T-Mobile Gives In

T-Mobile USA, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, was the last of the four major cellphone carriers to preserve a semblance of its customers' civil liberties. When they acquired VoiceStream in 2001, they capitulated to the demands of the Department of Justice and the FBI for lawful intercept points in their equipment. While this wasn't ideal, it was a compromise given the circumstances and the important thing was that it extended to LAWFUL intercept only. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security never received the kind of access they desired to T-Mobile's network...but since what they were seeking was illegal anyway, there wasn't much they could do about it. In 2007, T-Mobile purchased the rights to airwaves from the FCC to deliver new, broadband wireless services to its customers. They spent about 3 BILLION dollars on these airwaves. However, the government decided to withhold those airwaves from T-Mobile because it would not grant carte blanche access to its customers' private data. This set T-Mobile back an entire year as they tried everything to get the government to let go of the spectrum, even offering $50 million in bribe money at one point. The government wouldn't budge. T-Mobile decided to acquire a small carrier in the southeast US, SunCom Wireless, earlier in 2007. The government withheld final approval, again because T-Mobile would not let the privacy of its customers go. This is a rare example of a corporation making visible sacrifice on behalf of the people it serves, protecting them from a government flush with illegally gained power.

That is, until today. Finally, given great financial pressure from shareholders in Deutsche Telekom as well as the lagging status of its cellular network in the US, the company gave the Department of Homeland Security the blanket access it had so long desired. Watch what you say.

Sources:
BetaNews article
CNet article

WikiLeaks.org Getting the Shaft

Wikileaks.org is a system for totally anonymous, liability-free leaking of documents to the general public...an essential tool in the times of increased opacity at all levels of government and business. It is a site that I would link you to right away, if I could. Unfortunately, I can't. A California court has ordered a Domain Name Registrar (the entity that keeps the addresses to websites) to stop allowing access to wikileaks.org because it leaked information about the banking practices of entities within the Cayman Islands. So, basically, the US government is restricting press freedoms on a worldwide scale on behalf of private interests doing business in another country. Wikileaks has been instrumental in the political process through its leaking of Guantanamo Bay detainee treatment manuals, national ID card procedures in Britain, etc. They have managed to keep their site running using different domain names, and you can access information about the current issues here. The text of the court's injunction can be found here.

Sad.