Verizon offers details on records releases

CNN — Verizon offers details on records releases:

Verizon Communications says it has pro­vided fed­eral, state and local law enforce­ment agen­cies tens of thou­sands of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and busi­ness records relat­ing to cus­tomers based on emer­gency requests with­out a court order or admin­is­tra­tive subpoena.

In an October 12 let­ter to mem­bers of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, a senior Verizon offi­cial says that from 2005 through this September there were 63,700 such requests, and of those, 720 came from fed­eral authorities.

The emer­gency requests, how­ever, were some of the more sur­pris­ing data pro­vided. Some of the emer­gency sit­u­a­tions Verizon said it assisted in included locat­ing the Internet address of a child preda­tor who had abducted a 13-year-old girl (who was then found due to that infor­ma­tion) and help­ing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents track down a man using a web­cam to broad­cast the sex­ual abuse of a 6-year-old boy.

The num­ber of requests is impres­sive, and indica­tive of the prob­lem — 63,700 requests with no court order or sub­poena? That cer­tainly sug­gests a poten­tial lack of over­sight, and a poten­tial pri­vacy prob­lem. On the other hand, the spe­cific sto­ries pro­vided on two requests (almost cer­tainly picked for exactly this rea­son) shows the dif­fi­cult bal­anc­ing prob­lem involved in reg­u­lat­ing the poten­tial pri­vacy inva­sions: who could argue with stop­ping child preda­tors? Of course, this may sim­ple be a “straw man” argu­ment, since there cer­tainly exists a poten­tial over­sight solu­tion that would still suc­ceed in locat­ing such peo­ple, while pre­serv­ing over­sight of the process.