Remember back in 2003 when a whistleblower from AT&T pointed out Room 641A that the NSA used to spy on all AT&T long distance calls and Internet traffic? Verizon and Qwest denied they did, too.
Put on your foil hat because I am going to make some crazy points.
The FCC only wants to deal with a few companies, not thousands of them. The FCC Chair likes having AT&T and VZ on speed dial - and the 2 remaining RBOCs like controlling a lot of the telecom infrastructure in the US.
I think a Duopoly was pre-determined. It's easier than free market competitive landscape that can't be controlled.
Think about how hard Vonage was pounded by patent lawsuits when it got too big for its britches. How come no other VoIP company has been attacked with patent suits since?
Who knew that a telephone carrier would need a veep of national security? Last job, for a CIA front company and he carries a double zero designation.
Who knew that everything that outraged me about the Cheney-Bush Administration would just become business as usual in the Obama Administration?
The voters have become so complacent that the best they can do is post a picture to Facebook and like it, instead of screaming at their Congressman or marching on Washington.
Since 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act, we have moved to a police state all in the name of national security.
The journalist who broke the latest version of the story - that VZW hands over daily call records to the NSA due to FISA court order - Glenn Greenwald has railed against these types of abuses for years. The next piece of the puzzle was PRISM, the NSA program that allows Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, AOL, Apple to all secretly sharing private user communications with NSA.
Remember that FBI laptop with millions of Apple IDs? Makes sense now huh?
You thought that what they did on 24 and Leverage was sci-fi, huh? It is straight out of fiction, like I said before when I wrote about Brad Thor's book.
You want to talk about a BIG DATA probelm - how does the NSA, even with 25,000 square feet of computing power in one place, sift through all of that data? How does it translate that data from the thousands of dialects and languages in use in the US?
Lifehacker has an article to explain what it means for the average person and how you might take precautions to gain back some privacy, but as anyone on Facebook knows, the only privacy is when you never post.
I wonder what these companies - ATT, VZ, VZW, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, T-Mobile, Qwest, Yahoo - got in return for violating every privacy policy.....
