Law Enforcement Requests for Phone Billing Data Have Increased 2.5 Times
Over the past five years, investigative authorities have started requesting court access to data on connections between mobile subscribers 2.5 times more often. The number of such requests has been steadily increasing each year, according to data from the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court, as analyzed by RBC.
Billing data and communication monitoring relate to actions conducted by investigators during preliminary checks. However, courts annually review about 500,000–600,000 requests from law enforcement officers to “restrict citizens’ constitutional rights to the privacy of correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph, and other messages transmitted via electronic and postal networks.” These measures are already carried out as part of a criminal investigation.
Law enforcement has also started requesting information about bank deposits and accounts more frequently: in 2017, they sought permission for 139,300 actions related to lifting banking secrecy, and by 2020, that number had risen to 260,000. Meanwhile, requests for wiretapping and access to correspondence dropped from 244,000 in 2015 to 34,000 in 2020. This decline is partly explained by the fact that there was previously no separate investigative action for billing data: authorities would obtain permission for wiretapping but wouldn’t use it, as they were only interested in billing records.
According to Damir Gainutdinov, head of the “Network Freedoms” project and an attorney, the decrease in this surveillance method is due to Russians adopting new communication technologies: “Initially, wiretapping was one of the fastest-growing segments—if you look at earlier statistics, there was steady growth from 2007 to 2015. But since 2015, there’s been a decline. That’s exactly when messengers started to develop rapidly, and people began to think about communication security and the benefits of encryption. Regular voice calls and SMS are completely unprotected from SORM (System for Operative Investigative Activities), and almost all communication has moved to messengers, most of which use end-to-end encryption.”
He links the growth in billing requests to the fact that data on connections with cell towers can provide law enforcement with a lot of information, even if a person doesn’t use voice calls or SMS. “Mobile phones with secure messengers still have to connect to cell towers. Information about connections between user devices, geolocation, and the time of connection to specific towers—all this massive amount of data is now processed much more effectively, and it’s extremely important and informative. That’s why there’s growth here,” the expert explains.
“The increase in billing requests and the decrease in monitoring and recording conversations is something we predicted long ago. The point is, there simply wasn’t a separate investigative action for billing data before: authorities de jure obtained permission for wiretapping but didn’t use it. They were specifically interested in billing records. Eventually, the number of wiretaps dropped to cases where they genuinely needed audio recordings,” explained Kirill Titaev, Associate Professor of Sociology of Law at the European University at St. Petersburg, to RBC.
“The total number of law enforcement officers is about a million. 240,000 permissions for monitoring and recording conversations [as in 2015] means they simply wouldn’t have enough time to listen to it all (especially if more than one conversation is recorded and the wiretap lasts for some time), considering that only 15–20% of employees are actually engaged in operational work,” the expert added.
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