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Comment by Oculus | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight:

Step 1: Start by completely ignoring civil liberties and forcing telecommunication companies to hand over data on their users. Bonus points for giving an NSL so users aren't aware of their breach of privacy.

Step 2: Allow said companies to bill for providing the data. This makes sure they keep quite and don't speak up to the things the government is doing because lets be honest, what sort of businessman is going to complain about thick margins?

Step 3: Repeat steps 1 & 2 until there is a leak and the world finds out about everything that's been going on.

Step 4: Wait for the repercussions of step 3 to blow over. Now that everyone knows what's going on, no use in quieting down the companies by paying them off so let's sue them for charging too much.

How do they have the balls to do this kind of shit? Makes me want to vomit.

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1) The bill is to the government and is typically in the range of $750 per day per tap.

2) Any network admin inside of telecom will tell you that this is a terrible system to implement and maintain.

3) Zero operators perceive wiretapping as a profit center; it is an annoyance that is tolerated as a condition of doing business in the US.

If you evaluate the decisions that operators make as participating in the game theory that is our world, they're actually quite rational.

Lastly, if you think $21M represents a material payoff to a company like Sprint or AT&T, I would suggest that this is a few orders of magnitude shallow for such a concern.

The cited article is an example of a reconciliation fraud of a very minor nature, not an example of hush money from the government.

Oculus, your Step 2 is not quite correct. According to the lawsuit text, said companies have to foot the bill to any facilities or equipment, or systems modifications, and may only bill for operational expenses.

So not only is the gov forcing these data breaches, they are also forcing the companies to foot most of the bill.

Yeah you got it right.

The fact that one end of the government overstepped grants a retrospective (by several years) right for a company to deliberately over-charge a completely different end of the government for legitimate services. Certainly, there can be no topic involving the government and telecommunications where ranting about NSA isn't on topic. It is really that simple.

I mean, the NSA killed contracts from other parts of the government because Qwest wouldn't play ball, why not pay them through other parts of the government for deniability?

CALEA was enacted in 1994, well before the recent issues with the NSA.

I don't like what the NSA is doing either, but companies like Sprint are obligated to provide these sorts of things to law enforcement for other reasons than just NSA spying. It's also for other legal investigation using warrants.

They shouldn't be abusing it by collecting more than they're due, regardless of how anyone feels about the NSA.

Insofar as you take as premise that the arrangement was good in the first place, it doesn't really follow that it's abusive for the telecoms to continue to bill for infrastructure costs associated with maintaining and building their ability to tap to meet government demands. It's not as if there has been 0 infrastructure buildout since 1994.

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's abusive. Rather, the 1994 law seems quite abusive.

> How do they have the balls to do this kind of shit? Makes me want to vomit.

The larger the organization you join, the more divorced you are between decisions as a person and decisions as the organization. Sure, corporations may effectively be citizens, but they sure don't come with the ethical constraints and responsibilities that individuals do.

Not all ethical decisions are directly beneficial for the individual, but multiply that times hundreds of thousands of people? The good decisions get lost somewhere between the PR department and the accounting department.

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