14 November

Your carrier holds records of your calls and data use, and how investigators reach them depends on local law: in Taiwan, Article 11-1 of the Communication Security and Surveillance Act generally requires prosecutors to apply to a court, with exceptions for offences carrying a minimum sentence of ten years and others it lists; in Japan, Article 197 of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets investigators seek reports from organizations and ask carriers to preserve specified logs for up to 30 days (60 if especially necessary), though a preservation request does not itself make the carrier hand them over (both read on 8 November 2026). On 14 November 2002, a New York Times columnist wrote that if the Homeland Security Act was not amended before passage, Americans' credit card purchases, prescriptions, web browsing and trip bookings would all go into a database under the US Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. In a May 2003 report to Congress, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) described TIA as a research prototype for counterterrorism and wrote that building dossiers on US citizens was not the department's intent, and in September that year Congress barred funding for TIA in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2004, exempting only processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence, which could be used solely in operations outside the United States or wholly against non-US citizens. According to a panel report released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence after declassification in June 2023, intelligence agencies can buy commercially available data, the rules on it are looser than for other intelligence sources, and combining it with other commercial data can often identify individuals. If your mobile number is with a carrier in Taiwan, we suggest requesting your own call and billing records under Article 9 of the Telecommunications Management Act and its rules on subscriber inquiries; this involves a fee, covers records kept for at least one year and does not reach commercial data bought by intelligence agencies, and the rules do not say whether you can learn that your records were obtained (read on 8 November 2026; we have not checked other carriers in Asia).