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AT&T Helped the NSA Spy On Internet Traffic
An anonymous reader writes: Newly disclosed NSA documents show that the agency gained access to billions of emails through a "highly collaborative" relationship with AT&T. The company provided access from 2003 to 2013, including technical assistance to carry out court orders permitting wiretapping. "The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency. One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, 'This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.'" The new files don't indicate whether the partnership currently exists, but the government has been doing its best to keep corporate partnerships hidden. The article also notes that "In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after 'a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,' according to an internal agency newsletter."
I remember when the technician in this article was being called out as paranoid and many did not believe it.
Unfortunately too true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
NSA got access to everything, blah blah. The NSA is our new overlord and conscience. So I'm contrarian here and curious: what did AT&T get out of this?
Or are they just happy they can listen in to phone calls again way back when the (actual) operators supported party-lines across multiple families and literally did the dialing for you?
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For those of you too young to remember: a party line was a single shared telephone line spread across multiple houses where anyone could pick up the phone and hear a conversation that another family was having -- that's how it was designed; no single line per each room in a house but a single line shared between disparate houses.
If someone was calling, the ringtone (a clapper striking a physical bell attached to the phone) was a different pattern for each house so the correct person would know to pick up.
Speed-dial? Touch-tones? Rotary? Dial-tone? No, you flashed the hook to get the attention of the mostly-present operator and verbally told them the name or number to dial for you.
I've got a phone like that hanging in the kitchen. Unattached and unused for decades, of course, until I give in and pay for the "Twilight Zone" option.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Which pretty much makes it explicit that when the NSA comes to your CEO, they're rude, obnoxious and demanding. And you can't say no.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Seems to me that datacaps facilitate the surveillance.
The published/public reasons for datacaps are to "reduce network congestion" and that various telcos would like to charge [gouge] their customers more money.
Many articles have debunked the "network congestion" argument. But, telcos would like to charge higher prices so they continue to float the myth ad naseum. It's also a great cover.
Maybe the only "congestion" is that while it would be relatively easy/inexpensive to build out networks to handle it [routers, etc.], it would be prohibitively more expensive to add the requisite amount of surveillance equipment to handle the load [if they could]. Otherwise, the "secret room" inside a telco's CO would have to become the "secret floor" and eventually the "secret building".
Charging customers higher prices for congestion is a misnomer. But, instead of using this capital [or any capital for that matter] to build out networks to accommodate legitimate internet traffic increases, like any reasonably/responsibly managed company, diverting it to a telco's "black budget" would be harder to justify [even internally] to an auditor.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there