As we all know AT&T has been up to no good with the FBI for many years (J Edgar Hoover must be salivating in his eternal sleep) but this article shows how successful they have been marketing spy craft to local police forces and at the same time cloaking its existence and scope. Spooky.
I especially love (in a twisted sort of way) the part where New York Times dutifully reported on the "partnership...as an essential and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool. Wow, deep journalism!
AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit - The Daily Beast: "The telecom giant is doing NSA-style work for law enforcement—without a warrant—and earning millions of dollars a year from taxpayers...Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public"
Another article on this from one of my favorite watchdogs I have followed since the early days of my work founding Petaluma Community Access (PCA) in 1993,
AT&T Requires Police to Hide Hemisphere Phone Spying | Electronic Frontier Foundation:
