What the Government Pays To Snoop On You

transporter_ii writes "So what does it cost the government to snoop on us? Paid for by U.S. tax dollars, and with little scrutiny, surveillance fees charged by phone companies can vary wildly. For example, AT&T, imposes a $325 'activation fee' for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey."

Comments

certainly restoring the fourth amendment

[Presto Vivace]

could save us a lot of money, in addition to saving our constitution.

AT&T Introduces Privacy+ Tier

[transporter_ii]

It's funny. I wrote this in 2006 and originally posted it to Slashdot. Turns out, it was a fairly prophetic piece. It got posted to Slashnot, google finance picked it up, and listed it as a blog post under AT&T's stock!

-=-=-=-=

AT&T Introduces Privacy+ Tier for Consumers and an NSA Turbo-Speed Tier for the government, at Market-Leading Prices

Wednesday April 26, 6:00 am ET

For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2006--AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - News) today announced a new, higher-privacy tier for its AT&T Yahoo!® High Speed Internet service that meets consumers' growing outrage for allowing the NSA full availability to its backbone. At the same time, it announced a new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier that, for a fee, allows the government to override the newly introduced Privacy+ Tier.

Beginning Monday, May 1, new residential customers who order AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet service online through www.att.com can purchase the Privacy+ Tier -- offering data to the NSA at speeds sometimes as slow as 56k. (other monthly charges and a 12-month term commitment apply). Effective today, the new Privacy+ Tier is available for $24.99, when it is ordered with a qualifying service bundle. Existing AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet customers can upgrade to the Privacy+ service through the company's Web site and take advantage of the current pricing promotion beginning Monday.

"Consumers are craving greater privacy, and now with the AT&T Privacy+ service, they can at least get the satisfaction that the government is going to get their private data at the slowest speeds possible; "Consumers could easily get more privacy from a company that doesn't offer the NSA a fat pipe right onto its backbone, but with the incredible amount of money that the government paid us for that pipe, we just couldn't pass it up. The new Privacy+ Tier, tips the scales back just a little bit in favor of the consumer," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.

Also effective Monday, May 1, the NSA can sign up for the new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, which for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, allows the government to override the newly created Privacy+ Tier. "The NSA is craving greater speed to American's private communications, and now with the NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, they can at least get the satisfaction that they can resume domestic spying at the highest speeds possible; "The NSA will be hard-pressed to find this speed at a better price, for a full 12 months, from one of our leading competitors," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.

AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet also announced that with the NSA paying an undisclosed, but very large amount of money for access to its backbone data, and with a higher than expected demand from consumers, that it has decided to ask popular web sites, such as Google and eBay to also pay a monthly fee to insure a speedy deliver of all consumer data to these web sites. In that regard, AT&T Yahoo introduced the new Extortion-racket Tier.

Also, in a move that is sure to stun Wall Street, AT&T has announced that they will soon enter the "garbage collection" business.

About the New AT&T

AT&T Inc. is one of the world's largest telecommunications holding companies and is the largest in the United States. Operating globally under the AT&T brand, AT&T companies are recognized as the leading worldwide providers of IP-based communications services to business and as leading U.S. providers of high-speed DSL Internet, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services. AT&T Inc. holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which is the No. 1

Re:AT&T Introduces Privacy+ Tier

[guttentag]

For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second

You can't stop them from giving the NSA your data, but for an extra $29.99 a month you can have AT&T re-class your data as Privacy+ tier which costs the NSA an extra $599.99 in monthly surcharges to obtain. For the extra-privacy-conscious, you can name your price ($50 or greater) for PrivacyUnlimited and whatever you spend per month will cost the NSA 30 times as much to obtain.

AT&T: We're Listening

It costs the government NOTHING.

[jcr]

The government isn't a producer of wealth. Every penny it spends is taken from us.

-jcr

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[Jason Levine]

In other words, it costs us twice. First, to get cell phone service (acceptable though whether the amount is fair is arguable) and second to send our data to the NSA without our approval (definitely NOT acceptable). And the phone companies get paid twice by us (well, once by the government using our tax money). So they aren't likely to argue too strenuously against this unless the potential for bad PR is too high. (In other words, they'll work doubly hard to keep the whole thing secret.)

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[Lendrick]

You might want to get a new introductory economics book. Yours sounds like it was written to promote a political view rather than actually, ya know, teach economics.

The government is just as capable of producing wealth as any other entity. If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth. Whether the entity is public or private doesn't figure into it at all.

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[khallow]

The government is just as capable of producing wealth as any other entity.

Capable != actually doing it. The private world has the profit motive for keeping it productive. The activity has to generate some sort of value to the actor beyond its cost or it isn't generating a profit.

If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth.

Where is this study that claims a 2:1 return? I decided to google for this and came across this study. The money quote:

SNAP brings Federal dollars into communities in the form of benefits which are redeemed by SNAP participants at local stores. These benefits ripple throughout the economies of the community, State, and Nation. For example:

* Every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.00 in total community spending.
* Every additional dollarâ(TM)s worth of SNAP benefits generates 17 to 47 cents of new spending on food.
* On average, $1 billion of retail food demand by SNAP recipients generates close to 3,000 farm jobs.

Note that $5 in spending produces $9 in spending not wealth. So right there we don't have a 2:1 return. As I see it, we take $5 of someone's money and use it to generate far less than $5 of value - feeding someone who can feed themselves. That's negative return on investment right there.

It's a destructive economic gimmick to conflate spending or economic activity with wealth creation. They aren't equivalent or even correlated. For example, a disaster creates a lot of spending and economic activity (from reconstruction efforts), but it results in a net loss of wealth.

