If you're not paranoid yet...

...here are eight million reasons you should be.

Techdirt provides this summary:
Sprint provided law enforcement with GPS location data a staggering 8 million times in the last year. Sprint apparently set up some sort of portal that made such requests easier, and it sounds like law enforcement took advantage of that in a major way. The report also notes that this information should have been disclosed to Congress, under a 1999 law, but the Justice Department has ignored the law for the past five years. The rest of the report also looks at some other concerning factors, such as the fact that the government seems to regularly get all sorts of info from service providers, with little oversight. On top of that, it explains why so many service providers agree to it: they charge the government for such info, and it's quite lucrative.

The original source is the dissertation research of this IU grad student.

As often occurs, h/t to Tam for providing my first link to this very disturbing story.

Oh, and by the way, thanks to the cat box media for digging this up (NOT!). Or, at least providing wider coverage once it was discovered (NOT!). Because when the newspapers fold, there won't be anyone who knows what they're doing to investigate stuff and find things out (NOT!).