US govt pays AT and T to let cops search Americans' phone records – 'usually' without a warrant

TangledHyphae@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 223 points –
US government pays AT&T to let cops search phone records
theregister.com
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Hasn’t this been a thing since like the patriot act came out if not long before?

This predates cell phones. I believe there was a government wiretapping program for many non-criminal citizens back in the 80's. The program was shelved publicly when it became public knowledge, but continued in the background under different names and different areas of government since. I don't have a source offhand, but there was a lot of stuff that came to light about this around the time Edward Snowden blew the whistle. The Patriot Act just made a lot of this more legal, and was even expanded under Obama. I don't believe Trump or Biden have done anything to improve the situation for citizens since.

Wireline and wireless all have the ability to tap and trace built into the equipment. If a legal document is presented, it is a very easy thing to do.

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Phone records are the property of the operating company. It's a business record. Every operating company has a compliance manager who works to provide legal access to the company's business records. Of course, the effort to do that costs money for the company. But, for a company to allow access to its business records without a legal subpoena, means that the operating company is not run worth shit.

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Side note: I can't get lemmy to recognize a regular "&" in the title without it being transformed into "&".

The app I use changes it from “&” to “and” which looks weird still: “AT and T”

Edit: I just realized you did that intentionally because of that issue

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Willem Dafoe is curiosly listening to your phone calls

Psst… I messaged you just now RE: the deleted 2023 picture of the year post. I had to use a browser as neither Memmy nor Voyager (iOS) supported the feature, although the latter pretended to.

Messaging is definitely in its infancy. Required quite a backwards flow to find the sent message, after determining how to find you in the first place given you were on another instance.

/threadcrap (sorry readers)

(Actually I’ll keep crapping because I had to troubleshoot why I couldn’t reply to your “Roses are #FF0000” comment… looks like that post was deleted, but Lemmy via browser wasn’t going to warn me besides spinning a pinwheel after I clicked “[post] reply”.)