The company formed data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Samsung and dozens of other device makers, raising new concerns about its privacy protections.

Four U.S. senators on Wednesday urged the U.S. Homeland Security Department (DHS) to disclose additional information about unusual cellular surveillance activity that has been detected around the nation’s capital.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the main author of the original Patriot Act, wrote an op-ed in 2013 explaining the NSA bulk collection of data belonging to Americans is an abuse of the legislation. In particular, Sensenbrenner slammed the Obama administration for abusing the Patriot Act in order to collect phone call information of all Americans, despite any ties to terrorism.

The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.

The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said

New cellphone rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for emergency, or 911, calls have cellphone manufacturers and providers, and privacy and public safety advocates in an uproar.

Your cellphone already can track your general ground-level location using its GPS (global positioning system) application, or your location in relation to specific cellphone transmission towers.

The new rules specify, for the first time, that the FCC also wants cellphone providers to allow tracking of phones by altitude, The Washington Post reports.

Devices on Planes that Mimic Cellphone Towers Used to Target Criminals, but Also Sift Through Thousands of Other Phones

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

A bill to permit the practice of "unlocking" a cell phone--meaning a consumer could use the same phone on different carriers--was passed by the House of Representatives yesterday and is expected to be signed into law by President Obama. The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act passed with wide bipartisan support and was sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) in the House and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) in the Senate.