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Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

So AT&T kept records for 26 years and counting. Information that includes location of caller. I am very happy drug dealers were caught, but 26 years? There is some serious potential for abuse.

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I was at a different telecom a couple years back and legal handed down a ruling that we couldn't keep things beyond two years, even though we were research instead of billing. Research was the last group at the company to have to delete all that stuff, and we only had space for five years anyway, and even that was stripped down to 10% of its original data. However the researchers felt very safe in assuming that since the government has all of the data reflected off the antenna base station switches through its own network, there's no way they're deleting anything.

It's weird that at&t had to give them that data, unless you assume that up til now they had access to the nsa's copy and now the justice department says they have to have their own.

Just read article in depth and found two more significant "features". First one - database build by AT&T can identify if target individual uses multiple phones (So if say I was engineer Joe and wanted to get sell private cell number(s) for Angelina Jolie how much would you pay?). Second - they can identify if you switched to a new number. Even if you threw out your phone. (So speaking of numbers, how much would you pay for a yearly subscription previously offered 'product'). Seriously if AT&T doing this, there is no reason to believe that other providers do not.

>Seriously if AT&T doing this, there is no reason to believe that other providers do not.

The article says AT&T has the data for any telco that uses AT&T switches. This is a little odd, given that the company currently known as AT&T is not the same company that used to manufacture switches; but, if this has been going on for 26 years, I suppose the government would have insisted it continue across corporate splits and mergers.

IIRC, lots of other companies selling telecom use AT&T infrastructure (infrastructure owned by AT&T now, not infrastructure built by a different company called AT&T in the past.) There are a much greater number of companies that you can buy local and long-distance service from than companies that actually operate the physical infrastructure.

I suspect that current infrastructure is the "AT&T switches" that are relevant here.

That makes more sense, thanks.

A question no one on here gives a shit about but is of critical importance is, "Was there actual abuse?"

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