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Comment by postdb | Hacker News Reader

>Crimes are committed all the time using phones and yet, we do not allow phone companies to monitor, record and report the content of pur phone conversations. And they can't just add a line in a terms of service, they have no legal right to do it. (Ignore the issue of Metadata, I mean the audio portions of our calls)

Are you sure about that? It is my understanding all telco traffic are monitored. Some countries may have laws that prevent real time conversation/sms to be look at for a few months.

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Correct, I cant speak for all the world. In the United States, only a party to a phone conversation may record that call. Some states have stronger requirements than that, requiring all parties to consent.

The phone company can't listen to your phone calls and there is definitely no public expectation or journalists demanding that AT&T and others do something about preventing crimes that used a phone by recording all calls and passing them through a Crime Detector (TM).

Ignore the illegal spying by US intelligence agencies on American citizens on American soil (past and/or whatever is still ongoing). Is this an example where the US may "let" a friendly nation spy on US citizens and then just gets that information from them?

So rather than the NSA hoovering up US phone call content, which they almost certainly have the capability of doing, they just let the UK do it for them?

That happened. Can’t recall the source however the UK was spying on US citizens and passing to the US through a “Five-Eyes” agreement.

Yes Five Eyes is what I was thinking of just couldn't remember the name.

Wire taps are a thing. I don't know the law around it, but it likely requires approval from a court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiretapping#United_States

Otherwise, telecom companies keep records of all calls that take place on their network - the phone numbers, time, duration, etc.

The phone company can't listen to your phone calls

Perhaps not explicitly legal but calls are monitored all the time after switch upgrades. We even applied US specific patches that disable the operator override tone that lets you know someone is on the call. I had to do this after every switch upgrade. One time that specific patch flubbed in a non obvious way and when I jumped onto a random call the people said, "Is someone there? Who is on our call?" and I disconnected.

For what it's worth, my boss had an arrangement with the three letter agencies to give them unfettered access to all the switches and we would even enable non-logging test mode to prevent any of their commands from being logged. My boss and most of his direct reports were not US citizens and one of them openly hated Americans so they did not really care. This was a couple decades ago so maybe by now everybody follows the spirit of the law.

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