The Electronic Frontier Foundation (commonly known as EFF) recently filed suit against AT&T alleging that the phone company has been helping the NSA to spy on their customers. The EFF claims to have seen some secret documents with proof. The case has just begun but shocking details have already been revealed. An engineer who used to work for AT&T has come forward to support the EFF’s lawsuit and has released a statement. If it turns out to be true, the ramifications are huge. It claims AT&T gave the NSA full access to all of the data on their network as well as the data on other networks that passed through their network, and the NSA installed equipment to monitor that data. With a network provider as big as AT&T, that would probably end up being maybe 1/3 or more of all US Internet traffic. Wow!
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One reply on “AT&T is Spying on You”
We could always do what some people started doing back when the threat of Carnivore came out some years ago… Encrypt EVERYTHING. All voice communication, all digital communication, etc. It’d be a silent form of protest when they spend hours of processing time just to find out that your wife asked you to buy milk on the way home.
On a related note: I find it pretty amazing that a de facto strong encryption tool isn’t integrated into more email clients, to be honest. If it were I’d encrypt absolutely everything, including mundane stuff.
Having seen this sort of stuff from both sides I can see plenty of legitimate reasons for the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to have access to some communication for national security or military purposes. I don’t have much of a problem with surveillance carefully targeted toward The Bad Guys. I think, though, that they should have to go through the proper (and well documented) channels in order to proceed with such surveillance so that down the road civil libertarians can look over everything and ensure that it was done for damn good reason.
In this day and age, though, there’s probably be a warrantless wiretap and there would be no accountability whatsoever. In this climate, I’d rather see a few ‘useful’ messages go by than contribute to an unchecked surveillance state.