Here's How Often AT&T, Sprint, And Verizon Each Hand Over Users' Data To The Government

Congressman Ed Markey released a collection of letters he received from major phone carriers in response to a query he sent them earlier this year, demanding that they reveal how often they give users’ data to the government and under what circumstances.   Andy Greenberg of Forbes compiled the report into the following bullet points below.


It’s important to remember that the information revealed Monday includes “tower dumps,” too, says Chris Calebrese, an attorney with the ACLU. “Just the sheer volume of orders is amazing, but a significant chunk are dumps from entire cell towers,” he says. “That means tons of people’s information is being grabbed with a single one of these orders.”

• Sprint received 500,000 subpoenas for its data from law enforcement in the last year. That doesn’t include court orders for wiretaps and location data, which Sprint didn’t track annually but which added up to 325,982 requests in the last five years. The company also says it doesn’t have the resources to track how many of those requests it responded to or rejected. The company has 221 employees dedicated to processing and responding to government requests for its data.
• Verizon received 260,000 requests for its users data in 2011, including wiretaps, calling records, text message information, and location information, but doesn’t add how many were fulfilled.
• AT&T received 131,400 subpoenas in criminal cases for its information in 2011, as well as 49,700 warrants or orders that it hand over data. It rejected 965 of them. The company says it employees more than 100 staffers full-time to respond to law enforcement demands.
• T-Mobile told Congressman Markey it “does not disclose” the number of law enforcement requests it receives or complies with.
• MetroPCS says it received fewer than 12,000 requests a month on average for the last six years.
• Cricket received 42,000 requests last year, and U.S. Cellular received 19,734 requests in 2011.
• The New York Times counts a total of 1.3 million requests for users’ information in the last year based on Markey’s data.
• The number of data requests seems to be growing quickly across the board. The major carriers who measured the growth in requests over time agreed that law enforcement demands have risen 12-16% year-over-year.