Every phone generates only one location record that is kept current. That has nothing to do with how many emails, text, calls you make or receive, though those are part of that record.
So, looking at it another way, on any given day, there are 5 billion chances that your location has been tracked.
Thought I'd take that a bit further. The math says that every second there is 57,870.3 chances that your location record was collected.Dude, 
the math, it hurts!
No offense, your point is still well taken.
Given that the police in the US have started trawling through masses of phone location data to connect people with crimes, etc (without a warrant, of course), Iâm not surprised the NSA is doing this. I wonder who else is digging through this dirt?
With 1% of the Snowden documents released, much of the world is in an uproar. I wonder how the world will be after the remaining 99% are released.
Pretty sure this guy didnât need a review this serious:
Ibragim Todashev, who was killed by the FBI during a questioning, was shot six times, once in the crown of his head, photos shown at a press conference in Moscow reveal.
No, not 5 billion transactions, such as texts, emails, what-have-you. Itâs 5 billion associations with towers, or transfers between tower relays on the backend, thereby revealing the location of a cell device. It translates to hundreds of millions of cell phonesâ locations tracked per day. Which could be the same ones every day, or it could be a rolling look, which will eventually touch all cell phone users worldwide.
No wonder cell phone networks are so damn slow. They are encumbered by the metadata collection. Just wait - when the datacenter in Utah is completed, the cell network will crawl even slower because the feds will then be sucking up all the actual data in addition to the metadata. Egads, weâre just making it so hard for ourselves, arenât we?
iâm sorry, but iâm confused. (this could be a direct result of willful ignorance in worldly mattersâŚ)
Less than one percent of the Snowden documents have been made public to date. ?
where are the rest? who has them, and who is doling them out?
And worse yet, nothing quite compares to this in producing guilt by association - or maybe we should call it âguilt by proximityâ.
Just think - you are the friend or family member of someone with mental health issues, radical political opinions, or the one you associate with closely is merely associated with someone else who fits that description. You spend a significant amount of time with that friend or family member - grocery shopping, doctor appointments, maybe even a road trip. Things that ordinary people do. But now, should that person (or their associate) flip out and commit some crime, or worse yet, become interesting enough to the NSA just because they âmightâ flip out at some future date, that you get treated to porn-scamming, sometimes lethal FBI questioning, a no-fly order, or some other type of NSA-powered harassment.
Should you be afraid? Probably. Because, you cannot possibly predict the future. All you can see clearly is the present, in which this person is doing absolutely nothing unusual. Say goodbye to your freedom to associate - because being tracked like this while associating with anybody at all puts you at potential risk. This is not âassociationâ in the sense that it is meant by more public political association. This is private association, which may at times go out into public.
Maybe, you decide not to allow this bullshit to alter your life.
But maybe, that person you associated with was a more casual acquaintance. Maybe, you have mainly maintained the association in order to be helpful to a troubled person. And maybe, you decide to abandon the relationship because being constantly tracked and treated as suspect is just too scary. So what happens to you? Did your quality of life just suffer?
And that person you associated with? How about their quality of life? Does your fear help actually push them over the edge? Is suicide now a greater risk? Murder? Extreme hatred for this government? What about someone like the Newton shooter? (I saw many commenters blaming his family for his actions.) Or what about the kids in the first Colorado school massacre. Many, many people blamed their friends and family members that time. So, did the NSA surveillance just push us to marginalize such people even further by discouraging any association with them? This is just a made-up exampleâŚbut it was dead easy to do. Way too easy.
And so much for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The NSA has decided that all you really need is pursuit of potential criminal targets and whatever safety they may claim to provide. And screw anyone who argues and fights for change - they are terrorists!
Itâs worse than that. To be caught in this sort of dragnet you donât even have to know anyone âof interest to the authoritiesâ. If your mobile phone happens to be logged into the same cell as theirs this means you are physically near them. Thereby proximity. Thereby possible association aka letâs look a little closer.
This sort of thing can happen to residents of a part of town where a political rally or demonstration takes place:
Good point. So, that was nearly 20 years ago. Iâd have to think hard to even remember every place I went 20 years ago, lol.
Yes, itâs bleak and Orwellian.
âBleakâ tends to portray an endless and sad situation. How about âcriminallyâ? That way, the clear implication of perpetrators deserving some justice comes into it. We need some super-hero stuff right about now.
Gangs already hide guns around a city for a momentâs need to pop someoneâs ass. Now that theyâre even more paranoid about tech, what do you want to bet that the criminals out there have stashes of burner phones to be used at a momentâs notice. No need to carry your own. Just pick up a hidden one or a contactâs phone and then leave it where you got it when youâre done.
What Iâve read seems to indicate that heâs given document sets to Glenn Greenwald and a few others who are parcelling out the data as they research and then write about it. I would assume itâs a slow business to verify the stuff theyâve got since the people who can vet it are spooks or in some sort of military/industrial corp.
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