-NSA now. The worst part is they are encouraged to do this from the top-down (DHS, FBI, DOJ).

res0nat0r 12y ago
Wasn't one of the major findings after 9/11 and big complaint that law enforcement wasn't communicating enough and purposefully too siloed?
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Sharing information have with other agencies within the legal boundaries (warrants generally) and in a transparent way is fine. What is not fine is: 1) encouraging the police to do illegal mass surveillance of citizens, too, with Stingrays and other methods 2) use information obtained in an illegal way (such as NSA spying on Americans) to do parallel construction by telling cops exactly who to stop at check points because they already know through illegal spying that he committed a crime, and then using that in Court, and saying they find out about his crime at a regular traffic stop.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  No, that was propaganda.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    Why is everything government related on HN now propaganda or fueled by conspiracy theory?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - res0nat0r 12y ago
        Read the 9/11 Commission Report.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

room505 12y ago

The Washington Post has detailed information on the States. Here's Virginia: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states/virginia/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/states...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Balgair 12y ago

Honestly, looking at my state's centers (as linked in another comment) they all look pretty benign. Like, just regular inter-agency communications. But after reading the WIRED article, it seems much worse than that. Assuming that you buy that the NSA needs to look at my texts to my wife about buying milk for national security, that the local cops need to beggars belief. Especially when they are elected officials and fellow citizens that are here to enforce laws and public safety. Are drug dealers and bored teenagers THAT big of a threat? How can I relate to the local constabulary at the PTA meeting when they know all my private medical issues and marital problems? The power differential is too great.

trhway 12y ago

i somehow feel that all the attempts to legally regulate/restrict the data gathering by government is like an attempt to board a train that has already left the station - just a mental refusal to accept new reality. World has changed (or has been disrupted in SV lingo). We have to adapt to new conditions. Just like taxi cabs and regulators have to adapt to Uber/AirBnb, we have to adapt to NSA/Palantir.

frostmatthew 12y ago
> Just like taxi cabs and regulators have to adapt to Uber/AirBnb, we have to adapt to NSA/Palantir. If only someone like you were around 200+ years ago to tell Washington, Jefferson, and Adams that they should accept new reality and adapt to the British seizing our ships, blockading our ports, burning our towns, and spilling our blood.
- trhway 12y ago
  on the other side Native Americans didn't adapt to the fire weapons used by colonists and used bows/arrows and horse mounted front attack tactics far too long. One can also argue that Washington et al. did accept the reality and thus didn't insist on some new laws/rules restricting British Crown power in the colonies.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    Just how can one adapt to gunfire? Grow a shield?
- shitlord 12y ago
  Don't be hyperbolic. trhway has a valid point. A lot of things around us are out of our control, so we have to adapt. Let's be honest, the political system is not within our control. Very, very little political change will come out of our complaints. Instead of repeatedly trying and failing to bring about meaningful change, we should adapt -- because that is the reasonable thing to do. We can't change the government's behavior, so let's change ours; something has to give.