EXCLUSIVE: What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records

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That’s just one of the questions raised by an msnbc.com investigation into use of cellphone tracking data by local police departments across the nation. Msnbc.com built a database of thousands of invoices issued by cell phone network providers to cities after cops asked for caller location and other personal information between 2009-2011. The invoices were first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and released to the public earlier this month.

The database offers perhaps the first blow-by-blow accounting of several cities’ use of cellphone tracking as a crime-fighting tool and the potential blow to civil liberties that the requests represent.

While 200 cities responded to the ACLU, three cities -- Tacoma, Wash., Oklahoma City, and Raleigh N.C. – provided enough detail to paint a picture of how cellphone tracking data is being used in mid-sized police departments around the nation. Categorizing the thousands of pages of invoices supplied by the three municipalities provided some insight into why cops use cellphone locations and call records to investigate crimes and how much the carriers earn responding to these requests.

The tension between the war on drugs and what some have called the war on privacy is most readily apparent in Tacoma, Wash., where the most frequent reason that police requested cellphone data over a two-year period was to investigate drug dealing, the analysis indicates.