That’s not historically how it works in the US. If government comes to you and says, “hey, so we have the ability to regulate you, imprison you, etc. Now we can do that, or you can accept this payment to give us access to private records — you have a day to decide”
Most people call that blackmail, even if it is government.
Second, it’s still a search and seizure of your records. You made the call, AT&T was only the common carrier connecting you. Regardless, of whether or not they paid to conduct the search. Now the judiciary is pretty slanted to supporting law enforcement so it will take time to play out. Often the higher courts are more apt at deciding these issues (ie less bias)
That said, there’s a tendency in the US justice system to protect the system. So we will see how it shakes out in 5 years while this makes its way through
Historically, here’s how it works: Suppose the police come to your door and say, “Hi, we’re investigating your neighbor for a crime and we would like to see the footage from your security camera for the last few days.” At that point, you can choose whether you share the records with the police. It’s up to you. You may demand to see a search warrant, but you do not need to. Your neighbor does not get a say in whether you help the police.
Here, the same pattern applies, but the scale of cooperation is staggering. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” on steroids. In the case of AT&T, their cooperation includes trillions of records and affects literally everyone who has used a phone since 1987.
The issue, according to the article, is not whether voluntary sharing of records is constitutional, but whether the public should have a right to know the details of how the system works.
> If government comes to you and says, “hey, so we have the ability to regulate you, imprison you, etc. Now we can do that, or you can accept this payment to give us access to private records — you have a day to decide”
Who said the Government blackmailed them? These companies are selling this data to every large corp asking, not just the Government. You give private corporations way too much credit here, if they can earn a buck they will sell your soul.
The government does blackmail. They will freeze you out of government and defense contracts if you do not cooperate. I would also bet that every other carrier has a similar arrangement, not just AT&T.
Furthermore, if the DOJ contracted them to build the system there would have been due diligence on the legality and process.
But basically all American tele operators are selling this data to private corporations already, it is a standard contract there is no need to blackmail to buy data then. The only strange thing here is that they try to hide this project, not that it is ongoing.
And I'm pretty sure that most corporations that sells your call data to other private corporations sees no issue to also sell it to the government. To them it is just another customer.
Nope. Private operators cannot access this data. American telcos are heavily regulated. This falls under customer private network information (CPNI) to be shared only with the owner of the data(the customer) or with law enforcement (and internal use but not for commercial use).
> This falls under customer private network information (CPNI)
Any source for that being the case here? CPNI is partially protected, but subsets of it can be freely shared and sold by companies. Do you have a link showing the data police accesses here goes under the protected category and not just the freely available category?
Private companies can access the following according to the CPNI wikipedia, parts of it can only be shared inside the company but a very large part like location data and URLS and demographic data can be sold freely:
> Verizon shares CPNI "among our affiliates and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries unless you advise us not to". and states that it shares "URLs (such as search terms) of websites you visit when you use our wireless service, the location of your device ("location information"), and your use of [Application software [applications] and features" as well as other "information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use), as well as demographic and interest categories (such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner)" with other non-affiliated companies
This is historically not how it works. You do not own the records the bakery keeps of when and what the oven is used for. If the cops want to pay for that record keeping you have no say even if you've ordered a cake from that bakery. The fact that you did or did not use the cake to smuggle a hammer into a prison is frankly unrelated.
