Sprint and the Government

Reposted from an article for a class:

National cellular provider Sprint has 50 million subscribers. Sprint allows law enforcement to use provided tools to determine the location of any of their subscribers via on-device gps. Law enforcement can access this information once every 3 minutes, over a period of 60 days. One might assume that this data would be accessed only a for a select few people, and not terribly often. While we don't know how many people were located via this service, we do know that gps information was requested 8 million times over the last year. 50 million subscribers- 8 million gps location requests. At the very least, 278 people could have been checked every time available. The real number of people is somewhere between 278 and 8 million. The scary thing to me is that this is just Sprint, and Sprint is the nation's 3rd largest cell provider. What sort of numbers would come out of Verizon and AT&T if law enforcement decided that gps information was necessary 8 million times in a year.