AT&T is Selling Phone Records to the CIA for a Tidy Sum

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AT&T is Selling Phone Records to the CIA for a Tidy Sum

Anthony M Freed
Nov 7, 2013





The New York Times reports that government officials have confirmed that telecom giant AT&T has been selling call data to the Central Intelligence Agency and pocketing as much as $10 million a year from the sales.

The data is being harvested under the pretense of counter-terrorism operations by the agency, and includes records of international calls made by U.S. citizens. The program is a completely voluntary contractual arrangement, and was not prompted by a subpoena or court order.
“The C.I.A. protects the nation and upholds privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws,” said spokesman Dean Boyd, who would neither confirm nor deny the program.
“The C.I.A. is expressly forbidden from undertaking intelligence collection activities inside the United States ‘for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of U.S. persons,’ and the C.I.A. does not do so.”
The process involves the CIA supplying the phone numbers of international terrorism suspects so that AT&T can conduct searches its databases and produce call records intended to help the agency identify potential associates.
AT&T maintains that they do not provide the CIA with the identities or phone numbers of American citizens who place calls overseas, and that the arrangement does not violate any U.S. laws.
“We value our customers’ privacy and work hard to protect it by ensuring compliance with the law in all respects. We do not comment on questions concerning national security,” said AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel.

AT&T t-mobile virozon they all sale record to the gov. not just AT&T.........

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Mobile carriers and FCC reach deal to allow smartphone unlocking

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By Salvador Rodriguez

December 12, 2013, 12:22 p.m.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said a deal has been reached between the agency and mobile carriers that will make smartphone unlocking legal.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agreement will ensure customers are allowed to unlock their devices as well as receive information from their carriers on how and when they can do so.

Smartphone unlocking allows users to switch the carriers that provide service for their devices. Some carriers like to keep the devices they sell locked to prevent customers from taking their smartphones to their rivals.

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The agreement with carriers, which includes AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Verizon, will require them to notify customers when they become eligible to unlock their phones.

Carriers will also be required to have clear and readily available policies about phone unlocking. Companies will be required to unlock eligible devices within two business days of a customer request. And carriers will unlock phones for active deployed members of the military.

Smartphone unlocking has been illegal for nearly a year. It became illegal after a ruling by the Library of Congress late last year.

But after phone unlocking became illegal, users quickly protested the change through an online petition that was signed by more than 114,000 people. After the petition, the White House weighed in on the topic and said phone unlocking should be allowed.

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The locks come off mobile devices, but not far enough


By Jon Healey

December 13, 2013, 11:34 a.m.

It took new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler just a few weeks to persuade the major U.S. mobile phone companies to make it easier for customers to move their phones and tablet computers to a rival carrier's network. But the new industry principles announced Thursday by CTIA, the wireless companies' trade association, don't give consumers all the rights they should have over the devices they buy.

At issue is consumers' ability to "unlock" a phone or tablet from the network it is electronically bound to. Many (but not all) wireless devices are technically capable of operating on more than one carrier's network, but carriers usually sell them with software that prevents them from straying to greener wireless pastures. And under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal for anyone to make or sell technology to circumvent those software locks.

The new principles, which the five largest carriers have endorsed, call on carriers to unlock mobile devices or provide the information needed to unlock the devices after any applicable service contract or financing plan has been fulfilled. That would include the payment of any early termination fees. Devices that have no service contract, such as prepaid phones, can remain locked for up to a year, after which carriers will unlock them on request.

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The problem is that carriers will continue to act as gatekeepers unless they automatically unlock devices when the customer's contract expires. That hurts the resale value of phones, and with it the phones' value to the original buyer. The principles even allow carriers to charge an unlocking fee to new customers who want to use a phone they bought from a different carrier or on the resale market.

The right solution here is for Congress to make it legal to unlock devices, period. That would legalize unlocking technology, making it easier for consumers to do the job themselves instead of relying on a carrier's indulgence. It also would restore full rights of ownership to those who buy phones and tablets from the wireless carriers.

Naturally, the wireless companies argue that carriers need the locks to recover the subsidies they put into phones and tablets. But carriers already have a perfectly good way to recover their subsidies -- contracts that require a customer who buys a device to remain a subscriber for a certain number of months, or else pay an onerous early termination fee. The software locks are overkill, at least when it comes to discouraging churn.

Besides, using copyright law to prevent phones from hopping from one network to another or being sold in bulk overseas hardly seems relevant to the statutory goal of protecting and incentivizing creative works. And at the urging of the U.S. Copyright Office, the Librarian of Congress had exempted cellphone unlocking from the DMCA's ban for years, starting before Apple released the first iPhone. The agency reversed course in October 2012, however, reimposing the ban as of last January.

The decision was decried by the White House and multiple members of Congress, and the FCC began pressing the wireless companies early this year to adopt more lenient unlocking policies -- to no avail. Shortly after taking office in November, Wheeler (a former president of the CTIA) sent a letter to current CTIA President Steve Largent, telling him (in so many words) that if the industry didn't act on the unlocking issue voluntarily, the commission would force it to. The principles released Thursday closely track what the FCC had sought.

Maybe Wheeler can now persuade lawmakers to take the next step and give consumers real ownership rights over the devices they buy from wireless companies.