Billboard Liberation Front vs. ATT + NSA

The Billboard Liberation Front today announced a major new advertising improvement campaign executed on behalf of clients AT&T and the National Security Agency. Focusing on billboards in the San Francisco area, this improvement action is designed to promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.

More, and larger, uncropped version of the pic above by Jacob Appelbaum is here.

(hat tip to BoingBoing.net

Can that Patriotic Telco Shit, Hatch

When Dodd filibustered the telco immunity bill, Republican douchebags like Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl and Orrin Hatch whimpered that the telcos were like Colonial Minutemen, rising selflessly to answer the call of a government that needed their help as we pissed our collective pants, blinkered after 9-11,9-11,9-11,9-11.

They all said that the domestic spying they bravely gave Cheney was merely for the love the bald eagle and the Twin Towers or somesuch.

Of course, Cheney started the spying before 9-11, so there’s that… ahem!  But the latest telco outrage is crazier. Well, how do you take your crow, guys? Poached in vomit? Coming right up:

Wiretap Is Cut Off After Feds Fail To Pay Telecom Spying Bills The FBI routinely failed to pay telecom companies promptly for providing phone and internet lines to the FBI’s impressive domestic surveillance architecture — resulting in at least one phone company cutting off a foreign intelligence wiretap until the FBI paid its bill, according to an audit released Thursday. The Justice Department’s Inspector General also found that telecom charges and invoices for surveillance overwhelmed the FBI’s ability to keep track of their bill and that one field office got a $66,000 bill from a carrier for unpaid surveillance work. Former FBI agent and now ACLU national security policy counsel Mike German directed his ire at the telecoms who happily played along with the government’s warrantless spying and let the FBI illegally get customer records following requests to get surveillance today with false promises to pay with a court order tomorrow. . “To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail,” German said.Each field office has wiretap recording computers that are meshed together with all the other field offices and HQ through a secure fiber optic network operated by Sprint.

The telcos were doing it for the money.  Then, when Republicans (oh so good with the economy and money stuff, ain’t they!) stopped paying the bills, well, shit, the telcos shut down Bush’s spy ring.

Before the power went out, the FBI’s national security wiretapping software, captured 27,728,675 communication sessions, according to released FBI documents, but the documents do not define what a “session” consists of.

{If you want to learn more about FBI’s wiretap network and software, start with “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” and find out even more — including details on the FBI’s cell phone tracking vans — in “FBI E-Mail Shows Rift Over Warrantless Phone Records Grab.”}

Verizon Doesn’t Care If You Die

clipped from www.currentmagonline.com I can’t be the only one who’s thought about what a great asset a cell phone would be if you were being kidnapped or mugged.� As you’re being dragged off into that dark alley, get a finger free to dial 911 and just leave the line open so the emergency operators can hear you scream. Apparently Verizon phones put out a low alarm when 911 is dialed.� This is supposedly in response to a section of the Telecommunications Act that requires the phones to be usable by disabled customers, but this can be done without an alarm signal.� A complaint was lodged by a woman who tried to covertly dial 911 when she thought vandals were wandering around her property- and was alarmed by the alarm.� Whoops.� The best part of this is Verizon’s response: “ Sellaway said Verizon is concerned that Carol is unhappy with her service. She saidCarol’s is the first complaint about the tone.”� Yeah Verizon, that’s because the criminals heard everyone else dialing 911, and killed them.

Ok, so it’s not a perfect plan, but as a last resort it’s not bad and if it doesn’t do any good, at least it won’t do any harm, right? I admit I’ve considered it at moments.

Jay Rockefeller (D-AT&T)

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald kicked the crap out of West Virginia’s biggest Dick Cheney fan, Jello Jay Rockefeller.

Jay Rockefeller channels Dick Cheney’s fear-mongering to urge telecom amnesty

Leading telecom advocate Fred Hiatt this morning turned over his Washington Post Op-Ed page today to leading telecom advocate Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, to explain why it is so “unfair and unwise” to allow telecoms to be sued for breaking the law. Just as all Bush followers do when they want to “justify” lawbreaking, Rockefeller’s entire defense is principally based on one argument: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Thus he melodramatically begins:

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: Aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters. . .

Rockefeller’s claims that surveillance efforts will “come to a screeching halt” without his amnesty plan is nothing more than the sort of deceitful fear-mongering which the Bush administration has relentlessly churned out over the last six years.

Worse, still, Rockefeller worked out this retroactive amnesty boondoggle with Sith President Dick Cheney himself:

Last June, in a phone conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, set down his conditions for revising the law governing the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping. Only when the committee got access to secret administration documents authorizing surveillance without court warrants, Mr. Rockefeller told the vice president, would it consider such legislation.

