When a law enforcement agency completes a cell tower dump, they are given data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to the targeted cell phone towers over a set span of time, usually an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and wireless providers, and can net information from thousands of phones, according to USA Today. On Thursday, March 27th the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, and other government agencies asking about information regarding these tower dumps. According to Katie Haas of the ACLU Human Rights Program, “Cell tower dumps aren’t rare. A congressional inquiry found that companies received at least 9,000 tower dump requests in 2012, and in 2013 Verizon alone reported receiving 3,200 such requests. Even when they were successful in helping to solve a crime, virtually all of those dumps also resulted in the government obtaining location information about hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”
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