INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
T-Mobile has revealed an uptick in the number of demands for data it receives from the government.
The cellular giant quietly posted its
2017 transparency report on August 14, revealing a 12 percent increase in the number of overall data demands it responded to compared to the
previous year.
The report said the company responded to 219,377 subpoenas, an 11 percent rise on 2017
These demands were issued by federal agencies and do not require any judicial oversight
The company also responded to 55,372 court orders, a 13 percent rise, and 27,203 warrants, a rise of 19 percent.
But the number of wiretap
orders — which allow police to listen in to calls in real time — went down by half on the previous year.
A spokesperson for T-Mobile
told TechCrunch that the figures reflect a ''typical increase of legal demands across the board& and that the increases are &consistent with
past years.
Although the results reveal more requests for customer data, the transparency report did not say how many customers were
affected.
T-Mobile has 77 million users as of its second-quarter earnings.
Several tech companies began publishing how many government
requests for customer data they received since Google debut report in 2010
But it was only after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013 that revealed mass surveillance by the National Security Agency when tech
companies and telcos began regularly publishing transparency reports, seen as an effort to counter the damaging claims that companies helped
the government spy.
T-Mobile became the last major cell carrier to issue a transparency report two years later in 2015.
The company also
said that it responded to 64,266 requests by law enforcement for customers& historical cell site data
That data became the focal point of the United States vs
Carpenter case earlier this year, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement must obtain a warrant for historical cell and
That figure is expected to fall during the 2018 reporting year as the new bar to obtain a court-signed warrant is higher.
T-Mobile also said
it received 46,395 requests to track customers& real-time location, and 4,855 warrants and orders for tower dumps, which police can use to
obtain information on all the nearby devices connected to a cell tower during a particular period of time.
But the number of national
security requests received declined during 2017.
The number of national security letters used by federal agents to obtain call records in
secret and the number of orders granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were each below 1,000 requests for the full
year.
Tech companies and telcos are highly restricted in how they can report the number of classified orders demanding customer data in
secret, and can only report in ranges of requests they received.
Since the Freedom Act was signed into law in 2015, the Justice Department
began allowing companies to report in narrower ranges.
