As you point out, a lot of this early post 9/11 “help” took place around the time of several large telecoms mergers. Each of which required antitrust clearance and approval from the Bush administration. Given the hundreds of millions in bonuses at stake, the hundreds of millions of promised cost cuts, and billions in projected profits (never mind the greater market concentration and oligopoly power), these companies had incentive to cooperate fully. Many of them did.

So the government just went to AT&T and Verizon’s switches and took it there.

This explains the “you should use both” line in the slides. Clearly PRISM does an end-run aroud corporate unwillingness by providing a single mechanism that links the data no matter how it was collected (probably via ip and date) and allows the analyst to use nsl data for indexing the fat stream.

The way I read this, which may be wrong, if I sent gmail (Google mail) via AT&T DSL, then any emails captured would have been thanks to AT&T?

I also have a Yahoo mail account (required by flickr) but don’t use it to send email. But, if I had sent email, would the fact that I use AT&T DSL have trumped Yahoo?

I’m not clear about how the email provider and the internet connection provider are separated or not, for practical purposes.

What It’s Like to Get a National-Security Letter

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-its-like-to-get-a-national-security-letter.html

@earlofhuntingdon:

maybe co-operation with the gov in spying on its customers facilitates this corporate behavior:

http://www.muninetworks.org/content/atts-many-broken-merger-promises

thanks.

i was thinking of the portion of the spying involving u.s. citizens directly.

prism would do that only indirectly – though, i if read you correctly, quite effectively.

OT — Last night we noticed we can’t directly access guardian.co.uk any more. When we type that in, it goes to guardiannews.com instead. In the context of military Internet blocking of the Guardian, we’re a little concerned… Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

@Hmmm: great catch. i just tried – having logged onto the UK site many times – and it redirects to the US version guardiannews.com. Can’t access the UK version.

something’s up.

There’s a little drop-down tab in the upper left corner marked “Edition”, with choices of UK, US, or AU. Hadn’t noticed that before, though it may have been there for a while.

This page can be reached on any edition:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/series/glenn-greenwald-security-liberty

If you change the edition, you start over, it doesn’t stay on the same page.

Marcy’s suggestion that they’re trying to accommodate greater traffic from the US sounds reasonable.

@P J Evans:

and to answer a question ask by a commenter about u.s. companies being “u.s. persons” (using the orwellian legal jargon of the united states department of justice) posed in an earlier ew post:

“…And Binney recently told Zero Hedge that the government believes it can gather and use any information (including content) about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from “any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.”

this fills in another cell in the “matrix of lies, excuses and evasions” involving presidential and generalissimo assurances of adequate “checks and balances”, “transparency”, and “lawful laws” which i suggested politicians like wayden and udall need to construct to educate the public in detail about the false assurances of the prez and the generalissimos that citizens’ privacy is being protected from gov’t intrusion.

Question from Corrente: Yahoo has just gone to scanning all their e-mail accounts. But the account holder has to hit a button saying “Switch now” (see screenshot) to agree to the new terms. I think G-mail has been doing that all along. There is no alternative — accept the new terms or never access your e-mail again.

What’s up with making you hit the button? What choice would you ever have had? Are there some rights we don’t know about?

http://correntewire.com/common_household_remedies_request_126

@thatvisionthing: Your comment about snail mail made me think: is there supposed to be a higher standard of “warrants” for landlines vs. cell phones? Does a landline tap actually still require a warrant? Or is that just a quaint notion now?

@pdaly: It’s just my feeling that if we wanted to connect privacy tangibly to the Constitution again, and what I assume is over two hundred years of law and legal theory on the right to privacy in your communications, and a commitment to open public information, the place to start is the place it started – the USPS. I see no reason why they can’t provide e-mail services and internet services. It’s just keeping up with the times, pony express carried forward. Plus many other suggestions for the post office, like simple banking, VOIP, wifi, cell phone service, etc. were given at Corrente, I guess they’ve been talking about this for a while. Turn all the evil NSA hardware over to the post office and let it be put to good public use. Sunshine!

Then we’d be reclaiming our commons, and our heritage. What a relief! I think it would be like recovering function of a numb limb. Joy, well-being, thankfulness, connectedness, wholeness.

katiebird, 4/28/12: http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/save-the-post-office-make-up-for-the-drop-in-physical-volume-with-digital-services/

@posaune: From Marcy’s interview last week:

Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. And – I mean it’s actually interesting because the order that we saw for Verizon collecting phone data actually asked for routing information. It said metadata includes routing information. And that means location. If it’s a land line, the routing information has your address and how the phone company gets to you. If it’s a cell phone, they have your cell tower location or your GPS or both, because when you move around the cell company has to keep looking for you and therefore it has to know where you are at all times. And it was funny because the NSA director was sort of like, “Oh, well we’re allowed to capture that but we don’t” – and I don’t remember whether he said we don’t use it or we don’t actually collect it. What’s interesting though is, at least with the other data they’re collecting, as I said, they’re dumping big chunks of the data into the CIA’s hands and into the FBI’s hands on request, and so I’ve wondered whether – it probably would be the FBI or the National Counterterrorism Center – whether they get some of this data and whether they’re using geolocation in a way that the NSA is not.

Don’t know if that answers your question, but land lines are included and Marcy still has questions about who does what with the data and how.

@thatvisionthing: The Yahoo e-mail account came with AT&T DSL service. I found this story from 2006 — oddly familiar?

http://www.correntewire.com/at_t_all_your_data_are_belong_to_us

If you don’t surrender your right to privacy, AT&T won’t let you talk on your phone.

AT&T now says it owns your data. All your data. San Francisco Chronicle quotes AT&T’s new “privacy” policy:

“While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T,” the new policy declares. “As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

[…]

And the best part of all? You have to sign off on this corporatist crapola as a condition of service:

Moreover, AT&T is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing [hmm….] with government authorities or others.

Oh, and while they’re at it, they’re also going to track your usage:

In a section on “usage information,” the privacy policy says AT&T will collect “information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices … that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services.”

So wait. My question is, if AT&T has already been openly doing this for seven years, why would Yahoo – same account in this case – now require its own signoff to scan and track and disclose your e-mail? Again, are there rights e-mail account holders actually have now, before clicking the button to agree to new terms? So curious.