good deeds are for suckers

Yesterday I tried to do what I thought would be my Good Deed for the Day. I found a lost phone in a local park, a fairly new-looking Samsung smart phone, and I thought I would do the right thing by finding the owner and letting him or her know that the phone had been found. So I took it home and it would not turn on no matter what I did. Totally dead. There was a tiny USB port in the side, but I have no USB cord with a plug that small, so I removed the battery, stuck it into my universal battery charger, and let it charge for an hour. This was enough to bring the phone to life, but alas! There was no information about the owner. All that stuff was blank. I couldn’t even figure out what the number of the phone was, so I called my own phone with it, and while that gave me the number, it was useless information. This was a prepaid tracphone, and I was running out of options as to how I might contact the owner. In desperation, I scrolled through regular contacts and tried calling a number that appeared frequently. A female voice answered, and when I explained I had found the phone and wanted to contact the owner, she immediately became evasive and sounded very nervous, saying she could not help me. Then hung up. Ready to give up, I showed it to some neighbors who were a little more savvy than I am, and they started laughing at some of the “contacts” — which they said were well known sex chat places.

okaaay…

In disgust, I decided to simply abandon the phone. So much for my “good deed for the day.”

None of this would have merited a post but for an article I read earlier about DEA snooping:

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

Apparently, the project is especially interested in throwaway phones:

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Well that sucks. If we assume that the phone I found was a throwaway belonged to some drug dealer, that means my honest attempt to return the phone to its rightful owner might very well have made me look like someone who was getting calls from a drug dealer.

And who knows, I might have even committed one of the innumerable “crimes” by using the phone to call myself!

What a ridiculous world we live in.