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[Alomex]

Actually many of the activities of the government are wealth producing, including science, education and infrastructure.

The funny thing is that obviously false FoxNews talking point gets modded +5 Insightful because it appeals to people to be told that money was unjustly taken from them.

p.s. By the way people out there reading this with mod points, you are all extremely handsome and you pay too much taxes, and you deserve a raise.

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[stenvar]

If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth. Whether the entity is public or private doesn't figure into it at all.

That money the government spent was taken away from someone who then couldn't invest it in something else. So, in order to show a net benefit to society, it's not sufficient to show that the government produced a positive return, it's necessary to show that it produced a positive return that was larger than the person the money was taken away from would have gotten, and that these benefits are large enough to compensate for the additional negative effects that taxation and government spending have.

Of course, your claim of a "2:1 return" is unsubstantiated to begin with. The USDA study where this number seems to come from (you fail to provide sources for your ridiculous statement, so you leave your readers guessing) claims an economic multiplier of 1.79. An "economic multiplier" is not a "return". You can have "economic multipliers" with no net benefit to society at all, or even negative "returns". And even that number is based on a single report, using an economic model (rather than empirical data), created by single person at an organization with a strong interest to make SNAP appear in a positive light.

I happen to think SNAP is one of the better welfare programs and should continue, but your statements about it border on fraud.

Re: It costs the government NOTHING.

[stenvar]

Well, I think then the government should take all the money you earn and reallocate it. You can live in public housing and get SNAP for food. According to you, it's clear that that would produce the greatest societal benefits, since the government according to you knows better what to do with your earnings than you do.

Re:It costs the government NOTHING.

[TheRaven64]

Wow, that's the most oversimplified attempt at discussing economics I've seen for a long time. Hint: economics is complicated - if it were easy we'd have a simple working system that everyone could agree one (or, at least, the people who worked out out would get very rich by betting on the economy 100% correctly and other people would notice) - and any explanation that simple is likely to be wrong.

Consider the following counter example:

The government builds and maintains a road between two places. This employs people, taking them out of the labour pool where they could be doing other things, so it's a cost. But it also allows the two places to trade more cheaply, which increases wealth production. Similarly, employers at either end of the road would have access to a wider pool of employees and potential employees to a wider pool of employers and so people would end up in more productive employment.

Now, would the same apply if private industry built the road? This is where it starts to get more complicated. First, who would build the road? It might be some consortium of businesses at both ends who wanted to use it. If so, then they might charge money to anyone not part of the consortium to use it, which would give them a competitive advantage, but be less healthy for the economy as a whole by producing a barrier to competition (and, most specifically, a barrier to entry for new companies).

It might be a third party that thought that the road would be profitable, who would run it as a 'common carrier' toll road. This, however, would provide a disincentive for people to use it. If they priced it too low, then they'd go out of business (which would discourage future road-building companies). If they priced it too high, then they'd make it unprofitable for some users to use it, however given that the cost of the road is now a sunk cost the economy as a whole benefits if as many people as would gain any benefit at all from it use it.

In some cases, the benefit to the economy may be significantly lower than the cost of the road, so it would not make sense for the government to make the investment. It's often difficult to make that call, however. In the UK, be Beeching Report identified a large number of unprofitable railway lines and, to save taxpayer money, the nationalised railway service closed them. Unfortunately, it turned out that a lot of the unprofitable lines were ones that got people from near where they lived to a more profitable line. When they were closed, people at the edges ended up having to buy cars, which meant that they no longer used the larger lines either, and so pushed those into unprofitability (and so there was a second Beeching Report some years later which repeated the entire mistake). The cost to the economy of no longer having a widespread, cheap, railway network is widely agreed by economists to be significantly greater than the savings from closing the lines.

A nationally owned private rail operator may have seen further ahead, but most likely they'd have had shareholders making the same demands: sell off the unprofitable lines and concentrate on the profitable ones. A larger number of smaller railway operators would have had similar problems, with the ones operating the unprofitable lines going out of business and reducing demand on the profitable ones.

Wonder what Sprint charges?

[pecosdave]

Because they're sure not using it to make their network worth a crap.

Re:Wonder what Sprint charges?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're expanding their direct connections to the NSA. They found out it's a better business model to set up wiretaps than it is to provide good internet connections.

Empower me

[Anonymous Coward]

So the NSA is going to do it anyways... at least let me sell my data. Give me a tax break or something...

Wait

[superwiz]

Can I get in on that action? That's waaaay more money than a phone subscription would cost. I'll record all of my own conversations on all communication devices (and I'll increase the number of those that I have by a factor of 10-100) if they pay me half of that amount for each device-subscription combo. Heck, I'd do for a quarter of that amount. I'd still be ahead.

Actually

[arcite]

It sounds like corporate welfare funded by government spending. ie. your tax dollars at work!

Re:Actually

[Cryacin]

More to the point, it now makes sense why they market so heavily with anyone with an arabic name, and target individuals on a no fly list! Screw monthly calls membership, wiretapping is more profitable!

It gets worse.

[Waffle Iron]

For example, AT&T, imposes a $325 'activation fee' for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it.

These are only promotional introductory rates, good for the first 24 months. After that, the charges revert to "standard" rates, the details of which are not available anywhere.

Even the NSA has not been able to find any information on what they will have pay at the end of the promotional period.

So what you're saying is

[WOOFYGOOFY]

So what you're saying is the telcos have a built in motivation to search for and find (or create) the perception of as much criminal wrongdoing on the part of their hapless customers as they possibly can. Don't bother telling me me they wouldn't do this- I read The Guardian, not the Washington Post.