Hasn’t this been a thing since like the patriot act came out if not long before?
This predates cell phones. I believe there was a government wiretapping program for many non-criminal citizens back in the 80’s. The program was shelved publicly when it became public knowledge, but continued in the background under different names and different areas of government since. I don’t have a source offhand, but there was a lot of stuff that came to light about this around the time Edward Snowden blew the whistle. The Patriot Act just made a lot of this more legal, and was even expanded under Obama. I don’t believe Trump or Biden have done anything to improve the situation for citizens since.
Wireline and wireless all have the ability to tap and trace built into the equipment. If a legal document is presented, it is a very easy thing to do.
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This was the plot of the Kevin Mitnick movie
Phone records are the property of the operating company. It’s a business record. Every operating company has a compliance manager who works to provide legal access to the company’s business records. Of course, the effort to do that costs money for the company. But, for a company to allow access to its business records without a legal subpoena, means that the operating company is not run worth shit.
Why does the content of the call matter for business records? Shouldn’t it just be “X made a 4m:37s call to Y at TIME on DATE.”?
Two separate things. Phone records have calls made/received, duration, that sort of thing. Tap and trace is the actual call plus location. Two different types of subpenas.
My question remains! Why have that part? Other than “I might need to spy on someone because reasons”?
Why record the calls at all? Thats so much data storage wasted for junk.
As I said elsewhere, the operator doesn’t record calls. Too expensive and needless. Law enforcement can with the proper legal document.
The reason it’s available in the equipment is because long ago Congress mandated it should be.
More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
I understand better what you were saying. I still see no justification to record calls at all. There may be legal documents supporting it, but I can’t fathom any reason it could be used for good.
There are things that are against the law you know. A lot of mob cases were made from wire taps
But spying on everyone to catch the relatively few bad guys…
Just because criminal organizations have been brought down with these taps doesn’t mean it’s right. Could authorities open all the mail to find something if they wantrd/needed to?
all telecom companies do this.
Side note: I can’t get lemmy to recognize a regular “&” in the title without it being transformed into “&”.
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The app I use changes it from “&” to “and” which looks weird still: “AT and T”
Edit: I just realized you did that intentionally because of that issue
Willem Dafoe is curiosly listening to your phone calls
Psst… I messaged you just now RE: the deleted 2023 picture of the year post. I had to use a browser as neither Memmy nor Voyager (iOS) supported the feature, although the latter pretended to.
Messaging is definitely in its infancy. Required quite a backwards flow to find the sent message, after determining how to find you in the first place given you were on another instance.
/threadcrap (sorry readers)
(Actually I’ll keep crapping because I had to troubleshoot why I couldn’t reply to your “Roses are #FF0000” comment… looks like that post was deleted, but Lemmy via browser wasn’t going to warn me besides spinning a pinwheel after I clicked “[post] reply”.)
What’s AT? And what 's T?
/s