An Open Letter to AT&T Chair and CEO
Randall L. Stephenson
The government has been paying AT&T to spy on you since 2008.
What AT&T has been doing with Project Hemisphere amounts to a private detective tailing you, recording your location, who you’re talking to and for how long, what websites you’re visiting, and any un-encrypted texts or calls you’ve made, and then carefully analyzing and indexing the records to be sold to law enforcement.
That’s pretty upsetting by itself. But they’re not just doing it to their own customers.
This affects you if you call or text AT&T customers. This affects you if you are near an AT&T tower and that’s what our phone connects to, or if our communication passes over AT&Ts infrastructure at all. AT&T owns 2/3 of all landline switches in the US. They have the second largest share of wireless infrastructure in the US, and several lower-tier companies like Cricket use AT&T’s infrastructure to provide their service as well. They are potentially capturing and backing up all metadata for any calls/texts/data transmissions (so any app that doesn’t use encryption, like Skype) that pass through any of their massive infrastructure.
They built a special program that can analyze this data, detect patterns (like social networks), and suggest potential targets to law enforcement, and have packaged it, marketed it, and sold it. Not to the highest bidder, but to any local law enforcement, who are then reimbursed by the federal government, to the tune of millions of dollars.
But who knows what happens to it after that. Local law enforcement is not known to use their seemly boundless surveillance apparatus responsibly.
This use of our own data against us for profit must end. Project Hemisphere must be shut down now. Sign our open letter!
Dear Randall L. Stephenson,
This week we discovered that the spying we already knew you were doing was much worse than previously thought. We found out you’ve been capturing everything that passes over your backbone since at least 2008, backing it up, analyzing it, packing it up, and marketing it to the police.
Honestly. It’s just way too much. It’s sickening.
These new revelations have changed our understanding of how your company thinks of itself in relation to its customers. Before, it seemed as though we could at least expect AT&T to protect our information as much as they could. It’s common knowledge that phone companies and ISPs must occasionally acquiesce to government requests for info on its customers, but Project Hemisphere throws that in the trash.
Your users have trusted you with their most private information, their most intimate communication. They’ve used products and services that they assumed were safe, or at least that wouldn’t actively hurt them, and you betrayed them.
Not only that, but you have hurt people who haven’t even elected to use your services just because you can.
It’s not right.
We are absolutely opposed to AT&T’s collection and indefinite storage of our exact location, call records, browsing information, etc., without cause or warrant in order to analyze and sell to law enforcement. We demand an immediate end to Project Hemisphere, and will now be working against you to ensure our data can no longer be used against us.
Signed,
The Internet
Sponsored by
To:
Randall L. Stephenson
From:
[Your Name]
This week we discovered that the spying we already knew you were doing was much worse than previously thought. We found out you’ve been capturing everything that passes over your backbone since at least 2008, backing it up, analyzing it, packing it up, and marketing it to the police.
Honestly. It’s just way too much. It’s sickening.
These new revelations have changed our understanding of how your company thinks of itself in relation to its customers. Before, it seemed as though we could at least expect AT&T to protect our information as much as they could. It’s common knowledge that phone companies and ISPs must occasionally acquiesce to government requests for info on its customers, but Project Hemisphere throws that in the trash.
Your users have trusted you with their most private information, their most intimate communication. They’ve used products and services that they assumed were safe, or at least that wouldn’t actively hurt them, and you betrayed them.
Not only that, but you have hurt people who haven’t even elected to use your services just because you can.
It’s not right.
We are absolutely opposed to AT&T’s collection and indefinite storage of our exact location, call records, browsing information, etc., without cause or warrant in order to analyze and sell to law enforcement. We demand an immediate end to Project Hemisphere, and will now be working against you to ensure our data can no longer be used against us.
Signed,
The Internet