Justice Department Expands Hunt for Data on Cellphones

Cellphones seem to be increasingly attractive to the Department of Justice, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show. Agencies affiliated with the department used more than 37,600 court orders in 2011 to gather cellphone data, a sharp increase from previous years. They were almost equally divided between “pen register” data, which captures outgoing phone numbers, and “trap and trace” orders, which refer to incoming phone numbers, which means one phone could have two separate orders associated with it. The total number has roughly doubled since 2007, when cellphone communications were more limited. By law, the data can be...

Read more: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/justice-department-expands-hunt-for-data-on-cellphones/