That vow paid off this week when, after some last-minute brinkmanship, the committee got to see the documents and then on Thursday night passed a bipartisan bill that offers a compromise between Congress and the Bush administration on the contentious eavesdropping issue. (NYTIMES)

What was the point of Rockefeller’s quid pro quo? What did he do with those secret documents? Dick.

Rockefeller and President Cheney had tangled previously over the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program. In July 2003, after a briefing for leaders of the Intelligence Committees from which staff members were barred, Mr. Rockefeller hand-wrote a protest note to the vice president, saying that as ”neither a technician nor an attorney,” he was not able to satisfy his concerns about the legality of eavesdropping without warrants.  He then locked the note in his safe.  I am not kidding.  A lot of good that did.

Jay Rockefeller (D-Verizon)

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans.He has also recently benefited from some interesting political contributions.

clipped from guntotingliberal.com Democratic Lawmaker Pushing Immunity Is Newly Flush With Telco Cash Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon). In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent. AT&T executives discovered a fondness for Rockefeller just a month after Verizon execs did and over a three-month span, collectively made donations totaling $19,350.

Scumbag.

Verizon Ripping You Off for GPS Functionality

Last month, a New York Times blogger wrote a post called “One Reason We Need a Google Phone: Free GPS.” He was complaining that cellphone carriers, mainly Verizon, are disabling the GPS navigation systems built into phones so they can charge $10 a month for the service.

Telephia, a research firm, reported today that half of the $118 million that consumers in the United States spent on cellphone applications in the second quarter of this year was on what it calls “location based services.” That’s mainly services like Verizon’s VZ Navigator that display maps and driving directions using GPS hardware built into phones. Verizon charges $9.99 a month or $2.99 a day for the service.

Verizon is opening up it’s platform now because in Google’s open model for its Android operating system, carriers and phone makers are free to put as many gotchas as they want into phones. Including, for Verizon, this GPS to map gotcha that steals $240 million a year from us in $9.99 per month or $2.99 a DAY fees.

These Clowns Will Fuck You Up

Why Retroactive Amnesty for Telcos Matters

clipped from chrisdodd.com Yesterday afternoon I sat down with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. He’s the technician who revealed that the NSA has secret rooms for sweeping up massive amounts of electronic communications on the internet. Klein is calling on the Senate to not grant telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. He’s also testifying to the scale of the Bush administration’s electronic surveillance: “Everything you could imagine you use the internet for flows through these cables. It’s not only international traffic, but a huge amount of domestic traffic too.” Watch the video of Klein talking about why he opposes retroactive immunity.

I turn to the indefatigable Matt Browner-Hamlin for the real deal on telecom immunity.

Verizon and AT&T Not In On Google’s Open Source Phone

clipped from gizmodo.com Sprint and T-Mobile are big companies but they don’t have the momentum or subscribers that Verizon Wireless and AT&T do. The opening volley of official announcements from Google and the Open Handset Alliance bring good news for people sick of the carrier choke hold. Of course, it’s easy to spot who gets an Android device first: T-Mobile and Sprint.

When Google announced the Open Handset Alliance, Sprint and T-Mobile jumped on board but Verizon and AT&T didn’t.Verizon said it “shares the goal of more open mobile application development,” and that this competitive move on Google’s part shows that innovation comes without the need for “legislation nor regulation.”

The robber baron Verizon is praising the radical free market and deploring regulation because they want to party like it’s 1929.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Verizon doesn’t want to give up the tightly gripped vice they hold on their locked handsets. They thrive on proprietary business models. Open source anything is Kryptonite to them.

AT&T’s Spy Technology Explained

This tech blog Freedom To Tinker explores exactly how AT&T went about becoming comic book evil in a gutless toady kind of way:

clipped from www.freedom-to-tinker.com Here are a couple of representative diagrams from the paper: Fig. 4. Guilt by association – what is the shortest path to a fraudulent node? Fig. 5. A guilt by association plot. Circular nodes correspond to wireless service accounts while rectangular nodes are conventional land line accounts. Shaded nodes have been previously labeled as fraudulent by network security associates. When this research was done, back in the last century, the bad guys where people who wanted to rip off AT&T by making fraudulent credit-card calls. (Remember, back in the last century, intercontinental long-distance voice communication actually cost money!) But it’s easy to see how the FBI could use this to chase down anyone who talked to anyone who talked to a terrorist. Or even to a “terrorist.”