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.”