While NSLs typically apply to phone or banking records and email addresses, the bill, which cleared the Senate intelligence panel on Tuesday by a 14-1 vote, appears to change the scope of the longstanding term "electronic communications transaction records".
In Senate testimony earlier this year, FBI Director James Comey said that a "typo" in a 1993 statute concerning electronic communications transaction records was leading "some companies" to resist providing the FBI with "ordinary transaction records that we can get in most contexts with a non-court order".
Under the Senate's change, the FBI would be able to demand electronic communications transaction records such as time stamps of emails and the emails' senders and recipients, in addition to some information about websites a person visits.
Juniper Research is releasing a new study today that reports that the transaction value of mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and NFC (Near Field Communications) transactions will reach $670 billion by 2015, up from $240 billion this year.
At five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, the UDC will be a clearinghouse and a depository for every imaginable kind of information -- whether innocent or not, private or public -- including communications, transactions and the like.
"Links between entities can represent communications, relationships, transactions, message logs, etc and are visualised over time to reveal temporal patterns and behaviours," it reads.
The most important event of the past decade has been the growth and widespread use of the Internet, which, in accelerating and multiplying communications and transactions across borders, has converted quantity of communications into quality and created a new social realm that transcends local activity and subverts the concept of identity.
In addition to information on WorldCom's accounting in 2001 and 2002, the period already under scrutiny for the $3.8 billion in transfers, the committee requested details on WorldCom's accounting for swaps of communications capacity, transactions that have raised concern at companies like Global Crossing and Qwest Communications.
Rules vary regarding communications, relationships, transactions, taxes, contracts, fraud and expectations.
Aether is the dominant provider of mobile data service for real-time communications and transactions across a range of devices and networks.
After studying operations in greater detail (e.g., communications patterns, transactions, and security), the authors conclude that drug trafficking more closely resembled a cottage industry of small, somewhat temporary sets of people, and that there were few instances of large, hierarchically-organized distribution networks.
