Surviving Capitalism (Not) : AT&T Developed Secret Program To Help U.S. Police Mine Client Phone Records

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

AT&T Developed Secret Program To Help U.S. Police Mine Client Phone Records

Click here to access article by Pratap Chatterjee from CorpWatch.

Here we find another report on the government's police agencies, which serve the ruling capitalist class, doing an end-run around privacy statutes in the Constitution in order to access information about anyone who might pose problems for the capitalist government. The article explains how the AT&T arrangement works and other background information.

Police departments across the U.S. pay AT&T, the telecommunications giant, over one hundred thousand dollars a year for special access to telephone records of clients without first obtaining a warrant. The program is called 'Hemisphere' and the company required buyers to keep its existence secret.