The Hill: The ‘dirtboxes’ of the US Marshals Service

The Hill: The ‘dirtboxes’ of the US Marshals Service by Peter Toren:

Recent reports about the United States Marshals Service’s use of planes to collect location data from cell phones of suspects through devices known as “dirtboxes” — but which also involves collection of data from a large number of innocent cell phone users — raises serious questions about the process by which the government seeks to obtain the information and whether the records collected from non-suspects are being minimized.

The practice involving planes is simply a variant of the surveillance practice known as a “cell tower dump,” where the government obtains records from the owners of cell towers of all cell phones in contact with a specific cell tower or group of towers over a particular period of time.