Agency seeking wireless records – PittsburghLIVE.com
By Mike Wereschagin
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Pennsylvania officials who track down deadbeat parents want to mine cell phone records — an untapped resource that contains information about more than half the people in the state.
Part of the allure of cell phones is their portability and anonymity — they go where you go, and no one gets the number unless you give it to them. An estimated 6.5 million of Pennsylvania’s 12.4 million people have cell phones. Inspired by new tracking programs in Virginia and Iowa, Pennsylvania’s child support bureau wants to see whether any cell phone owners owe back child support.

Law enforcement agencies have for years eavesdropped on cell phone calls and used the devices to pinpoint a person’s location, in the case of a 911 call, for instance. But using cell phone records is a new area for child support collectors.

“Perhaps it can be useful,” said Dan Richard, director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Child Support Enforcement. “We’re aware of it, we’re considering it, but there are a number of things that would have to be looked at and ironed out,” for instance, the best process for getting records from the companies.

The Bureau of Child Support Enforcement already uses records from banks, public utilities and taxing bodies to hunt down parents who fail to pay child support. Expanding the search to cell phone records is a logical next step, say supporters of the plan.

The bureau is working on about 600,000 cases involving about 1 million children whose parents have failed to keep up on their child support payments, Richard said.

It is trying to collect about $1.5 billion in back child support this year. Cell phone records can help, Richard said, but the head of a Pittsburgh fathers’ rights group derided the plan as just another invasion of a dad’s privacy.

About 95 percent of child support providers are men, both nationally and in Pennsylvania.

A spokeswoman at Verizon Wireless wondered whether it could lead to innocent subscribers having their numbers and addresses released to a government agency.

Virginia: 44 percent success

The idea, which has had mixed success in Virginia and Iowa, is to send subpoenas to cell phone companies for records of parents who are delinquent in their child support payments.

“Everybody above the age of 4 has a cell phone. We’re going to use them as a way to reach out and touch someone, so to speak,” said Nick Young, director of the Virginia Department of Social Services’ Child Support Division.

In late June and early July, Young submitted to Virginia’s seven cell phone companies subpoenas with the names of 48 hard-to-find child support delinquents. So far, four companies found addresses for 21 people who owe a combined $2,034,574. One father was arrested for his delinquency.

An Iowa law allowing that state’s Department of Human Services to do the same took effect in July, but the agency hasn’t seen any results, said spokesman Roger Munns.

Virginia’s 44 percent success rate got the attention of at least four other states, including Pennsylvania.

“We would like to do a pilot of this, perhaps in Philadelphia,” Richard said.

Richard said the state would only be interested in addresses and phone numbers of deadbeats. The bureau wouldn’t use cell phones to pinpoint the location of delinquent fathers so they could be picked up by police.

“Most local child support agencies do not have staff that actively apprehend people,” Richard said.

December is the earliest the bureau could have a pilot program up and running, he said.

Identification tricky

Now that cell phones have become so popular, with many people choosing not to even keep a traditional phone line, it only makes sense to go after wireless records, Young said. According to the wireless industry group, CTIA-The Wireless Association, about 193.6 million U.S. residents — roughly 65 percent of the population — have cell phones.

Kevin Sheahen, president of the greater Pittsburgh chapter of the National Congress of Fathers and Children, said the solution to child support delinquency is to change the laws that treat fathers like criminals, not to attack their right to privacy.

“Let’s give dads more incentives to pay before we add more Draconian measures,” said Sheahen, 50, of Bethel Park, a divorced father of two.

The record searches could turn up information on people who have nothing to do with child support, said Laura Merritt, spokeswoman for Verizon, a major cell phone carrier. Verizon sorts its customers by phone number, not by name. So if Pennsylvania wants to know whether someone has a cell phone, it might need the phone number first to make an identification.

“For example, if they say they want information on John Smith in Pittsburgh, we could have 100 John Smiths,” Merritt said. “It would be very difficult to … make sure we’re providing the right information.”

Besides, the state already has enough records to search, Sheahen said.

A provision in the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996 allows state agencies to search records from banks, public utilities and taxing bodies to find parents who haven’t kept up on child support payments.

“(Searching cell phone records) is just a natural evolution,” Virginia’s Young said.

General subpoenas sought

Richard said he wants to work out a deal with cell phone companies that would allow the Bureau of Child Support Enforcement to search cell phone records without first obtaining subpoenas. The usual procedure is to ask a judge to issue a subpoena. If the subpoena is granted, then sheriff’s deputies would deliver it by hand, and the company would respond.

Richard envisions an agreement similar to what his bureau does for bank records: The bureau obtains a general subpoena that doesn’t include specific names. Then it gives the bank a list of delinquent parents, which the bank tries to match against its customer records. That way, the bank is protected from claims it violated customer privacy, and the bureau is able to check for hundreds of people with just one subpoena.

“We have too many cases to check on people with the cell phone companies one by one,” Richard said.

Cell phone companies have been reluctant to hand over customer information. Young tried for about six months to hammer out a deal like Richard wants, but cell phone companies said it would violate their privacy policies. In the end, Young had to issue a subpoena for each person he wanted to find. Young now plans to issue several hundred subpoenas each month.

“We fully cooperate when we receive a lawful subpoena or a court order,” said Bryan Zidar, spokesman for T-Mobile, a cell phone company that operates in Pennsylvania. “Our position is that our customers’ privacy is paramount to us.”

Richard pointed out that the bureau already goes through bank records, and his department would be as protective of the cell phone records as the companies.

“We don’t disclose that information to anyone. The information is never passed on beyond the local child,” Richard said.

‘Treat Dad like a dad’

Sheahen, however, said the search powers don’t address the real reasons fathers don’t pay.

“The problem is the way child support orders are assessed,” he said. “It’s charged at such a high rate, these guys can’t pay. There are deadbeat dads out there, no question. But instead of penalizing dads, we have to look for ways to make them pay.”

One sure way is to give fathers more custody rights, Sheahen said. Citing U.S. Census figures, he said fathers with consistent access to their children pay child support 92 percent of the time.

“If you treat Dad like a visitor, he’s going to act like a visitor. Treat Dad like a dad, and he’s going to act like a dad.”

Mike Wereschagin can be reached at mwereschagin@tribweb.com or (412) 391-0927.