e-ignite

Did you know that AT&T are currently being sued? This may not sound like a big deal - a large US corporation is being sued. But it becomes interesting when you find out what they’re being sued for.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are suing AT&T because they illegally installed methods to tap its customers phones and log all internet traffic. And what was the purpose of this? To pass all the data to the American NSA.

The summary of the EFF’s lawsuit can be seen here on their own website, but it makes some frightening reading. The basics are that AT&T maintain a database of all communication data that expands to approximately 30 Terabytes in size, and they allowed the NSA full access to this data without any legal authorisation.

The question that I would like to ask is which party is most at fault. Immediately, you would scream “AT&T!” but if you think about it, this may not be true. It is unlikely that AT&T would call the NSA and offer full access to the data out-of-the-blue, so what would bring this around? It’s more likely that the idea was “suggested” by the NSA, and AT&T simply granted the request. It was ill-advised that they do this without the correct legal clarifications, but if a Government Agency asks for data, you would think it would be a fair assumption that they are actually allowed access to the data.

It comes down to the global erosion of privacy that I have discussed before in this blog - an email may contain dangerous communications, so we had better read them all. A phonecall may be from one terrorist to another, so we’d better tap them all. It is getting to a critical point.

Predictably, the US government moved to dismiss the EFF suit as quietly as possible:

On May 15, the United States government filed a motion to dismiss EFF’s suit. While EFF was not permitted to see the government’s entire brief, in a redacted version made publicly available the government said that the case against AT&T should be immediately terminated because any judicial inquiry into the whether AT&T broke the law could reveal state secrets and harm national security. Source

The magic phrase again: National Security. So are you happy to just roll over and let the Government take your privacy from you?