January 9, 2014
Photo courtesy patdollard.com
New research into the financial cost to law enforcement demonstrates just how cheap it is to track a suspect with a cell phone, and how those figures can affect the legal barriers protecting privacy.
The monetary cost to law enforcement to track people has taken a nosedive following the broad adoption of cell phones, putting a dollar figure to the practice. Or to be more precise, a cents figure.
Tracking a suspect using their cell phone’s Global Positioning System (GPS) costs around 1/1000th of what it costs to track them using the visual surveillance method, according to a new study published in the Yale Law Journal on Thursday by privacy researchers Kevin Bankston and Ashkan Soltani.
The cost of nonstop surveillance has been reduced from an average of $275 an hour for a five-car “surveillance box” to less than a few dollars per hour, depending on which cell phone carrier the suspect uses. Sprint, for example, is significantly cheaper at 4 cents per hour for 28 days of surveillance than AT&T ($1.19) or even T-Mobile ($4.17).